Steer Your Career

The DiNitto Career Center (DCC) is a one-stop shop for all things career advising, serving social work students and alumni at UT Austin’s Steve Hicks School of Social Work. When it comes to setting any type of coaching appointment, users must interact with a platform called Steer Your Career (Steer), but the system is unintuitive and, more often than not, folks struggle through the scheduling process. These career advising appointments are the Center’s bread and butter in guiding students through all stages of job market exploration, so it is critical that the Steer website runs smoothly and can be made more user-centered.

Impact: This project ultimately led to a 27% boost in student engagement, as well as a 20% decrease in task completion time.

The Basics

  • The Client

    The DiNitto Career Center at UT Austin’s Steve Hicks School of Social Work

  • Role

    UX Research Lead

  • Skills

    Heuristic Evaluation

    Competitive Analysis

    Test Documentation (Screeners & Moderator Scripts)

    User Interviews / Usability Testing

    Interview Moderating & Notetaking

    Synthesis

    Presentations

Project Overview

Project Inspiration:

I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the DiNitto Career Center for two years. In that time, I saw countless student emails, expressing frustration, asking for help, or some combination of the two - with regard to our online appointment scheduling platform, Steer. I approached the Director of the Center, Jennifer Luna, and got her approval to tackle this issue and come up with recommendations on how to make this flow more intuitive.

Methodology:

  • I started by consolidating student complaint emails relating to Steer and built out an affinity diagram to find common areas of concern.

  • I conducted a heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis.

  • Based on this initial research, I wrote up a screener based on the Center’s target audience, as well as a moderator script for the test sessions.

  • I conducted user interviews and usability tests.

  • Following testing, I synthesized my data and presented a finalized set of insights and recommendations to Jennifer Luna and the Academic Advising team.

Formative Research

Affinity Diagram:

After consolidating student emails, pertaining to Steer troubles, and building out an affinity diagram, I found some key areas of concern:

  • Difficulty navigating

  • No option for desired appointment type

  • No available appointment times

  • Inactive buttons

  • Not at all intuitive

Heuristic Evaluation:

I then approached the scheduling flow as if I were a student, trying to set an appointment. I organized the screens into task-based scenarios and conducted a heuristic evaluation, based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.

I combed through each scenario, commenting on heuristic violations, along with our recommendations, and categorized them with severity ratings.

Competitive Analysis:

I wanted to better understand how other social work programs organized their career advising systems. I researched several schools, analyzed their platforms and features, and found some commonalities that were unique to Steer:

  • Intuitive calendars, with layouts similar to Calendly

  • An abundance of appointment availability

  • Streamlined and modern interfaces

  • Easily navigable

Usability Testing

Participant Recruitment:

Upon wrapping up the formative research, I was ready to interact with participants and conduct user interviews and usability testing. While the interviews revealed insights into what users thought of Steer, the task-based testing illustrated the quality and intuitiveness of task flows - or lack thereof.

To kick this process off, I created a straightforward participant screener that included the following criteria:

  • Social work students

    • With Steer accounts

  • Any level of knowledge or experience with Steer

Test Design:

I recruited 8 participants and created a moderator script for the interviews and usability tests. The moderator script consisted of a mix of opinion-based questions, a couple of Likert scales to score their knowledge and experience with Steer, as well as a series of tasks to complete.

See here for moderator script.

Synthesis / Recommendations

Overall Findings:

Based on the Likert scale findings, it was clear that while participants had low levels of knowledge of Steer, they had higher opinions of its user experience.

The lower knowledge of Steer can be attributed to the fact that the students are not provided with a formal training the platform and, consequently, have to spend time poking around on the site to piece things together.

After synthesizing my data, various other insights came to light:

Recommendations:

Based on these findings, I put together my top 3 recommendations on how to start improving Steer.

Summary Slide Final Report