BACKGROUND

Problem

Post-secondary students avoid applying for Manulife’s internship/co-op program and full-time positions due to the image they have of the ‘old’ Manulife.

Goal

The site should provide the necessary information about the technology and culture that exists in the Engineering departments at Manulife. This will be done with the hopes of having a more positive influence on potential co-op studnets or new grads who are deciding whether Manulife will be the next stop in their careers.

STAKEHOLDER OBJECTIVES

PRIMARY RESEARCH

When I arrived at Manulife, the problem I’d be working to solve was already defined for me by the product owner and some AVPs. My first goal was to understand the problem space better and validate it however I could.

We generated and sent a survey out to 38 designers and developers of various skill levels to better understand who we are designing for. We also conducted 5 in-person interviews to gain further insight into the current perspective our target users have of tech jobs at financial companies. Here’s a summary that we presented to stakeholders:

I was able to pinpoint the top 3 reasons why users don’t apply to engineering positions at companies in the financial industry:

1. Lack of innovation/inflexible 2. Boring 3. Corporate Environment

These will be helpful in identifying where we can stand out in the industry with how we communicate to our users.

ANALYZING CURRENT USER INTERACTIONS

I decided to investigate the current flow users would take to apply for an internship at Manulife, given that it’ll be a primary function of our solution. From the flow walkthrough and user interviews completed earlier, myself and the fellow co-op identified 3 key pain points users are facing:

With all we’ve learned so far, we chose to create 3 personas that represent a spectrum of users we’ll be designing our solution for. Here is one of the three personas, modelling an eager first year student who is wanting a position that’ll broaden his range of technical skills:

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Now that we have a greater understanding of our users, time to understand our competitors. How do other companies attract students? What content are companies presenting on their careers pages? What components should we introduce? These were some of the questions we were considering.

Plenty was learned from this, including ideas to shorten our banners so users land on more content-loaded pages, to introduce plenty of graphics and visuals for easy consumption, and to be sure not to introduce too much nested navigation.

We spent the first few weeks learning about our users and filling out our problem space. With that stage completed, now came the time to strategize a solution. With our knowledge gained from user interviews and competitive research, we met with the product owner, a Marketing Officer and other Manulife employees to brainstorm the content for the site.

SITE MAP

Considering what users said, what stood out to us most with competitors, and what Manulife is requiring for the site, we developed the following site map:

To help us stay aligned with stakeholders thorughout the design process, I set up weekly check-in meetings and introduced Agile concepts such as sprints, sprint planning and stand-ups.

USER FLOWS

We created user flows for some of the interactions we expect on our site. These were developed to help shape the designs we’ll create in the next stage of the process. Here’s an example of one of the flows we made, provided by my fellow design co-op: