Acorns Switch is a mobile app that helps career changers find their perfect job. Users are offered their best matches based on their background and preferences and are provided with a personalized browsing experience, bridging the gap between what they assume a job could be with what a their new interest actually is.

During the 4 week period of the project, I completed an end-to-end design process, including primary and secondary research, product strategy, visual design, prototyping.

The COVID-19 outbreak has had a huge impact on how workforce view and consider their career moves. These include the ability to work remote, have more flexible job options and use their skills towards a purpose.

These impacts are even more tangible for Women as family caregiving responsibilities before and after the pandemic have largely fallen on them. 65% of low-income mothers and 70% among those working part-time jobs said they took unpaid leave because of their child's school or daycare was closed.

Looking for a new career is a multistep process. Whether it was to better understand the people I was designing for or just learning more about the available tools – every bit of research was done with intention. Researching with intention allowed me to take advantage of the findings established early on and to also conduct primary research.

Getting fist-hand information from the people who were looking for jobs was extremely helpful. Through one-one conversations and the survey I explored how they used the platforms they chose, why they chose it and compared with what the companies actually offered to their users. Some insights from user interviews and survey results regarding their frustrations:

Seeing what tools are currently available to the users provided me with a strong context of the current market. Instead of SWOT, I decided to explore a more comprehensive benchmarking analysis approach that included visual and informational aspects their products too. To achieve that, I conducted S.W.C.D.UX.O analysis for the top performing job hunting and mentoring platforms—the two main job switching areas discovered from previous research phase.

After collecting data from research and having a clear image of what our potential users need, I started ideating. My ideation was done through a combination of design sketches and affinity mapping with sticky notes. After the initial phase of this activity was done, I then categorized each sticky note into clusters and each of those clusters shared some commonality between the ideas.

Using journey map, I aligned the their struggles and flow with their process to understand where is the most suitable point for improvement. I chose "Information gathering" phase, as it showed to be the most stressful and time consuming for the users.

Once I understood what I need to build based on the research synthesis, I started sketching different ideas. With unlimited possibilities in terms of features and information architecture, I soon realized creating detailed user flows that include product’s features will help me try the structure of the different sections of the app faster and change them accordingly. So after multiple rounds of adjustments, I created the user flow below:

After the sketches, Based on feedback from 4 other peers and 2 mentors, I iterated my design over the span of 1 week with 3 major improvements:

With 8.2 million customers, Acorns is offering an economical way for the people to invest their money. The sky-high unemployment rate during the pandemic inspired the acorns team to partner with online job market ZipRecruiter. With the idea that earning more will lead to more investment, Acorns is hoping to increase their sign ups and eventually convert their platform users into subscribing to their investment services.

To better help establish the value of the product and the features, I came up with these measurable metrics: