Adaptive Career Coach
What Is It?
In 2023, Talespin hosted an interdepartmental hackathon. The goal was to find innovative ways to integrate generative AI into our work. I partnered with a team that included Natalia Zhang (UI/ UX), Erich Welz (Engineering), Colin Gause (Product), Thai Nguyen (Engineering), and Brian Lee (Engineering).
Our idea was to prototype a system where users could interact with a virtual human career coach, and, after providing some information about their past work experience, preferences, and goals, receive customized recommendations on possible careers that would be a good fit and an explanation of why.
The inspiration for this idea was to help address some of the employment disruption caused by the adoption of generative AI tools. As some skills become obsolete and new job opportunities are created, our team knew that job seekers might feel at a loss when trying to determing what new skills would be needed and what positions would be a good match for their previous experience. To put it another way, we wanted to use generative AI to address some of the pain points created by generative AI.
How Did You Build It?
Our approach was interdisciplinary and multi-faceted. Natalia created detailed wireframes illustrating how the interaction with our virtual human coach could work. Thai, Erich, and Brian created a video illustrating our Miranda VH speaking auto-generated text. Colin and I collaborated on a more detailed deck illustrating our prototype and exploring the potential market impact.
My main contributions in the design process were in creating a detailed user persona and in creating an interactive conversation experience that supported the user persona’s needs.
Our persona was named Heather Davis. Heather was a paralegal who felt pressure to upskill to ensure her job security. She has limited time and money, and so is unable to pursue a traditional degree to change careers. Our persona helped us to identify Heather’s need for emotional support during her upskilling journey, and the need for clear guidance on how to make the transition to a suitable career. (Feel free to click through the FigJam board to learn more about Heather).
I created this persna using Figma for easy visual design and collaboration.
For the interactive interface, I relied on Voiceflow. If you’re unfamiliar, Voiceflow is a scripting tool that allows users to create blended branched, intent-driven, and generative conversations. Conversational experiences can be chat-based, or voice-based.
I selected this tool for this project in part because of the flexibility it allowed. I knew that restrictive, branched prompts would be needed to gather information from the user, while generative portions could provide the kind of in-depth analysis and adaptability that a recommendation engine would need. I also created this conversational experience with Heather’s needs in mind, and focused on adopting a friendly supportive tone that would imbue Heather with confidence on her career transition journey.
Feel free to try out the experience here or by clicking through the embedded prototype below!
What Makes this Project Unique?
This project was unique because of it’s interdisciplinary nature and because of the experimental nature of what we were doing. I felt like I learned a lot from the rest of the team and gained more insight into their talents and abilities. I also really appreciated how we each were able to contribute to a collaborative, cohesive end product from our respective disciplines. You can try out the chatbot portion using the embeded prototype link.
What Was the Impact of this Project?
Our team won the audience choice award of the Hackathon! 🎉🎉🎉 The audience and judges seemed to really appreciate the product work we had done and appreciated our approach to blending structured conversation interactions with generative AI.
Show Me!
You can try out chatting with our career coach, Miranda, by clicking through to the embedded prototype or clicking this link.