A/NET: Your Accessible Job Network
A/NET is an inclusive job-seeking platform that is made for people with learning disabilities to connect and match with employers.
Sector Nonprofit, Learning Disabilities, Job Employment
Tools Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator
Role Visual/ UI Design, UX Research, and Content Strategy
the challenge
In Australia, about 3% of people have a learning disability. Learning disabilities change the way people communicate, retain information, and undertake work or leisure activities. What can we design to assist young adults with a learning disability to be work-ready?
the problem
Young adults leaving school to join the workforce would often face many challenges, or perhaps numerous rejections before getting their first job. It is the same for young adults who have a learning disability; but on top of that, stigma, lack of support, awareness and misconception within the workplace have evidently contributed to a low employment rate and sustaining in the workforce.
To brainstorm for the appropriate technology intervention, we started asking questions. Why are 8 in 10 young adults who are potential workers but are still unemployed? Is there a gap between the transition from school to the workplace? If yes, how can digital technology help them to be work-ready and maintain a stable career in the long run?
“I feel that people with a learning disability, with the right support, can achieve great things.”
- Quoted from a user’s interview
The making of A/NET
During the course of the research, other than looking into literature, interviews and online ethnography research have also been conducted to gather user insights for a better understanding of their needs and goals. We have also created a user goal framework and a user journey to map and capture their experience with each touchpoint they perform with our product.
Key Insight
They want to be financially independent and feel valued.
They lack appropriate support.
The job does not match with their skills and capabilities.
And their potential employers have general misconceptions towards people with a learning disability.
We have initially come up with a few design concepts that could work together as a whole. We have then later refined our MVP design solution to a job search portal based on feedback.
Design Concept
User Journey Mapping
User Flow Chart I & II
We understand from our research that our design has to be:
Inclusive - To support young adults with a learning disability with different needs.
Accessible - To provide easy and accessible language and tools to assist job seeking and application process
Efficient - To offer an integrated platform to guide young adults to jumpstart their careers.
From there, we have decided what actions and features would be crucial and beneficial for our target audience and designed a user flow chart for our product around these conclusions. Ultimately, our aim is to provide alternative assistance to people with a learning disability when it comes to job seeking.
Based on our personas, we have also defined user tasks:
1. Search a job within a specific industry
2. Filter the job lists (eg. skills)
3. Apply for the job
- Login or register for an account
- Create profile
4. Create Alert for specific jobs
Experience should be seamless, simple, and most importantly, inclusive.
Prototyping and Wireframing
The process of user flow charts, sketching, and wireframing has led the team to explore diverse approaches to the problem: from allowing young adults to explore their career paths to assisting them during the job-seeking and application process.
Early iterations have also helped us to find many obscure problems: the accessibility and the legibility of the content as well as the easing of the job-seeking and application process.
Sketches
Wireframes
the product
We introduce an inclusive and accessible career network platform for people with a learning disability - we aim to be able to match their unique capabilities with suitable jobs, with an accessible, easy, and understandable layout with just one click away to apply for their jobs. Our platform is able to gather job listings from third-party websites, and unlike other job-seeking websites, we can also convert them to accessible languages, preferably for people with different needs with the use of AI technology.
The Design
A/NET aims at a community with a learning disability. It is a job platform to allow accessibility and efficiency to look and apply for jobs. The visual concept of the product is based on psychological and physiological studies on color for inclusive spaces. Blue and purple were chosen as the primary colors for the product as studies show that blue has a calming effect, and is generally preferred by sight and hearing-impaired individuals. Whereas, purple corresponds to the top of the head and cerebral activity and supports non-verbal activity (Torrice and Logrippo, 1989). Essentially, job-seeking should not be seen as a complex activity, hence, layouts are to be made with simplicity and practicality in mind.
Prototype video
