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Case Study:

RiseKit
Nonprofit
Dashboard


RiseKit is a workforce development platform connecting workers with the right training, resources, and job opportunities at the right time. The platform serves employers, community organizations, and jobseekers navigating the workforce. 

How can a redesigned career navigator experience help RiseKit become a daily driver for the staff managing their clients' path to employment instead of a backup tool or an afterthoght?

Written by Kelly Schairer

Introduction 


The Team


I led design on this project in collaboration with a product manager and the head of product.

Timeline and Tools


The project was completed in 8 weeks. We conducted ideation workshops in Miro, leveraged Vercel for rapid concept generation and prototyping, and used Figma as the primary design tool to carry designs from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups. 


My Role



User Research and Synthesis

I moderated user interviews with our clients in the form of a conversation about their current work flow, goals, and pain points. I also synthesized the qualitative data collected through these interviews into the akeaways that guided the direction of the design.

Product Marketing

I coined narrative langage that shaped the delivery of this user experience, identifying and leveraging key phrases from the user research to establish product terminology that resonated with our research participants’ goals for the user experience. 

Wireframing and High-Fidelity Mockups

I created every stage of the designs for this project in Figma, using our generated concepts as a reference to draft the inital wireframes, the initial set of MVP designs, and the final iterative high-fidelity mockups after collecting user feedback.

Challenge

Navigating the Workforce Development Space




A Compass for Career Navigators


This redesign focused on a user type we call career navigators: users employed by workforce development nonprofit organizations in case management roles.

While no two of these roles are exactly the same, the shared objective of the career navigator is to help disadvantaged jobseekers pursue further education, additional nonprofit support, and professional opportunities.

Every instance of friction in the career navigator’s workflow increases the risk that a client will fall through the cracks. The tools that career navigators use daily should remove obstacles from their workflow, not create new ones.


Bring it All Home


We’d already had plenty of conversations with career navigators going into this project, and knew that workforce developments nonprofit tend to be chronically understaffed, requiring career navigators to cover multiple roles with no room to delegate.

Although career navigators have many responsibilities in common, we’d need to factor in that there’d be additional responsibilites varying from role to role. Key task flows for career navigators should start right on the RiseKit homepage, with a wide variety of features accesible from this central location.


Mind the Stopgap


RiseKit was just one of many tools career navigators found necessary to do their jobs.  They were patching their workflows together with an array of different single-use digital tools, many on which RiseKit should be able to replace.

A tool that adds friction doesn't get used, and RiseKit was a "nice to have" rather than a genuine daily driver. We needed to give careeer navigators a reason to log in every day.

The Approach

Gathering Research Insights





10
RiseKit clients spoke to us about Risekit’s current and potential role in their workflow

What’s my universe today?

- M.O., RiseKit Client

User Research


We conducted user interviews with 10 career navigators across RiseKit’s partner organizations. Interviews were structured as open-but-guided conversations, focusing on the topic of building and maintaining client relationships, and tools used in daily workflow. Here’s what we learned:

Navigators Wear Too Many Hats

We confirmed and expanded our understanding of how career development programes are rarely fully staffed, and navigators regularly absorb responsibilities outside their job description. Repeatedly navigating to features siloed across different screens was adding up to 30 minutes a day to the career navigator workload. Reducing clicks to high-frequency tasks with a flexible dashboard would be a meaningful unlock.

Direction that Cuts Through Noise

One client beautifully articulated the question every career navigator asks upon login: What’s my universe today? They wanted an immediate, structured answer to this question. Who needs attention? What's outstanding? What's next?

Exit Clients and Celebrate Success

Career navigators shared a pragmatic and productive goal: to successfully exit clients through placement or completion of defined goals to shift focus onto other active cases. Following a case through to a positive end result provided moments of celebration in a frustrating workflow. 

Opportunity to Extinguish Workarounds

Nearly every navigator we spoke to was maintainging a spreadsheet or Google doc to track their client load. This redesign presented a major opporunity to eliminate, or at least diminish, the need for a stopgap solution.
Navigating to the same features repeatedly added up to 30+ minutes a day. Reducing clicks to high-frequency tasks was a meaningful unlock.




Discoveries

Forging a Design Path





Defining the Problem


This diagram visualized a critical insight from our research: Admiral user satisfaction was driven mostly through interactions with Customer Support, and rarely through positive experiences with the dashboard. Users of all types and touchpoints rely on customer service representatives to compensate for the dashboard’s usability issues.

The RiseKit career navigator dashboard needs to effectively communicate the value of their services by enhancing the informational resources and usability of their platform so that users can understand and optimize the horizontal suite of products without relying on customer support.

Approaching the Solution



We established four design principles to inform the direction of our project:

FLEXIBLENo two caseloads are the same. This dashboard experience must lend itself to whatever tasks might get thrown at an understaffed career navigator that day. 
TOP-DOWNAlthough it is a high priority for the design to quickly provide a birds-eye view of everything on the user’s plate, it should also be easy to focus in on details and impact individual cases.


LOW-LIFTThe dashboard should bring the tools necessary for high-frequency tasks to the surface of the user experience, with task completion starting with the first click after login.
CONSTRUCTIVEEvery design decision should serve the purpose of quickly helping and exiting clients, so career navigators can celebrate success and shift focus to their next case.