OUR CLIENT
Equip, Inc.
Equip’s Original
Skill Assessment Tool
Equip is focused on helping electricians find jobs that match their skill level. With Equip’s original skill assessment tool, users can classify their own skill level without any testing or validation process. The problem is, when workers who’ve misrepresented their skills are hired, the employment demand is unmet leading to points of friction for both the contractor and employee.
The Challenge Our Team Faced
Our UX Design team was awarded a 3 week contract to redesign a skill assessment feature for Equip’s web app. The challenge our team faced was how to test and validate electricians’ skill levels so they can find the right job and meet their employment goals.
introducing
Our UXDI Team
Seth Pritchett
Galina Bystrika
Joshua Land
Prakriti Chitrakar
OUR SUPPLIES
Methods
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping & Synthesis
Persona Crafting
Journey Mapping
Competitive Feature Analysis
Design Studio
Usability Testing & Reporting
Prototyping
Tools
G Suite
Miro
Slack
Figma
Zoom
My Role
Interviews
Research
Synthesis
Design
Testing
Prototyping
our plan
1
Learn more about various skill levels electrician’s attain through research and interviews
2
Uncover opportunities for solutions through the behaviours, needs, and pain points of our target audience
3
Provide design solutions based on our research and insights
4
Define the success of our design feature through usability testing
1. Learning more about our users
Equip supplied our team with a list users to interview, along with research documenting the skills that electricians acquire as they develop their career from an inexperienced worker to a qualified foreman. However, it’s up to our team to expand on that research to further validate the problem space. To do so, we interviewed 9 electricians and contractors to learn more about the skills they acquired as they advanced through their professional career. After completing the interviews and synthesizing the results, our team found that electricians are generally represented by two categories.
Non-Licensed Electricians
· Workers with 0-5 years experience are generally categorized as non-licensed electricians.
· Skill levels of non-licensed electricians vary greatly.
· Employment opportunities and wage rates fluctuate based on skill level for non-licensed electricians
Licensed Electricians
Electricians with more than 5 years experience rely on local and state licensing tests to qualify their skill level as Journeyman and Foreman.
Insights We Uncovered
From these insights our team found that, without the opportunity to accurately represent their skills, non-licensed electricians often struggle to find employment and earn wages that match their skill level. Equip helps to resolve this problem on it’s own by separating these non-licensed electricians into three categories defined as Helper, Junior Mechanic and Mechanic. At this point it was clear to our team that non-licensed electricians were underrepresented and needed a way to qualify their skill level to contractors who are hiring.
REPRESENTING NON-LICENSED ELECTRICIANs
Helper
Jr. Mechanic
Mechanic
meet our persona
Introducing Sameer
Now that our team knew more about the problem space and what type of electrician we are helping, it was time for us to turn our attention to defining a solution. To help us focus on creating the right product for right user, our team crafted the persona of a non-licensed electrician. Meet Sameer. He lives in Queens, New York and works as a non-licensed electrician. He aspires to one day get his Journeyman license like his uncle, and is looking for new employment opportunities that will help advance his career.
key points for sameer
Goals
To get a new job and avoid lower pay from trial period.
Needs
A way to let contractors know his skill level as a non-licensed electrician.
Pain Points
Struggles to validate his skills to contractors as an unlicensed electrician in order to increase his wages and advance his career.
2. Opportunities to help Sameer
Our team relied on journey mapping to help us detail the different steps Sameer experiences as he searches and finds a new job. Here, we focused on capturing his emotional state as he travels through different points of friction and success.
Learning more about
Sameer's Journey
Highlighting sameer's journey
Lows
New job salary is unknown
Trial period pays less until he proves his skills
Highs
Friend refers him to new job
Hired after interview
Proves his skills and is paid more
Opportunities
A way to prove his skills to contractors before accepting a trial based job.
Defining The Problem & Finding Our Opportunities
Contractor’s rely on job trial periods to validate the skills of non-licensed electricians in order to advance their wages. Sameer doesn't have a way to validate his skills to contractors before beginning a new job.
