The Challenge
Hawaii Career Pathways is a partnership between public and private sectors in Hawaii, from various state agencies including the Hawaii Department of Education, to various non-profit organizations throughout the community. The partnership’s ultimate goal is to help Hawaii’s students prepare for a bright future through career pathways, a workforce development strategy used in schools to help students explore and plan an education-to-career pathway.
An educational resource website must be easily digestible and relatable for a wide range of audiences.
After initial discussions with the team, I was able to further define the challenge with the 5W1H framework:
5W1H Framework
What am I building? A resource website
Why am I building this?
Business Need: To educate the public about a new educational concept and rally widespread support.
User Need: As a user, I want to learn more about this concept and see how it benefits me.
Who am I building it for? Students, parents, educators business leaders, adult learners
When and where will it be used? Schools setting, home/leisure settings
How could I measure it? Engagement, net promoter score
The Solution
Because the concept of “career pathways” was not well-known, we had to reach a wide range of audiences who each had a different purposes for visiting the website. Here are some questions we discovered each audience had regarding the topic:
A very content-heavy website, we had to plan how we could speak to different audiences with rather limited resources. Additionally, we also had to make sure that we weren’t creating too much work for content administrators who had to maintain the site after launch.
Think Gen-Z middle- and high-school kids.
Because we wanted to segment our audiences from the homepage, we wanted to create these different paths from the the homepage. We aspired to achieve this interactive feeling, sorta like you’re in a video game, selecting your own character—you are the one in charge here.
Each landing page was geared toward each specific audience.
Information at the top of these pages spoke to how career pathways benefits each type of user. Resource links at the bottom offered links to in-depth guides and were tailored for each audience’s needs.
Majority of the content lived in the Resource section of the site.
After evaluating all the content that would go on the site, we determined that there were only very minor differences when writing for each audience (i.e., the overall topic of an article was universally relatable between all the audiences). Therefore to reduce repetitive content entry internally, we would create one article on the topic and link them on the relevant landing pages. These articles were housed in the Resource section of the site.
