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As part of my summer 2023 product design internship, I designed and shipped an external facing administrative feature for SeekOut's Career Compass tool.
SeekOut is a B2B startup that focuses on improving companies' talent strategy. One of their products - Career Compass - is a talent management platform that helps companies retain their employees by enabling users with better access to company resources.
Career Compass is a platform that companies can use that gives their employees an account with access to plenty of resources to improve their career. Career Compass houses tools that let company employees record and track their skill progression, map out possible career tracks within the company, move up within the ranks of their current job, and find learning courses/modules to help them improve on their skills. However, in order for Career Compass to do this, information such as the skills, career paths, job/level information, and learning modules for each specific job function (role) have to be stored in a database that can be regularly updated depending on changing job role requirements.
This database was previously an internal tool that only SeekOut employees were able to access and edit. This meant that every time a customer wanted to change a small detail about a specific job function such as the description or a skill associated with it, they would have to go through SeekOut customer service where a SeekOut employee would make the changes for them. This is inefficient for both SeekOut customers and SeekOut customer service reps. To solve this, I was tasked with redesigning an internal database to be accessible and editable by SeekOut customers.
My responsibility for this project was to design the full end-to-end experience of an external facing admin tool. The final deliverable was set to be a high fidelity prototype of the experience. Additionally, I collaborated with a PM intern to work on product discovery and research. I also collaborated with an engineering intern to build out the product.
To provide some additional context and summarize some earlier bits of information, there are 4 pieces of information that are associated with every job function:
The skills required to be successful in the selected job function
Possible career paths that can be taken from the selected job function
Learning modules to help the user improve on their skills
A description of the selected job function and a breakdown of the job levels
As mentioned previously, SeekOut had an internal facing admin tool where SeekOut employees would make changes to the above factors in an internal database. The internal database is shown below.
All job roles live inside what's called a "job architecture" structure. This means that groups of job functions that are similar will live inside a job family. This is just a way to organize data so that we are more easily able to locate job functions. The picture above shows a list of job families. One job family (software & systems development) is expanded and within it lives multiple job functions including the one shown (systems engineer). This is just an example of how to locate a specific job role/function within a job family. A breakdown of some of the information within a job function in this database is shown below.
Within a specific job function like software engineering as shown, we can see there is a job description of the job function. This information will be important in the job levels aspect of the solution. Additionally, we can see a breakdown of some skills that are required for a software engineer. On the left, we see HRIS data. These are skills that a customer provides us with for a certain job function. This means that the customer's company requires these skills from software engineers. On the right, we see public data. These are skills that SeekOut generated for the specified job function through machine learnings tools. So, public skills are recommendations for skills generally found in software engineers on the internet. Users may want to alter the HRIS skills they've given for a job function or add a publicly generated skill to the HRIS list. The external facing admin tool will allow users to do just that. Below skills, there is also more information on career paths and a job level breakdown. My task for this project was to essentially redesign this database to be editable by customers.
This was a very visual design heavy project because we were under a big time crunch. This was a feature some customers were interested in which meant that the project had to be ready to implement and launch quickly. This meant that there wasn't much time to incorporate research practices into this design process. Here are some ways I was able to get insight anyways:
The admin feature is very similar to product settings or permissions. Essentially, we want to give the user a way to edit the way the product is used to their liking. I looked at some popular settings and permissions tools like Apple settings, Confluence sharing permissions, and - to name a few.
Based on some of the competitors that I had found in the competitive analysis, I drew inspiration from the layout and structure of their tools. I also looked into examples of recursive/ nested information. I created a vision board with visual design aspects from our competitors that I thought could possibly take a similar form in the admin feature.
In order to create an external facing admin feature, I needed to understand a little bit more about the internal facing admin tool that SeekOut was previously using. The main problem with the internal tool is that it was made for internal employees who already understood how to use it as opposed to new users who had no experience with the tool.
Finally, in order to understand how the admin tool was going to be used, I created some scenarios of how HRBPs and Talent managers might go about using the Admin tool. Creating scenarios helped me understand a little bit more about what content is important and the information hierarchy of this content.
Based on the insights I gathered through the above research methods, I began to sketch out some concepts. Below is a whiteboard sketch that shows a possible structure that the admin feature could be built on. First, we would have the user navigate to the correct job family, then to the correct job function, then to the feature they are wanting to change, and finally sorting that feature based on public and HRIS data.
Because the functionality of each page (skills, career paths, learnings, and job levels) are pretty similar, I only designed the skills page in order to concept test on the general layout, look, and functionality before moving on to other pages.
Additionally, as mentioned before, in order to change skills, career paths, learnings, and job level information for a specific job role, the role needs to be accessed. We needed a search feature that would allow users to search for the correct job function. One flaw with the previous database is that sometimes it wasn't clear what job family a job function lived in. This made it hard to locate job functions. In a new admin feature, we would want a search function that can search both job families AND job functions so that the job functions are easier to locate.
Below are the mid-fidelity mockups for the search function and the skills page.
Search function
When searching for a specific job function, the function name is on the left side of the search results and the family that the function lives in is on the right side of the search results.
Skills Page
We can see the skills that are shown for a job function like software engineering and we can visually see the difference between public data and HRIS (added by me) data. We can also see even more publicly generated data in the skill suggestions at the bottom.
I presented the mid-fidelity mockups in a weekly product review meeting with some stakeholders involved in the project. Some of the main feedback was to:
After implementing some of the feedback I got on the mid-fidelity mockups, I created the final high-fidelity mockups as shown below.
Search function
Skills Page
Career Paths Page
Learnings Page
Job Levels Page