Signal: Reinventing B2B Career Discovery

Signal is an MVP product under the Future Nav suite, designed to empower upskilling and lifelong learning through personalized career exploration.

In today's workplace where internal mobility is crucial for talent retention, traditional career assessments like O*NET's Interest Profiler often fall short - they're lengthy, impersonal, and fail to connect insights to real opportunities.

From O*NET to Signal, my team’s goal is to transform career discovery into an engaging experience that clearly shows why careers match one's interests, illuminates growth potential, and makes exploration intuitive.

Primary Users: Corporate employees seeking internal career growth opportunities Secondary Users: HR/L&D professionals managing career development programs

Role: Lead UX Designer & Researcher

Timeline: October - December 2024

Team: PM, Instructional Designer, 2 Developers

Focus: Information Architecture, Visual Design, Prototype Testing

Strategic Approach

Right after analyzing O*NET's user flow with my PM, we identified significant inefficiencies in the original design. The horizontal layout and the sequential flow constrained information delivery, limiting users' ability to quickly access and understand their results.

For the brand-new Signal, I focused on clarity and efficiency of information delivery, as well as a modern face-lift to corporate users.

Simplify:

• Transformed clinical questionnaire and 10-step linear result reveal into a much-simplified flow

• Created interactive visualizations to encourage result exploration

• "Getting objective information about careers I didn't know existed"

Smartify: Improve learnability of the career rec logic

• Introduced a comprehensive view of both good and poor fit careers

• Implemented practical filters prioritizing:

  • Fit Score (most valued by users)

  • Salary Range

  • Job Category

Clarify:

• Established clear visual hierarchy for fit levels

• Achieved 86% filter discovery rate

• "Clean, inviting, modern, and easy to navigate"

While the new design improved information access, presenting comprehensive information upfront can create a steeper learning curve for new users.

During the final week before delivery, I conducted rapid prototype testing with 25 internal employees.

When analyzing responses to "What additional information would help you understand career recommendations?", one particular quote stood out and inspired the product team to rethink how users connect different pieces of information.

I did another batch of validation test after the tutorial and color coding of the fit levels using the same the research settings, significant improvements in user understanding and confidence in results.

• Understanding of career recommendations increased from 73% to 88%

• Filter functionality clarity improved to 86% (from initial 73%)

• Fit Score became the most valued filter, with 53% of users ranking it #1

• Trust in recommendations increased substantially with clear explanation of the logic

Impact & Key Takeaways

As a future B2B2C career interest tool, Signal still has a long way to go in terms of delivering better personalization and interest alignment, and overall rethinking the barebone of exploring career fit: does it eventually have to be a quiz? 🤔

While these questions remain for future exploration, the MVP has already generated significant business interest after two rounds of validation and iteration.

As the sole UX Designer and Researcher, I received recognition for both rapid delivery and crafting tasteful yet simplified experiences based on user and stakeholder needs.

💡 Here are several things I think I did right 💡

Instead of simplifying by removing information, I chose to use progressive disclosure and smart filtering to manage cognitive load while preserving depth. This allowed us to serve both novice users seeking guidance and experienced users wanting detailed insights.

For enterprise products, building user confidence through transparency and clear information hierarchy is as crucial as aesthetic improvements. Rapid testing and iteration, even under tight deadlines, proved essential for validating major UX changes.