Content creation for career centers
Client
Handshake
Service
Product design
Date
2023
Overview
Handshake was expanding it's business into Europe and the UK, and during a roadshow where the sales team met with potential Education partners, they identified a critical gap in the tools needed for career centers to create and manage content for students ("Resources"). I was sent to work with the EU team in Berlin along with my product manager where I led a design sprint to get us to a solution and onboard the new team to the problem space.
Deliverables
Product design
Research
The challenge
The legacy Resource builder in Handshake was dated, difficult to use and lacked features that career centers in the new EU and UK market desired. Based on roadshow and survey feedback from the sales team and the education partnership managers, we determined this would be a high value feature to update in order to bring new schools into the network. However, the team in the EU office was brand new and lacked a lot of important context about the Handshake product and user needs.
Sprint assets that informed designs
Research
During the design sprint, we brought together a cross-functional team of engineers, sales and product team members.We looked at competitor offerings, mapped the current user journey and pain points, put together mood boards, and then rapidly prototyped early concepts that we tested with potential users at EU universities and existing partners at US schools. We also tested the student experience with students at US partner schools. We heard lots of positive feedback on our early mocks that helped us define our v1 scope. Additionally, I conducted an audit of all the places rich text editing was available in Handshake to help our team identify any reusable patterns as we got closer to design and implementation.
How we did it
We broke the work up into 4 phases that we could release incrementally. We first worked on refactoring the existing resource builder to match Handshake's design system and form pattern. As a part of phase 1, we also updated the visual look and feel of the student library experience. In phase 2, we added the ability to embed rich media into articles. In phase 3, we partnered with another squad at Handshake who was designing the broader student content feed to surface relevant career center articles to students. And in phase 4 we added metrics to resources
Outcome
At the end of this work, we conceived, designed and delivered a solution that let career counselor users more easily create and categorize articles, and add rich media, resulting in a better content exploration experience for students accessing resources from their career center. Additionally, we onboarded the new EU product team to the Handshake product, collaborating remotely to deliver the project and enabling them to hit the ground running with additional feature work.
Initial wireframes for testing
WYSIWYG content creation
