How can we, with the help of motivation, give jobseekers the conditions to be more self-sufficient for a longer period of time and increase the quality and intensity of their job search?

Together with another designer we explored this question in an agile insight-driven project where we conducted user research and created design concepts and prototypes.

My role

Service designer - conducting research, facilitating workshops, developing design concepts and user testing. 

Project

Sep 2020 - April 2021

CHALLENGE

The Swedish Public Employment Service has noticed a decrease in jobseekers' motivation about three months after that they have registered. The objective of the project was to try to understand what affects the jobseeker's motivation in order to be able to provide the right support, services and feedback throughout the customer journey. The goal was to: 

- Motivation is a system of factors that affect the quality and intensity of job search. Motivation is affected by the person's perceived progress, feedback, the person's conditions (health, education, finances, etc.) and the ability to apply for a job.

Challenge: Motivation is complex and subjective

1.

Design concepts to help the customer to maintain and strenghtening its motivation throughout the customer journey

2.

Design a concept for a new service that supports the user to work with goals and sub-goals

3.

Come up with ways to measure motivation and provide feedback to the jobseeker along the customer journey

Reframing the question

Initially, the question was how we, in our digital flows, can support jobseekers who are starting to have problems with motivation and risk becoming unemployed for a longer time. During the research it became clear that the problem needed to be refocused on to work more proactively with how we can maintain and strengthen the user’s existing motivation.

PROCESS

In this agile design project, I and another designer conducted research. Based on our insights, we designed concepts and prototypes that we tested with users.

Interviews and research

Interviews with jobseekers, psychologists and job service provider staff at The Employment Service was conducted. We also gathered and processed research about motivation, goal setting theories, behaviour design and how to support behaviour change.

Workshops

Collaborated with other designers within the organisation from different product areas at The Employment Office. We planned and facilitated interdisciplinary workshop with both designers, copywriters and people working at the legal entity. We did four different workshops, including a design studio, in order to define user needs, define impact goals and get design feedback on concepts.

Prototyping & user testing

When we had enough insights about motivation and how it affects jobseekers' behaviour, we defined design principles for creating motivating user experiences. These design principles laid the foundation for what our concepts needed to contain in order to be motivating and supporting for the users. We came up with five concepts and for two of them we developed prototypes that we tested with users.

LEARNINGS

When we gained an in-depth understanding of what motivation is and how it works for jobseekers in this context, we realized that we needed to reformulate the problem statement. Motivation is a complex system, it is also volatile and subjective. Motivation-boosting efforts when the motivation already has dropped is not enough. Instead we had to take a much more comprehensive approach and work proactively with motivation throughout the customer journey. 

It is also very important that when working in a hypothesis-driven project to be able to quickly adjust and change direction based on what the insights show. Other learnings:

To be able to navigate in such a large organization and to involve relevant stakeholders from different areas at the right time.

To run a faster, more agile project alongside the large organization without missing important dependencies and in the end be able to merge the work within the organization.

To create an experience that puts the user first but that takes into account the larger context, different dependencies, legal rules and more.