Turning data into insights and storytelling

I was given two seemingly separate feature requests: first, integrating LinkedIn's Job Market Insights widget into Career Coach to increase API usage of the existing LinkedIn Economic Graph; and second, surfacing student usage data for university stakeholders.

Underlying these requirements was a fundamental question: How might Career Coach help university faculty members understand their students well enough to help them achieve their career goals?

• I recruited a diverse group of faculty for think-aloud usability sessions of LinkedIn’s existing Job Market Insights widget to understand dropdown selections and information gaps.
• I also conducted interviews, and in a second round of testing, I did a card sort exercise to understand the importance and stack ranking of the data points.

• We found job market data is useless on its own; faculty read the market through their specific students’ majors and skills and cared about the latest three months of market data.
• For students, real-world constraints like visa status and “dream city” locations decide what is realistic for their career goals.

Placing relevant data side by side for easy scanning still put cognitive load on professors to convert data to real insights. Instead, I worked to storytell students’ skill gaps based on their dream city and career.

• The “aha” moment of we need to switch the inputs and outputs of the LinkedIn widget and design for storytelling the student skill gap.

• The Tradeoff: For the initial release, I decided to use Career Coach alumni data for the inversion of the inputs and outputs due to technical constraints. Both the Teams and LinkedIn engineering teams needed more resources to rework the LinkedIn widget to fit our use cases.

The shipped design followed Microsoft Teams brand and component library, held an accessibility Grade A rating, one of the few Grade A rated products at Microsoft.