CERIC: Industry-wide Research Driving Content Platform Design
Timeline: 3 months
My Role: Leading UX research
Team Members: Abisoye Akinola (Project Manager), William Fritzberg (Design Strategist), Jennifer Delisle (Learning Designer), Madeline Ye (Graphic Designer)
CERIC is a national association for career development professionals in Canada. Their member engagement team sought to understand how current resources available to their members aligned (or failed to align) with the needs of career counsellors and other career professionals helping the public navigate Canada’s changing labour market.
CERIC required an independent audit to identify gaps in their own digital strategy and recommend pathways to address gaps identified to position themselves as a north star in the career development space and provide a strong source of revenue to help fund operating costs and future initiatives.
Challenges
- National, industry-wide scope of CERIC’s users
- Great diversity of users in terms of demographics and context of their work
- Fragmented landscape of support for career development professionals
- Extensive collections of existing content created over 20 years and presented across many different engagement channels and modalities
- Limited capacity within CERIC’s community engagement team, need to carefully prioritize solutions
Process & Methods
- Competitive analysis to identify existing career development platforms and support resources, gaps in the market
- National survey (~1800 respondents) to capture demographics and engagement patterns of CERIC’s users
- Focus groups (4 rounds with ~50 participants) to better understand pain points, aspirations, and attitudes towards CERIC
- UX audit to assess accessibility, content quality, and UX design performance based on engagement metrics and usability assessment
- Quantiative and qualitative analysis of research data to synthesize actionable recommmendations
- Presented recommendations and future roadmap to key client stakeholders
Results
- Delivery of a national snapshot of strengths, gaps, and opportunities in CERIC’s engagement strategy for modernizing content delivery and increasing reach
- Based on recommendations, client rolled out revised content strategy to best leverage new and existing content in the form of digestible, practically applicable resources
- Client launched a national resource hub for career development professionals which has seen strong uptake and generated significant revenue