Overview

TL;DR

• Problem: Many internationally-educated nurses struggle with job interviews in Canada due to language barriers and anxiety.
• Solution: Onward, an AI-powered interview coaching app designed to help users practice and improve.
• Features:
  • Practice interview sessions tailored to specific nursing roles.
  • AI-powered feedback using the STAR method and filler word analysis.
  • Review past interview sessions for continuous improvement.
• Outcome: Successfully presented to 200+ industry professionals, with ongoing development for future improvements.

Context

During our research phase, we found:

• 44% of internationally-educated healthcare workers are overqualified for their current position
• & over 25% of immigrants experience severe interview anxiety
• Profile of Immigrants in Nursing and Health Care Support Occupations, Statistics Canada (2021)

With this in mind, we first crafted our primary persona, Marco Dizon, a nurse from the Philippines who has been struggling to find work in Canada.

We aimed to create a solution to help Marco and others like him navigate the Canadian healthcare job market.

Plan

Based on Marco's major frustrations, we came up with our primary goals and values for Onward to try and solve them, including:

• Encouraging nurse growth by providing feedback
• Allowing confidence to flourish with tailored practice
• Helping nurses tell their stories by growing their language and communication skills

Establishing these goals, we crafted a structured site map with user flows for the main features of the app. Due to time constraints, our primary focus was on the practice interview feature/flow, which accomplished our goals to help Marco grow.

Process

On a tight schedule, I jumped straight into development, before the designs were even completed for the first iteration! Because of this limitation, to ensure quality and consistency, we conducted usability tests with our target users during each feature sprint to pinpoint any issues with our user flow.

To maintain efficiency and meeting our Agile goals for each sprint, which was rolling out a complete feature each week, we leveraged Chakra UI components to quickly build out our app and maintain a consistent design system.

One of the main challenges we faced during development was simplifying the user interface in the "practice interview" feature, to ensure that users could easily navigate through the flow to receive feedback.

Combining my roles as lead developer and UX architect, I consulted with our target users and outside mentors to find a solution, which was to reduce the amount of buttons on the screen, and provide micro-interactive feedback to actions taken by the user.

Results

After 4 months of development, we successfully launched Onward, and had the opportunity to present it live to an audience of over 200 people, including industry professionals, government officials, and potential investors.

Over the course of the project, we were able to:

• Structure practice interview sessions catered towards the role our users are applying to
• Provide tailored feedback with prompt engineering through the STAR method and use AI to highlight filler words
• Allow users to review their interview sessions and continue practicing!

While time constraints prevented us from implementing all planned features (e.g., native language practice) for our MVP, we continue to develop the app for future release.

You can view Onward here: onward-prep.ca