Onboarding

Prior to creating an account, onboarding allows students to gain a better understanding of the system and their goal in using it. Creating an account involves students creating a login so their information can be stored and so they can come back to the app day to day. As part of account creation, students input interests to give the system a base understanding of their preferences.

Questions

After account creation, students answer twenty personality questions. Based on their answers, they receive one of six personality types from Holland’s RIASEC model. Each day after that, students answer a daily set of ten questions that assess their interests, workstyles, and drives. Questions include multiple choice and likert scale rankings for variety in response-type. Each question set also includes a video for students to evaluate.

Daily Jobs

After each set of questions, the system pulls five jobs based on the information it knows about the student. Students can expand cards to see more detail, but are initially only shown a summary to mitigate content overload and avoid an intimidating flood of information at once.

Profile

The profile contains two sections: “Futures” and “Me.” “Futures” allows students to access daily questions or see how much time remains until more questions are available. Favorited jobs can also be viewed on this page. “Me” is where students view their interests, workstyles, drives, and personality. This information updates as a student continues to use the application.

Click here to see an interactive version of our final prototype!

Prototype

How It Works

The system’s algorithm matches students to jobs based on their profile information. The amount of jobs in the system related to a student narrows down as the system learns more about them. Each day, five jobs are pulled from within the related jobs realm, resulting in varying levels of relatedness in the jobs received.

Interaction with the System

Target Users

The first rollout of this system focuses on early high school students looking to learn more about themselves while still broadly exploring careers that relate to their interests. They also have limited sense of what they want to do in the future.

Ideal User Flow

Students download FutureFinder based on suggestions from teachers or counselors, discussions with peers, or discovery in the app store. After onboarding, students complete daily sets of ten questions and receive daily sets of five jobs. In the end, students are more informed of jobs in which they are interested and are able to take action to plan their next moves.

Ideal Engagement

Ideal engagement with the system involves exposure to 100 jobs, of which 20 are high-demand jobs in the Pittsburgh area. Ideally 5-10 of these jobs would be favorited by the student. This would involve twenty sessions and take place over the span of 6-8 weeks if students use the system about three times per week.

Intended Impact

The goal of this system is to assist students in learning how their interests relate to potential career paths and to have them engage with the system for long enough that they are exposed to jobs in which they are genuinely interested in. Having this occur will impact the future workforce by having less students go to college undecided, less students invest in futures that they are not confident in, and more students feel confident in their planning and actions as they move toward their future career.

Looking to the Future

Product Roadmap

We look forward to seeing FutureFinder continue to expand to better serve high schoolers' career exploration needs. There are three main features we see as critical additions in the future: hands-on activities, targeted search, and an influencer portal.

Hands-on activities were shown in our research to be the most impactful experience for a student to determine whether a career is right for them. A targeted search feature would allow a user to deliberately seek out information about a career they already have in mind. Finally, an influencer portal would be an alternate view for parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to see their student's progress in career exploration.

icons of roadmap plan

Future versions look to expand beyond self-discovery and broad exposure by adding features surrounding motivation and exploration in Version 2, the ability to narrow down interests in Version 3, and looking forward to planning and next steps in Versions 4 and 5.

While FutureFinder’s first version focuses on students who are broadly exploring, but as more versions develop, we hope to also target students who have already narrowed down their career direction. So, as more versions of the system roll out, the broader the range of students that they system will be able to impact.