Personalized Career Building
for Construction Workers
Mobile App Design for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, 2022
What is CityBuild?
CityBuild is a mobile application that provides a job platform for New York City construction workers including Section 3 workers that seamlessly connects the workforce with the local contractors. CityBuild has its own uniqueness in the way that it also provides learning opportunities.
Section 3 is a federal funding program that requires the recipients of the funding to hire low-income workers in order to provide wider economic opportunities for them.
Our client, NYC Office of Mayor’s Budget wanted a digital solution that could help the city agencies and contractors to better accomplish meeting the Section 3 requirements.
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UX Research (user interview, persona, competitive analysis, desk research, user test)
UX Design (wireframe, hi-fidelity prototype design)
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Lillian Yang
Lillian Gooden
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February 2022 - May 2022
Want to check out the prototype first?
6 Stakeholder Interviews:
Identifying 4 Challenges
We talked to diverse stakeholders and therefore were able to understand from the perspective of the construction workers, contractors, and NYC government.
As a result, we decided to focus on 4 major issues that we felt were most pressing.
Journey Mapping:
Ideating Solutions
We created a journey map of our primary persona, David, in order to clarify his pain points and needs. Based on the journey, we were able to ideate matching solutions for the 4 challenges above.
Persona:
Empathizing with the User
Based on the insights drawn from the interviews, we built the primary persona, David Skiba. David is a 25-year-old junior construction worker who moved to New York City from Poland just after finishing high school. He wants to get connected with better job opportunities that will help him gain experience.
4 Solutions for 4 Challenges
Competitive Analysis:
Refining Solutions
In order to refine our solution ideas, we conducted a competitive analysis on the following websites:
Section 3 related websites (HUD Section 3 Opportunity Portal, Chicago Housing Authority Section 3 Opportunity Portal, etc)
Online Career Platforms (Workforce 1, Indeed, etc)
Conversational writings (Turbotax, Otta, etc)
Learning Platforms (Duolingo, Linkedin Learning)
Government websites (Denmark.dk, Gov.uk, etc)
We chose 25 insights that could be directly applied to our design. Some of the examples are:
Motivate users for certain action by indicating how many people are participating in (“1,302 people are learning this course!”)
Use conversational text for button labels, not simply “next”
Apply tooltips to explain difficult terms or jargons
Use engaging photos, especially people interacting with each other
User Testing: Validating Wireframes
Based on the wireframes we built, we conducted a total of 9 user tests in order to validate our design solutions. We conducted a remote moderated user test around 3 tasks that would take the user through onboarding and our key app features.
We asked them to “think out loud” as they used the interface, noting their verbal and physical reactions. At the end of each task, we asked for feedback about their experiences.
We collectively evaluated our results, made findings out of patterns we found in the user testing data and developed our final recommendations.
Building a Design System
Our mood board is inspired by the city of New York and construction sites. From the mood board, we carefully selected two main colors - blue, and yellow. Our unique blue color, which we named City Blue, is the main color. And the Build Yellow is used limitedly for alerts and notifications as a sub color.
Creating a Brand Voice
The voice of the application was an important factor in our project. From our interviews, we learned that construction workers prefer gathering information through conversations. So, the key to our UX strategy was the UX Writing, which includes all the text in the app, such as messages, titles, descriptions, and even button labels.
Based on all the research insights, we build this cohesive voice identity of CityBuild.