How might we help Sameer validate his skills before beginning a new job?
3. Designing Equip’s New Feature
Before crafting any solutions, our team first needed to establish two key factors - who are we representing and how are we representing them? From our prior research we know both licensed and non-licensed electricians need to be represented. Our team determined a simple form validation would easily allow licensed electricians to verify their skill level. Next, our opportunity is to help non-licensed electricians test and validate their skill level as Helper, Junior Mechanic, and Mechanic. Here, we relied on our clients at Equip to supply us with a list of standardized questions that could be used to test and validate each skill level. Now it was up to our team to bring all these key factors together into one cohesive design that will help users like Sameer to test, validate, and represent their skills to get better jobs and earn higher wages.
exploring
Design Solutions
In order to help both non-licensed workers and licensed electricians better represent their skill levels, our team focused on creating the three primary pages that we believed users like Sameer would need - the dashboard, the assessment test, and the license verification form. The following designs show how our team worked through the iterative design phase to develop our solutions from low-fidelity wireframes (pictured left) to hi-fidelity prototype (pictured right).
Dashboard
From our initial interviews, we found that users like Sameer spent the majority of their time looking for jobs using a desktop computer. With this insight in mind, our team focused on combining both groups of electricians into one dashboard that would allow users to test, validate, and represent their skill levels. Equip relies on the same test questions for both Helper and Junior Mechanic, but represents their skill levels differently based on resulting grading scores. The mechanic test is for more experienced workers, while licensed electricians can verify their certification using the form validation. Below is an example of how our team worked through the iterative design phase to develop our solutions from low-fidelity wireframes to hi-fidelity prototype. The areas marked in red highlight changes after mid-fidelity usability testing.
Assessment testing
Skill assessment for non-licensed electricians is often done in person, but standardized testing on a computer is a proven way to accurately assess knowledge, experience, and skill level. Here we used Equip’s own assessment questions to populate the content of our standardized test, but looked toward function, navigation, and user control to help us form the rest of the design. The result is an experience that is simple and easy for Sameer to use.
License verification
Since our research showed that more experienced workers use local and state testing to certify their skill level and earn recognition as a licensed electrician, our team relied on form validation to as way to represent their accomplishments.
4. Testing our new skill assessment feature
As our team moved through the design phase, from wireframes to hi-fidelelity prototype, our team relied on crafting a usability test script that allowed us to test our feature’s functionality, navigation, and user control. This script had three tasks that required users like Sameer to test their knowledge as a Helper/Junior Mechanic and Mechanic, and validate their license information to earn badges that represented their accomplishments.
high fidelity
Usability Test Report
Since our research showed that more experienced workers use local and state testing to certify their skill level and earn recognition as a licensed electrician, our team relied on form validation to as way to represent their accomplishments.
Recap
Over a 3 week contract timeline, our team of UX Designers came together to help Equip, a hiring marketplace, design a new skill assessment feature for their website. Equip’s original skill assessment feature allows users to represent their skills without any verification process. Through research, interviews, and data synthesis to discover that licensed electricians rely on state and local testing to qualify their skills and earn higher wages in the job market, while non-licensed electricians rely on employment trial periods to assess and verify their skill level in order to earn higher wages. For non-licensed electricians this leads to employment delays and loss of higher wages. Equip categorizes non-electricians as Helper, Junior Mechanic and Mechanic in order to help represent the various skill levels of non-licensed electricians.
Next, our team relied on persona crafting to define our user and journey mapping to discover our opportunities to help him. Here we met Sameer, a Helper Electrician who is looking for better employment opportunities to earn higher wages and advance his career. However, when Sameer finds a new job, he is forced to accept the position and lower wages as a trial period until he proves his skills.
Finally, through the iterative design process and user testing, our team created a high-fidelity prototype that utilizes standardized testing to verify and represent the skill levels of non-licensed electricians, and verification forms to allow licensed electricians to represent their achievements. The final product is a skill assessment feature that allows Equip users, like Sameer, to test, validate, and represent their skill levels.
