Overview

A 10-Foot Long Journey Map?

For a special topics course, Journey Maps, my team and I were tasked with creating a 10-foot long journey map that would help a client improve user experience by providing a visual representation of the user's interactions and emotions throughout an experience, helping identify pain points, opportunities, and areas for improvement. By making the journey map 10 feet long it would draw more attention, therefore making it a better storytelling device.

The team and I chose to explore the process of searching for and applying for internships on LinkedIn. As students preparing for the job market, we found this topic relevant to our experiences.

The project required us to consider who would commission this research, why they would commission it, and how they would use it to improve user experience. We envisioned that LinkedIn would hire us to do this research in order to help LinkedIn employees better understand and improve the internship (and subsequently job) application process for students.

To aid our brainstorming and visualization, we utilized design journals. In these journals, we applied our sketching and creative note-taking skills that we learned earlier in this course to help bring this journey map to life.

Design Journals

Design Journal Page Examples

Research

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media platform for individuals seeking employment, enabling them to cultivate professional identities, connect with others through networking, and engage in job-related activities with the goal of enhancing success, productivity, and career opportunities. It is particularly popular among students, who utilize LinkedIn to establish their professional presence and pursue job and internship opportunities.

To gain deeper insights into the internship search process on LinkedIn, we conducted in-depth interviews with two college students, both of whom had successfully secured internships and had used LinkedIn during the internship hunt process. Each participant shared their firsthand experiences in utilizing LinkedIn as a primary tool for finding internship opportunities.

In our interviews, we explored their thoughts on the process, their motivations, the platforms they used, and any notable positive or negative aspects they encountered.

The participants expressed positive feedback regarding LinkedIn's interface and features, particularly highlighting the convenience of the "easy-apply" option and filters, which made job search and application more accessible. They found the streamlined process on LinkedIn so effective that they dedicated a significant amount of time to searching for internships specifically on the platform.

Interviews

LinkedIn Easy Apply Example

However, the participants also shared negative feedback about certain aspects of LinkedIn. They noted an inconsistency in the availability of the "easy-apply" option for all jobs or internships, which hindered their ability to easily upload their resume and save time during the application process.

Additionally, the participants disliked being able to view the number of applicants listed in job advertisements. Seeing a high number of applicants often discouraged and overwhelmed them.  However, depending on the job’s description and requirements, there was still a 50% chance that they would apply even if the job posting showed over 500 applicants

LinkedIn Number of Applicants Example

Persona

The Internship Hunter

To help humanize and understand the needs, goals, behaviors, and preferences of users, we developed a user persona based on our findings from the user interviews. Our persona, Nicole Montes, is an Interactive Design major at KSU, chosen to align with the backgrounds of our group members and interview participants, all of whom are also pursuing degrees in Interactive Design.

User Persona

User Journey

The Simple 9-Step Internship Hunt Program

To construct our journey map, we integrated insights from our user research, while closely examining the motivations, frustrations, and needs of our persona. This process enabled us to outline a comprehensive nine-stage journey that encompasses both the instances when the user actively engages with LinkedIn and when they don't. We made the deliberate choice to include stages where the user is not directly using LinkedIn, as our research revealed that users repeatedly return to the platform at various points in the journey to discover additional job opportunities, enhance their profile, or create posts.

Below are the nine stages of the journey map, with the highlighted actions represented by italicized bullets, indicating the pain points experienced by the user throughout their journey.

9-Step User Journey

Journey Map

The Vicious Internship Hunt Cycle

So, you know how I mentioned earlier that the map was going to be 10 feet long? Well, that ended up being a little bit of a fib. The final map was created on a 3x9 feet sheet of rolled paper because it was the biggest we could get our hands on. Nonetheless, this map serves as a visual representation of our persona's internship search journey and highlights the positive and negative impact of LinkedIn. It offers a comprehensive overview of their experiences, encompassing both beneficial and challenging aspects encountered throughout the internship hunt.

Final Journey Map

Among the details on the map, there are smaller highlights that may be difficult to see, such as notification bells indicating frustrating experiences. Additionally, we included small drawings of our persona to visually depict their emotions during key moments of the internship hunt.

One particularly intriguing aspect we discovered is the cyclical nature of job and internship hunting. It is common for individuals to face rejections from companies, prompting them to continue searching for new opportunities. To illustrate this, we incorporated two sections representing rejections or acceptances, with rejections leading the user back to the "Redo" section for self-reflection and improvement of their assets.

While the journey map visualizes a lot of different things here are the main takeaways:

  • Students rely heavily on filters when searching for internships

  • Users prefer to apply using the “easy-apply” feature because it saves time by not making users retype all the same information when applying to multiple jobs

  • Having the number of applicants viewable on a job posting can deter users from applying to jobs because it makes it feel like there is too much competition

  • Most of the stress in the internship-hunting process is caused by having to wait a long period of time to hear back after applying for a job

  • There is cyclical nature to internship hunting indicating that the process has a lot of trial and error

Key Findings

Conclusion

What Did I Gain From This Process?

This project was a very fun and thought-provoking experience. Trying to figure out how to visualize user emotions was difficult but also the most rewarding part of this experience. Getting to whip out the old pen and paper was definitely a plus. I am very happy with the final product considering the short time frame. However, I wish we would’ve had more time to interview more users because it felt like just two was not enough. But I understand that time constraints are everywhere in the real world so it’s good to get used to them. Going forward I will keep this experience in mind when trying to visualize user emotions and experiences.

~ fin ~

Like what you see? Check out more of my work ↓