01  Background

Worthi is a career improvement online tool for the U.S. market launched by Citi, aiming to help people who intend to improve their careers.

Through a series of research, testing, and combined with the vision of the Citigroup team, we restructured Worthi's product architecture and experience, trying to find solutions that are more in line with the current employment needs of people.

Feature 1 : Explore

Are interested in a certain profession, but don't know what its prospects are?

Users can search for data on more than 1,800 occupations, understand its income distribution map, the highest income region, and its growth space. We have also designed Work-Life Balance and Job Stability indexes for users to refer to so that users can learn more about whether this occupation can balance their lives and whether they will be stable in the future.

Feature 2 : Grow

If the user thinks he should make a change and breakthrough, then Grow can recommend suitable online courses based on the user's existing skills, as well as new careers they may be qualified for, and help users to improve or transform themselves.

Feature 3 : CalculateYour Worth

If users don't have a special purpose, just want to know their own market value, Calculate Your Worth will tell them where they are in the market and the potential development opportunities by understanding their current employment situation.

Feature 4 : Profile

If users find the courses and occupations they are interested in, click on the favorites, and then they can find them in the personal center. It is convenient for users to compare and think more before making the final decision.

In the current downturn in employment,what kind of difficulties do people encounter?

We interviewed a total of seven users, including college students, youth, middle-aged, and 3 different skin tones to understand the thinking and difficulties of different groups of people when looking for career opportunities.

Ranking of motivating factors. How much do they care about salary?

We asked the interviewees to prioritize some employment factors and understand the commonalities and differences in their career demands. Only one user put the salary in the top three. The work-life balance and career stability often occupy the forefront. This allows us to re-examine our previous understanding of people's professional aspirations.

Integrate demands.

We combined the pain points collected during the interview into an affinity diagram, and summarized the following five most prominent demands:

• The COVID pandemic has increased the importance of job stability and flexibility for many people.
• Job seekers value diversity and inclusiveness in the workplace.
• Candidates trust their network and local resources most.
• It is difficult to stay motivated when studying online.
• The main motivating factors when making career decisions: work-life balance, company culture and sense of accomplishment.

Possible solutions:

• Include indicators of job stability and work-life balance.
• Help job seekers to establish contact with local resources and integrate interpersonal network tools.
• Help online learners stay motivated, provide feedback and reward mechanisms for learning progress.

Concentrated.

We have tried various possible solutions to these problems, but if all are put into practice, Worthi's product positioning may be unclear. Then we communicated with Citi’s product and technical teams, combined with their vision and technical capabilities, and finally chose these two main functions for exploration:

• Career data display and personal value calculator.
• Recommend online courses and possible careers through existing skills..

Build Persona, journey map, and user flow.

By summarizing the types of users we face, we made three Persona models: Ethan, Jenn, and Ellie. These roles that understand the research situation help us to consider different user groups when designing while keeping in line with the needs of potential users.

Carry out usability testing for users.

Team member Sarah Ann conducted user tests on our high-fidelity prototype to find the pain points in use. Through the test results, we found some experience problems, and then based on time and the importance of each issue, I listed the two highest priority issues:

• The first impression on the homepage thought that this was a job search platform similar to Indeed, and did not correctly understand the purpose of the product.
• The word "Explore" is used repeatedly in many places, which confuses the understanding of the function.

Optimize the problems found in the test.

By adjusting the button text on the first screen (replaced from "SEARCH" to "GET INSIGHT"), removed the "Popular Job Title" section that is weakly related to user value and adding the Worthi profile section to prevent users from thinking that this is a job search app, Solve the problem of misunderstanding of product usage.

In addition, the order adjustment, merging, and layout optimization of each information section were carried out to reflect the purpose of Worthi more concisely and accurately.

It can be briefly summarized as:

• Button text adjustment, pay attention to semantic details
• Adjust and simplify information
• Optimized layout to reduce the burden of reading