Digifolio
Helping college students visualize their portfolios
Overview
Digifolio was my thesis project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It is a mobile application designed to help college students showcase their soft skills in a visual way.
Problem
Unlike my portfolio which you are looking through right now, most college students often struggle to brand their skills in a way that builds a cohesive narrative.
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Skills like empathy, adaptability, and teamwork aren’t necessary easy to showcase when they’re just listed as meaningless words on a resume.
Goal
Our goal was to create a tool that will help students align relevant works and experiences to those skills in a project-based template — much like a design portfolio!
Research
We talked to a lot of undergraduate students (especially non-design majors) about their career preparation. One of the most surprising findings was that students were comfortable listing their top skills, but had no idea how to express them in a traditional portfolio.
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We wanted to identify what students will find most useful for their career search and sent out a survey to various undergraduates who are prepping their career plans.
The results revealed very interesting insights:
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Students can identify their top 3 skills but have trouble finding specific projects to back them up
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Students want to build a personal website or e-portfolio on top of a resume
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Non-design/art majors aren’t really sure how to translate non-visual projects into a visual portfolio
Personas
The two personas we found from our research were:
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Students who don’t know their skills yet
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Students who might know but not sure how to showcase
Competitive Analysis
We conducted competitive analysis on 5 existing web-based tools that allow users to showcase their skills, expertise, and experiences, including LinkedIn, Pathbrite, Journo Portfolio, Squarespace, and Wix.
LinkedIn is very effective if users are well aware of what to showcase, but some students do not and need guidance on the process of exploration. The remaining 4 tools are e-portfolios or generic website-building tools. Some of them are catered towards showcasing projects and skills in specific professional domains and do not support the larger student/job-seeker population.
Our proposed solution
Therefore, we would like to develop a web-based tool to guide students in showcasing their strengths in a visual way. A major component of our solution is an interactive guide for students to create their narrative.
Iterations
We ideated sketched out our portfolio tool into two parts:
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Persona building: to capture their background, career interests, top skills and strengths
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Self-discovery: to find experiences (school projects, internships, work experience) that best exemplify the listed skills and strengths
Final Design
Onboarding: our onboarding steps are simple, introductory questions asking students about their background and interests. We wanted to keep it as short as possible, as the real exploration begins after students enter into the app.
Photo Time Machine: instead of asking students to list out projects which exemplify their skills, we prompt students with a photo selection activity to showcase their proudest moment. We hope that photos are easier to recall than projects or cases.
We use guiding questions to secretly extract keywords that will describe why this project best showcases their skills.
Our design of byte-sized tasks and flexible pacing also help ease their pressure in documenting their reflections
What Would Your Friend Say: we hope to help students project more empathy towards their self-perceptions and therefore able to tell better narratives of their accomplishments. This friend activity encourages such empathy where we ask friends to join and help reinforce student's strengths.
A scenario is provided. We ask the student and his/her friend how the student would respond to it. If the answer matches, that's a strength they both agree on. But if they don't match, that means that the student has another strength that they didn't even realize!
Final Portfolio: all the responses from the games are converted into a visual portfolio. On the main page are the student's strengths. Inside each strength are projects, cases, and keywords that provide concrete evidence from the student's experience.
Finally, soft skills can be visualized!
User Testing
We quickly took the idea to test with a group of undergraduate students at Harvard to gauge their perception of our concept.
Digifolio helps recall past experiences and promotes reflection:
"Interesting enough; stimulates users to reflect on things they don’t usually think about, but also not so complicated that it would discourage users from completing the activity.”
Want an export feature:
"User-friendly, but probably not very convenient for prospective employers to click through a digital portfolio; should add a function to export all the information onto 1-page infographics"
Too childish to show employers
"Visual-wise, seems to be more suitable for a younger audience and not professional enough to be presented directly to prospective employers."
We took these feedback into our future design considerations and planned to 1) include an export feature 2) tone down on the kid-friendly visuals so it is more professional.