MOBILE
Career Choice is an education voucher program for Amazon employees looking to gain skills for a new career. Amazon has partnered with a growing list of schools nation-wide to cover up to 95% of an employee’s tuition. Education programs range from nursing, commercial truck driving, web development, and more. I designed a scaleable mobile-first dashboard for Career Choice that integrates into Amazon’s already existing A-to-Z app.
My role was a lead UX designer and researcher in a team of 3, with another researcher and a senior product manager. I used Sketch and InVision to create a mobile prototype.
The Problem
Currently only 3-5% of Amazon associates engage in Career Choice, with many unaware of the benefit. Those that are enrolled have many complaints about the experience, ranging from the application process to finding work after graduation.
Objectives
• Research pain points of current CC experience
• Increase visibility and employee engagement with Career Choice benefit program
• Integrate Career Choice into existing AtoZ app
• Concisely communicate what is CC and how to enroll
• Create modular, scalable, and mobile-first prototypes using Amazon’s Stencil design system
• Continually iterate on design based on user and stakeholder feedback
Our senior product manager sourced 13 warehouse associates to interview and we grouped them by their stage in the Career Choice journey. The groups were: eligible for CC but not yet enrolled, currently enrolled, graduated from a CC program, and dropped out. We also made sure to have a diverse range of participants regarding age, gender, location, and previous education. We originally wanted to have an even split of on-campus and online students. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the students were eventually online-only.
The UX team of 3 all contributed to writing the discussion guide, which was modified depending on the group. As a researcher, I facilitated interviews and took notes to consolidate it into a research document. I created a framework to map user journeys in order to influence the design decisions for the prototype. Stages of the journey were turned into tiles on the CC mobile design.
A-Z Integration
Where should Career Choice live in order to get maximum engagement? Because the standalone website wasn’t generating many hits, the product team decided early on that CC will integrate into the A-to-Z app, which already has a large installation base. Amazon associates use A-to-Z every day to clock in/out, check work schedules, request sick days, view pay stubs, and complete job training.
Contextual Tile
Part of integrating CC into A-to-Z involved creating a contextual tile on the user’s home page. This increases visibility by living alongside important information that warehouse associates check daily such as work hours and PTO.
The CC tile provides contextual information depending on where the user is at in their CC journey. For instance, enrolled students will have their class schedule on the tile and unenrolled students can see their remaining tuition budget if they want to sign up for classes soon. Clicking the tile will take the user to the Career Choice dashboard.
As previously mentioned in the research section, the framework was used to influence the layout of the CC home page. The tiles are ordered chronologically from the very beginning of the CC journey, to finally searching for jobs and preparing for interviews after you’ve graduated.
The “Overview” section has information about how the CC benefit program can help Amazon employees, along with inspiring success stories from people who’ve already graduated.
The “Research” section helps associates choose their next career, as well as provide local schools that Amazon has partnered with.
Finally, the “Actions” section contains everything from the student’s application status, to requesting work schedule accommodations, and then a job board.
Results and Next Steps
Going over the initial objectives when I first started, the team and I successfully dissected the CC user journey and created an intuitive modular mobile-first design that satisfies users and stakeholders.
After the design is complete, what’s left is to develop CC integration into the A-to-Z app, then track usage metrics to see if more than 5% of associates are now engaged in Career Choice.
There’s always more ways to improve and iterate. I left before additional work could be done by creating a school discovery tool or a better job board. But I’m proud of the work I’ve done within the scope. It was also crazy watching the Super Bowl in 2022 and seeing an Amazon commercial about this benefit program. I couldn’t be happier knowing it’s changed a few lives out there.
