Overview
The current economic recession has led to many people being laid off, as a result, there is a sense of crisis among the laid-off employees. Mental health has also been severely affected. Hence, morale is down and there is a feeling of powerlessness that is leading to a reluctance in applying for new jobs & take the next steps.
Project Context
UMO x Social 2022 - Design for crisis, Team of 5.
My Role
Research, UI/UX design, Visual Design, Strategy design
Duration
1 month
Problem Statement
How might we design a solution that reduces the stress and pressure from the laid off employees and help them find a job and support them in their job search process?
Research
Desktop Research
We did our secondary research by reviewing several newspaper articles and research papers about layoffs to understand the extent of this problem.
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Indian startups laid off 12,000 employees, that accounted for 13% of global layoffs, also this year more than 121,000 employees from nearly 800 tech companies have been fired. (layoffs.fyi a website that tracks tech layoffs).
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People aged 24 to 50 were affected most, experienced people also felt Layoff Survivor Syndrome i.e. a toxic blend of anger, survivor guilt, fear, and anxiety that can cause sleepless nights, sinking morale, and plummeting productivity.
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60% of job positions are filled through networking and 46% of jobs gets filled through referral programs.
Real Stories
We searched for various social media posts to know about laid off employees and people who want to help to understand the situation of laid off employees.
User Interviews
We conducted user interviews and talked to 4 people who were laid off to understand their mental state. We were able to gather more perspective and include both behavioral as well as statistical data in our insights.
Emotions
Interview Insights
Competitive Analysis
After user interviews, we moved on to conducting a competitive and comparative analysis to understand our competitors features, functions, and flows to design a superior experience for job candidates.
Research Insights
Some key findings were uncovered after doing the desktop research, conducting user interviews and doing competitive analysis.
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There are no systems in place to give laid off talent an upper hand in their job hunt.
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Living in a constant feeling of insecurity that something worse might happen causes people to take hasty and drastic decisions sometimes.
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There are people who want to help other people by giving them refereals, or by guiding them.
Target Users
Next, we defined our target audience to help us make impactful design solutions that serve real users so we created a persona based on our user interview research.
Working or soft professionals ranging from freshers to seasoned mid-senior to well experienced senior level employees in the white collar job sector were most affected.
Personas
IDEATION
Solution Exploration
Our solution
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Design a feed dedicated for referrals alone, where only recruiters and people who want to give referals can post. This would eliminate the misuse of the feed.
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Build a community where people can not only network but also help each other. Laid off victims already go through so much stress here they can find mentors, interview tips, motivation through different channels in the community.
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Provide a way to manage stress and anxiety by recommending various tips and articles.
Introducing UMMEED!
Why Ummeed?
Ummeed means hope in Hindi and hope is everything we want our app to represent.
Logo
Tagline
There is Hope!
Mission
We want to help people in need get jobs and build a community where people help each other out!
How does Ummeed work?
User Flow
After coming up with our solution, we create user flow where we also brainstormed on features that our app could have.
Wireframing
We then made low-fidelity wireframes for our app.
Style Guide
Features
Some of the main features of our app.
Prototype
To demonstrate the proposed flow of when a person uses Ummeed , I generated a prototype explaining everything in detail with activities from splash screen to on-boarding, sign in, applying for job, looking into community, and finally checking messages and notifications.
Future Concepts
Impact
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This app helps in bringing back the laid-off workforce in the employment scenario. Bringing them back to job helps improve the economy.
Sustainability
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Content partners we have on board will be helping the platform to earn revenue.
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Digital platform is easy to access, allow for enhanced customer experience, automate processes, and deliver outcomes needed for the transformation of a business.
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An online community brings people together and provides users with a quick and easy way to navigate and find a resolution to a problem.
Business Viability
1. Subscription packages for content partners
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People putting up mentorships, workshops or courses in various domains can sell them on our platform as subscription packages.
2. Hiring Events
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Companies can advertise their jobs, put up job fairs and virtual hiring drives and pay a platform fee.
3. Executive Search firms
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Can be partnered with executive search firms in the later point of time.
Conclusions/Takeaways
This was my first competition where I participated with people from all over India. I got to know how they approach the design process and their perspective, which was a great opportunity to learn as it improved how I approach the design process. I got to learn a lot from my team members and also our mentor. Our mentor showed that designing the solution is not enough, we also need to think about the future and how its business will grow. Here are few key takeaways in the process:
Learn about the users
Know your users i.e. how they feel, what they want and what will help them.
Think about the future
Think about the business viability and sustainabilty of the product you are designing.
Accomplishing time-boxed goals
Setting goals and planning them according to timelines was one of the challenging aspects as we had very limited time.
Although we weren’t selected in the finals, we are very proud of this project as it will definitely benefiit the people in need. View our video submission on YouTube to know the story of our solution.
Thank you for making till here, if you wish to see our entire presentation deck, click here to view it on the official UMO website.