BAM! Find your dream job
Personal project, mobile app aimed at teenagers to show them jobs they have no idea exist and expand their possibilities
« So, what do you want to do when you grow up? »
I'm sure you've heard that sentence many times, whether it was when you were playing with a Lego Police car, or when you succeeded or failed at an exam at school. Whether it was from your nice auntie, or from your teachers trying to find some hope for your future, it has always been stressful, and painful.
Well that's the whole point of BAM, trying to create a bridge between what you like, what you could do and most importantly what you'd be super good at.
Without pressure, it would give you tips, ideas, give you testimonials of real people who made it, sending a message of hope and feasibility whatever your dream is. The app is mainly aimed at young people from 13-20 but it can be for anyone really. It is also focused around helping everyone discover jobs they never heard of and that are booming at the moment.
Meet the team
As a team, we created the concept, structure and content with Corentin Nedelec and Quentin Debard. We worked together on the very long and detailed discovery phase through research and interviews, and then I was responsible for turning all our findings into a fully fleshed prototype and branding for our app.
We thought emojis were a huge opportunity to communicate visually and therefore bringing the app to anyone from any social background, by communicating with a universal language: that of emotion.
Alone, I created everything on the app, the visual identity, the UX and the UI as well.
We met with a lot of professionals from education, tech, law, innovation, or even investors. As a team we put a lot of effort into understanding the problem from the bigger picture, trying to see where the answers could come from, how to solve this lifetime problem in a simple and stress-free way.
For my part, I did a lot of research into the visual and copy language, trying to find the best way to address these young people, treating them as equals and not children, but also bringing fun into the designs.
The discovery phase
The discovery phase
Interviews and insights gathering
Job overview and detail pages
The final app
The final app
Onboarding
Show a selection of global and generic centres of interest (around 30) that will allow the algorithm to get a good idea of what the user should be interested in and then present answers that are as relevant as possible. Of course the app will learn from the user's progress in the app, and as they will navigate to specific jobs or types of content as well as save specific information on the app, we'll be able to show more and more specific and bespoke results that will correspond to them.
Search
The user will navigate to jobs thanks to the search functionality. From their onboarding, tags will be populated and they will be able to add as many as they want if they need their results to be more specific, otherwise they can launch the search directly after the onboarding to see which jobs seems to match their profile.
From the result screen they can access a really limited selection of job ideas in order to avoid overwhelming them. They can refresh the selection or navigate to the job cards which is a visual summary of the job. And if the user is interested they can navigate to the full job detail page.
Job details
The main purpose here is to offer content that is interactive, visual, snappy and easy to digest. It offers a lot of bite size pieces of information with an elevator pitch type of description for the job, how to get there, fun facts, events… At the end there is a summary to allow the user to save this job in their box but also to share it.
Testimonials
One of the biggest purposes of the app is to show these young people that they are not alone in this difficult time, that we all go through this at some point. We want to show them that anything is possible if they want to reach their dream job, all it takes is motivation and work. Showing them actual people who do the job they are interested in might help them understand anyone can access it, even them.
Gamification
Badges, feedback, interactive elements, emojis, and a sense of community all play a big part in making this a nice process. The idea is to make it super enjoyable and fun as opposed to stressful and never-ending as it seems to be now for most of us.
Editorial content
There is a section focused on content to make the users come back to the app, to give them tips, information or display even more role models for them to follow and be inspired by.
Let’s test it with kids!
During Super Demain, an event in Lyon (France), we had the chance to test our job overview pages with teenagers and their parents. It was a paper version of the job overview page, where children could describe their dream job with emojis and key-words, and their parents did the same with the jobs they were currently doing.
It was very well received and teachers even took away our paper canvas to do the workshop themselves with their classes. The only thing they had to do was to buy a bunch of emoji stickers to enable the kids to put their ideas into a nice visual.
I improved on
This is a whole new version from the first designs I created in 2017. I really wanted to start from scratch in order to inject all the knowledge I have gathered since then, and also to be able to see my progression. It's really challenging to question the decisions we made in 2017 as a team, and start fresh on it, but it's good to see there was definitely a lot of room for improvement! And I'm sure there still is. We would love to make this app come to life for good someday, so if you're interested to build it, please come and talk to me :)
Lessons learnt
I think we need to phase this project and rethink all the functionalities in order to prioritise them for when we can get an actual built MVP. I cannot wait until this time come, because all 3 of us are convinced that this app could help a lot of people navigating through this difficult age when you need to find your dream job but nothing about it is presented in an engaging way. The purpose of BAM is to play down the massive pressure that every human being needs to go through at some point in there life… "and when you grow up, what do you want to do?" 🙄