The day I was writing this suddenly took me back to a naive little kid I was once back then with no future after graduation. One thing I knew is that I love tech. I claimed myself as a tech-savvy who understands how to build a PC. Right at that time, I decided to submit for an Informatics major study in one of University in Bandung, Indonesia. But boy oh boy did I get myself into the major that turned out to have a lot of maths — which I hated once. That time, I did regret my silly choice.

Background Story

Deciding on your future plan sometimes can be challenging. This kind of story is a reflection of how so many students find themselves puzzled when deciding which major are best suited for them or their career. Especially when it comes to suiting with their talent and interest.

The pain does not stop right there. Not only do they have to struggle with the so-many choices but they also have to thrive on the condition where there is no clear guidance or some kind of helping tools to guide them in planning their own academic future. According to TEMPO (2021), 87% of Indonesian students found themselves studying the major they do not desire. It means that it’s valid to say that fresh grads find it difficult to match their talent & interest with the major they once applied for and ended up regretting rather than succeeding.

Problems

With the backstory being underlined, I come to the idea of listing down two major pain points.

1. Most students applied for the undesirable major cluelessly.
2. There’s no clear guide in planning the future of students’ academics.

Research objectives

• To find out how the ideas could help students make their future academic decisions.
• To find out the level of usability, ease of use, and satisfaction with the ideated solutions.

More on that on Stimulus Research

How might we solve it?

So the big challenge is how might we enable alignment between students’ talent and interest with the future study plan. The ideas should cover a way getting to understand the future that students’ are willing to take based on their interests as well as suitable for their talents to better guide them in professional career.

Ideate solutions

With such HMW points, therefore I generated some of the ideas that support the HMW I’m trying to achieve.

• Planning recommendation using AI based on personality test or Academic Robo → It’s some kinda smart Robo that ask students few questions related to their action to some conditions, personal preference, and the least favorite thing they do during school. It’ll automatically generate a category that fits students’ interests and talents. They can either take the result or explore for more.

• Auto-generated OKRs → It’s basically an OKR that is smartly generated by the Robo in order to set some ambitious value that drives students to get their dreams even more. The Robo will have to have access to research data from Kemdikbud related to what it takes to be applied to such Universities.
• Career path short video story → It is Tiktok but instead of people making funny content, it enables exploration about majors that fit students’ personalities. They can either swipe or take the major as their dream and set the new OKRs.

Get to know the target audience

I’m aiming at users that have such properties:

• High or Vocational school students
• Age between 15–20 years old
• They who have no idea or whatsoever in taking major for their future

Prototype

Academic Robo

First, students will have to identify their condition. To widen our audience, besides providing options for early university students, I also provide an option for those who have been in the major that they’re in and regret.

Once it’s selected and the student is identified, the robo will give several questions related to their talent and interest. I make it very interactive and fun to answer with an easy tap as their input.

After going through the questions, they will be classified as a group identified from their personality. As an example, in this section, the student got the ‘Scientist’ category. Therefore, we explain what it means to be, interesting facts about their major, and show the best suited major as well as available universities. The student may choose their major interest and set it as their goal. But don't worry they can change it later in the future to provide flexibility.

Try the prototype here:

Generated Keys of Success

Once the student has chosen their dream major, they’ll get some kind of ambition like OKRs. I call it Rencana (Plan)that consists generated Kunci sukses (Success Keys) for students in order to set ambition target in achieving their dream major. They can update the value of each success key and even change its target due to inconsistency there is in real implementation.

Here’s exactly how the plan looks like:

Future Corner

In this feature, students can explore so many majors in the open sea that’s automatically generated according to their personality just by swiping their screen. They can also expand and find out any information they need regarding the major.

Validating design ideas

According to the Stimulus Research, this design initiation aims to achieve a good amount of design metrics. They are Ease of use, Usability, Desirability through ideas, and Happiness.

I tested the design out to 5 senior high school students that suited the user persona. Here is the test result:

Easy of use → 4 out of 5

Desirability → 4.6 out of 5

Usability → 4.5 out of 5

Happiness → 4.5 out of 5

Takeaways

According to the result, we can conclude that:

• Users find the design ideas to be Grealy Desired exceeding the target of 4.6 out of 5. It turns out identifying students’ personalities and talents help them prepare which major suits them the most.
• Talking about ‘Ease of use’, users find the design incredibly easy to use exceeding the target of 4 out of 5.
• For the overall ‘Usability’, it exceeded a score of 4.5 out of 5. Meaning the design meets the user expectation for not getting any experience issues in terms of the way students use try the design out.
• With the ‘Happiness’ score of 4.5, it exceeded the key result target of 4. Meaning, the design brings users to a state where they feel really happy using it.
• But there’s always some space for improvement such as improving a smarter algorithm in order to classify students better with their personalities. It requires a very complex sitemap and learning in terms of students' psychology so that we can conduct better matching system between their talent and their desirable major.

That’s been it. Thank you very much for reading.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this article or if you want to make it real to [email protected].

Cheers and stay safe 🍻