Strategy for Engagement & Action
Overview
Introduction
Minneapolis Tech Hire is an initiative created by the city of Minneapolis to engage the community on the career possibilities within the technical industry. This was done in an effort to help expand the technical workforce in the Twin Cities metro area as well as to encourage individuals in underrepresented groups to consider a transition into the tech industry.
The Event
The Minneapolis Tech Month “Tech for Tomorrow” event is an annual event in April that is organized by Minneapolis Tech Hire. The first “Tech for Tomorrow” event was launched in April 2019 This event was created as a way to promote opportunities in the tech industry to underrepresented individuals.
The Challenge
In this project, my team and I conducted research to discover how Minneapolis Tech Hire could expand their exposure within the community, increase attendance for “Tech for Tomorrow” in 2020, and track the engagement of the attendees.
The Solution
My team and I developed a strategy to engage and encourage minority groups to investigate the tech field. Our solution to this project involved developing a multi-touchpoint outreach strategy for the 2nd annual Tech Month in addition to producing a prototype for their main website. My contribution in the website prototype was designing the sign-up portion.
Methods & Tools
Secondary Research | Comparative Audit | Journey Mapping | Persona | Prototyping | Sketch
Personal Reflection
As we navigated the challenges presented by Minneapolis Tech Hire, I brought a sense of focus to our team efforts by helping to identify areas we needed to explore, and designate tasks among the team. I also brought a strong sense of empathy for the user and the client to the project which influenced my work significantly. I wanted to ensure that we kept our user’s needs in mind and developed touchpoints to genuinely appeal to a user’s feelings in addition to focusing on meeting the needs of our client.
Client & Users
The Organization
Our client for this project was Minneapolis Tech Hire, an initiative by the city of Minneapolis that was developed to bridge the gap between minority groups and opportunities within the technical industry. To help with this endeavor, they created Tech For Tomorrow: Minneapolis Tech Month to help promote resources for diverse groups. Following a meeting with them about their desires for the 2020 event, Minneapolis Tech Hire had these specific goals for the next event:
Increase engagement within the community
Increase attendance
Method of tracking participant information
The Users
During the initial client meeting, Minneapolis Tech Hire stated that they are interested in engaging people who are currently underrepresented in the tech field. Specifically this meant women and people of color. In the greater Twin Cities metro area, this could involve individuals within the African-American, Somali, Latino, and Hmong communities and more.
The User Goals
As we considered our users, we took into consideration their circumstances, pain points, and needs. For the project, we decided to focus specifically on women of color and created the following statement to summarize our user’s goals:
All of the touchpoints developed for Minneapolis Tech Month will help women of color who are not currently in tech to feel welcomed and empowered so that they can begin to see themselves in the tech field.
The Process
Analysis & Strategy Development - Finding the Starting Point
As a team, we conducted additional secondary research to explore how other similar initiatives engage minority groups in the tech industry. We reviewed the data and identified 4 key areas to focus our efforts upon:
Accessibility
Information Tracking
Engagement
Resources
We hypothesized that these aspects were the most important components of a successfully engaging the target users, and they became be the foundation of our design strategy for the 2020 “Tech for Tomorrow” event. To do this, we saw the following aspects as being a crucial part of each category:
Accessibility - language, transportation, internet access
Information Tracking - registration system, email survey
Engagement - marketing (social media, brochures, posters, media highlights), volunteers, event partners, alum, TechPass passport
Resources - primary event website, digital calendar of all events, educational opportunities, grants / scholarships
From here, we were able to focus our efforts on the particular touchpoints to engage our target users.
As began to iterate on touchpoints, we thought deeper about our users and their goals: what would the goal be for women of color encountering our touchpoints, especially if we are encouraging them to become engaged with the tech industry? We agreed that the goal of a user - a woman of color - in each touchpoint would be to investigate the tech field and begin to see herself as a part of it.
Prototypes
Following our synthesis of the data, each member of our team developed a prototype for the user touchpoints. Those prototypes that were developed are the following:
Physical brochure with engaging imagery and content
Registration process
TechPass passport in digital and physical formats
Website
My Prototype
In the project, I developed the prototype for the registration process. Knowing that the registration process would be a key point for Minneapolis Tech Hire to gather and track data, I used this knowledge to influence my design. I created a set of basic questions for each user to complete so that Minneapolis Tech Hire could get a sense of who was participating in the Tech for Tomorrow event. Additionally, I also included a feature to allow potential hosts and volunteers to sign up. Through this, more users could get involved in different ways.
Persona - Finding Empathy for the User
To help guide our project, we developed a persona to help us focus on main touchpoint areas and interactions. We created the persona of Chanel Martinez, a 27 year old single mother of 2 children (ages 3 and 7). Chanel is an African-Latina woman who has her high school diploma. She currently works as a CNA, but works long hours and still struggles financially. She wants to find a better career for herself so she can take care of herself and provide for her 2 children.
Journey Map - Understanding the User
To help demonstrate how our prototypes would fit into the larger scheme of the Minneapolis Tech Month event, we created a user journey map to show the flow of activity and interaction between the user and the touchpoints that we developed. This is meant to identify how important each touchpoint is both to the user and to Minneapolis Tech Hire throughout the experience.
We highlighted these particular areas because they are especially important to draw the user into the event. At each touchpoint, the user needs to feel a sense of welcome and inclusion. A large and important component of our touchpoints would be imagery that features women of color engaged in the tech field, and written copy that is accessible and clear to understand. Ultimately, we need to make it easy for a user to engage with the whole Minneapolis Tech Month experience, and make her feel as though she is a part of the community.
The team discusses the journey map of touchpoints
The Solution
Implementation Plan
To further aid Minneapolis Tech Hire with ensuring that they have a successful 2020 Tech Month, I developed an implementation plan that involves the prototypes from my team. In this plan, it has a cycle of 1 calendar year, beginning with outreach efforts leading up to the event, the actual event itself, following up with participants, and ending with tracking an analyzing information before returning back to outreach efforts for the next event.
A PDF version of the implementation plan can be viewed here:
Minneapolis Tech Hire Implementation Plan
Final Thoughts
In this project, it was absolutely imperative that we discover the needs of our user so that we could focus our efforts on how to fully engage them. While developing a strategy design, finding the key moments when a user interacts with a touchpoint and discovering the ways to maximize on that interaction was an aspect that I enjoyed.