Fledglink

Why this brief existed.

Fledglink is built for teenagers who are trying to work out what to do next and have nobody obvious to ask. It gives them impartial career guidance, a digital CV, attitudinal tests, a blog and a route to employers - the things a well-connected adult would otherwise supply.

The team's research found the app was not meeting that goal, and wrote the reason down plainly: the organisation of the content and the difficulty of the language were making the service unusable for the people it was for. Teenagers were unable to use the app properly, and were going outside it for help - which is exactly the outcome Fledglink exists to prevent.

The language finding was the sharpest of the three. Job titles and descriptions were written in the vocabulary of recruitment, not of a sixteen-year-old. One student, looking at a role: "I do not understand what is an analyst." A job you cannot understand is a job you cannot apply for.

What the students worked within.

Who the design had to serve

Young people roughly 15 to 19. The research split them into two groups with genuinely different needs: the younger end did not know how to write a CV or how to find out about jobs at all - "I do not know how to write a cv" - while the older end were focused on the network and on actual job opportunities: "I want to know what my friends are doing."

Constraints in the brief

• A live app, not a concept. This was improving features that already existed and were already being used.
• The prototype was built for an iPhone 6, on the team's own reasoning that most of the teenagers they were designing for cannot afford the latest model of phone.
• A team of three, working to a specific set of outcomes the client wanted moved rather than an open remit.
• Nine qualitative interviews across a four-year age range - a narrow sample that had to be read carefully, because the two ends of it wanted different things.

What the team actually did.

Taken from the team’s own final presentation back to the client — the research they ran, what it told them, and the design decisions it drove. Including the ones that did not work.

Nine qualitative interviews with users aged 15 to 19 came first, and immediately produced a split the brief had not specified: the younger users needed help writing a CV and finding out about jobs, the older ones cared about the network and the opportunities. The same app was being asked to do two jobs.

Three insights came out of the research. Navigation: the majority of users ignored the navigation tools on the bottom bar, and with them the features the app offered. Tools: some of the filters were irrelevant to teenagers' needs. Language: the wording used on job titles and descriptions was too difficult.

The team wrote a formal problem statement rather than jumping to screens - that Fledglink is intended to find suitable jobs for teenagers, that the service was not meeting that goal because of content organisation and difficult language, that this was causing teenagers to look for outside help, and that fixing it should show up in completed CVs, applications, connections and clicks on features like the attitudinal tests.

Personas and journey maps followed, mapped across discovery, findings and applying. The pain points were consistent across both personas: hard to find the app through a search in the first place, unable to apply through the website, difficult to navigate, confused by irrelevant information, too many filters, and job descriptions that were hard to understand.

Scoping the MVP, the team worked backwards from the first action a user has to take rather than from the most interesting screen. Three must-haves came out of that. First, collect more detail at sign-up, so the homepage can be tailored. Second, rebuild the homepage around what users actually said they wanted - CV, network, attitudinal tests and blog moved to the centre and prioritised by need. Third, simplify the language that had defeated people in the interviews.

They sketched on paper, built a low-fidelity digital prototype and ran three user tests on it. Feedback was broadly positive - "It is quite complete, I do not need more functions" from a seventeen-year-old, "I like that you can boost your qualities" from a fifteen-year-old - and users liked being able to connect with other people.

Two changes came directly out of watching people use it. Testers raised privacy concerns, so a privacy settings option was added to the profile letting users decide what other people can see. And a heart icon used for saving a job or a blog post was being read as a rating, the way it works on Instagram - so it was replaced with a bookmark. Small changes, but both came from observation rather than opinion.

The deliverables.