Mind the gap!
Empowering Women in the Job Market
Created an app designed to empower women in their job market journey by providing valuable insights into company practices, the app aims to tackle gender disparities and promote equality.
Background
Visual Design
Prototyping
UI Design
Role
Team
UX Research
UX Design
Brand Identity
2 UX Designer
Timeline
10 Days
We began our research by diving into secondary sources. From the beginning, we recognized the breadth and complexity of the gender pay gap, and tried to avoid a superficial treatment of the topic.
Key factors perpetuating gender STEM gaps:
Gender Stereotypes: STEM fields are often viewed as masculine, and teachers and parents often underestimate girls’ math abilities starting as early as preschool.
Male-Dominated Cultures: Because fewer women study and work in STEM, these fields tend to perpetuate inflexible, exclusionary, male-dominated cultures that are not supportive of or attractive to women and minorities.
Fewer Role Models: girls have fewer role models to inspire their interest in these fields, seeing limited examples of female scientists and engineers in books, media and popular culture.
Math Anxiety: Teachers, who are predominantly women, often have math anxiety they pass into girls, and they often grade girls harder for the same work, and assume girls need to work harder to achieve the same level as boys.
Discovery
Pain point
To further investigate this, we created a quantitative survey, making sure to start with demographic screening questions, and then getting more specific. We then saw that the element we defined where confirmed by both of the researches.
Competitive analysis
Goals:
Find what our competitive landscape looked like. we analyzed several companies that provide tools and resources for job seekers and employers to connect and evaluate each other. Understand what product features we needed in order to compare with our competitors.
Results:
By analyzing these companies, we gained insights into different approaches to networking, hiring, and evaluating companies. We also learned how each company addresses the issue of gender inequality in the workplace in a unique way. Gender pay has the most robust and data-based approach to the gender inequality.
Empathy map
An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user and help us in the empathizing fase to understand more about our users need.
We tried to empathize more with our “Woman in a male-dominated industry”
These insights were then transferred to the Empathy Map, which helped us understand:
Who are they?
What does our user want?
What forces motivate them?
What can we do for these users?
Ideation
In the Ideation phase, we chose the idea “Stinkedin, jobs you definitely you DON’T want and here is why…” based on voting.
We then explored factors for a perfect workplace, categorizing them as feedback-driven (based on worker perceptions) and data-driven (measurable elements). We aimed for a balanced evaluation, acknowledging that atmosphere and common values are essential in addition to data-driven aspects.
MoSCoW diagram
Utilized MoSCoW diagram post-ideation to prioritize app flow and features.
Streamlined complex pain point definition for better focus.
Employed empathy map to identify crucial elements for target users.
Key focus: empowering women by facilitating conversations on gender-related workplace issues and helping them find inclusive companies.
User persona and User journey
Through our ideation process, we clarified our goal and created a user persona, Nadia, to humanize our research findings and ensure that woman in STEM remained core to the design process.
Using Nadia’s persona, we developed a Journey Map that outlines her daily routine at work, her frustrations, and her goals. This exercise helped us identify the touchpoints between our product and our customers. For example, we discovered that our customers are interested in accessing information about companies, including their policies and commitment to gender equality.
Mid-fi prototype
Style tile
Next steps
Although we didn’t prioritize this part, the networking section still accounts for 50% of our evaluation, driven by user feedback. While the format and category sorting are undecided, it will function as a forum-based platform with potential for improvement.
The second part focuses on workshops, educating users about negotiation skills and workplace discrimination, offering opportunities for companies to increase awareness of these issues.
Another feature is the ability for users to improve their interactions with data by comparing different companies and applying filters to identify which factors are most important for their user profile.
