Includify

Role

UX/UI Designer

Duration

7 days

Team

Independent Project

Tools

Figma

Challenge

I worked on this case study as a part of the design-a-thon challenge conducted by Salesforce.

The design brief was “How might we address the real-world challenges women face at various stages of their lives to improve their overall well-being and quality of life?”

Focus Area

The area I choose to focus on is women’s career growth and development.

Irrespective of gender, everyone is on the lookout for career opportunities that will help them lead a fulfilling life. For the majority of people, working is no longer optional.

Studies have shown many women still face challenges in their workplaces, ranging from gender bias and pay disparity to inadequate support for career advancement. This is unfair!

Goal

Empower women to make informed career choices by helping them find companies aligned with their needs and preferences.

This, in turn, will benefit supportive and inclusive companies by making them better positioned to attract skilled female professionals who are seeking such workplaces.

This will motivate other companies to follow suit in order to remain competitive and attract top talent.

Solution

Creating a platform where female employees can anonymously share their work experiences and rate companies based on specific metrics.

The Users

The high level audience is females aged 18 and older. For a well-rounded view I made sure to include a diverse pool of participants.

I divided this audience into several main groups, each with different needs.

The main categories I considered were:

Career Starters
Mid-Level Professionals
Senior-Level Professionals
Working Mothers

I was interested in understanding the challenges women face across different career stages and the key factors they look for in a company.

I proceeded to conduct telephonic user interviews with 7 participants, making sure I had at least one participant from each category.

The main goal of the interview was to understand:

How satisfied women were with their current workplace
Factors that motivate women to choose to stay with a company
Resources they currently use to evaluate a company and its effectiveness

Keeping the interview goals in mind I formed questions that were open-ended and encouraged storytelling.

The interviews revealed that several key factors contribute to women’s satisfaction in a company but there was an emphasis on flexibility, career development, inclusive company culture, pay equity, and supportive leadership.

When choosing a job, women tend to refer to multiple resources, from reviews to networking, to assess whether a company aligns with their personal and professional goals. For most companies, there is insufficient information online about inclusiveness.

Based on the interview responses, I prepared two personas that would use the service

Persona 1

Persona 2

Secondary Research

Next, I felt the need to understand how inclusion operates within companies.

What is stopping some companies from providing an inclusive workplace?

After doing some background research I realised it could be because:

companies may lack the mechanisms to track and enforce their diversity and inclusion goals
if company leaders have biases, it can lead to discrimination, even if unintentional

Ideating

After having understood our target users and the environment they were operating in, I started brainstorming for solutions. I bounced ideas off of each other.

I decided on building a solution that utilizes data-driven decision making approach.

What I intend to design is a platform where female employees can anonymously share their experiences working at the company, as well as rate the organization based on various key metrics.

A score is generated for each company based on the ratings and reviews.

This can help other users in deciding if they want to apply/join that particular company

I also decided to add a job board where users can view jobs that align with their preferences.

How can this platform be made profitable ?

I did not want users to incur an additional expense.

Hence I thought of ways other than subscription.

Since this platform is essentially a database, I decided to provide companies with detailed analytics and insights derived from the platform’s data.

Companies can use this information to:

Benchmark their inclusivity against competitors
Understand areas for improvement

User Flow

Next I came up with a user flow for reviewing a company and accessing the job board.

Userflow for onboarding

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Some of the Wireframes

Usability Testing

I conducted a usability test with the clickable prototype, with 3 users. They were asked to think aloud.

There was one issue that I identified-

Issue - Users found the star rating system unnatural for answering the questions

Solution - I explored alternatives that would align better with the nature of the questions.I decided to go with slider inputs.

Logo

I designed a logo that symbolises women supporting women and building a strong community.

The star-like symbol represents a guiding light. Blue symbolises the trust and reliability women find in one another.

High Fidelity Screens

I proceeded to create the high fidelity screens. I selected blue as the primary color to align with the logo.

First Time User Onboarding

Job Board

Includigy Ranking

Job Description

Company Rating in Various Categories

Company Reviews

Typography

Main challenges and learnings through the project

Designing this website was both a challenging and fulfilling experience. I was driven to give my best effort, knowing it was created to bring meaningful value to other women.

Interpreting the interview results and identifying the key areas that mattered to women when searching for a workplace was quite overwhelming. Building on this understanding, I had to develop a set of questions to evaluate a company’s performance in these areas. This process taught me how to create a comprehensive assessment tool.