Giving job-seekers a better place to learn
Pathrise is an online mentorship program for job seekers in tech. Each fellow in the program is matched with a career mentor and an industry mentor who work together to help the fellow strengthen their job search.
Navigating the journey of applications, interviews, and offer negotiation isn't easy – and fellows had questions. But with each mentor managing an increasing caseload of fellows, Pathrise needed a way to help mentors support fellows at scale.
Goal
Increase engagement on the Pathrise knowledge base
Pathrise had an existing knowledge base, but it was underutilized. We hypothesized that improving the knowledge base would increase value for fellows while freeing up valuable time for mentors.
Why are fellows struggling with the existing knowledge base?
I turned to Fullstory, a digital experience analytics platform, to identify users' pain points within the existing knowledge base.
There was a prevalence of rage clicks in the sidebar, especially on section titles and on locked content.
Ideation
How might we create a helpful, consistent, relevant experience?
The Pathrise knowledge base needed to be able to handle a variety of content, from workshop recordings to coding challenge solutions.
I examined a variety of comparative experiences: news aggregators, technical support sites, and online learning platforms. These familiar, vetted UI patterns heavily influenced my work.
Card sorting software wasn't in the budget for our lean startup. So I invented a free workaround.
I used a combination of pre-made cards in Asana's Kanban view to mimic card sorting software. Our team was able to gain valuable feedback at zero cost.
The outcome? Users were confused by our existing navigation structure. They wanted to browse content by job search stage.
Multiple happy paths. Reusable components.
I reused components across multiple pages in the flow. Not only did this reduce technical complexity, it also established a familiar pattern for the user.
At teh time, we had no documentation for interaction design guidelines. As a precursor to a full design system, I added an interaction library to articulate important state changes to the developers.
Solution
Knowledge at your fingertips, on your terms.
Browse based on job search stage
Card sorting revealed that users grouped content primarily by job stage. They can now do this in multiple ways: from the home page, on the individual resource pages, and within the new mega menu.
Find what you want directly
If a fellow hears about a particular article in a workshop or mentorship session, it's now just a search away.
Filter by industry, resource type, & more
With multiple options for customizing via filters, the knowledge base is now a friendlier place for non-engineering fellows.
Whoa, that's actually a lot of tags. I recognized that I hadn't set constraints for engineers, or how to handle overflow. This was a great learning opportunity for me, something I'd improve if I did the project all over again.
Save your faves
Returning users shouldn't have to dig for the same resources twice. I aimed to reduce friction for repeat users by adding a bookmarking feature. Bookmarks are accessible from the mega menu.
Outcome
It's empowering to see people take learning into their own hands.
While we weren't able to accurately measure the reduction in overhead, we were impressed by engagement and feature retention mentrics. Analytics over the months post-launch showed that most users who visited the knowledge base returned to find another resource within 3 days.