Curatace

Curatace is a startup who works with colleges and universities and helps them facilitate alumni career success through volunteer infrastructures. Volunteering alumni connect with current students and help them build their early and mid-stage careers.

Curatace’s landing page (design is not mine)

The team at Curatace were in the early stages of their business analysis, and they wanted our help to create a human-centric solution, or in their words “a ‘HumanTech’ platform.” To this end, we used a number of ideation techniques to better understand how would a solution with Curatace’s core values and mission would work in practice. This project was a part of my Bentley course HF710 – Managing a User-Centered Design Team.

Given Curatace's early-stage status and need to validate both the problem space (do students/alumni need this?) and solution space (what features matter most?), we chose the double diamond approach. This framework allowed us to diverge with broad stakeholder research (30 interviews across students, alumni, and faculty) before converging on a focused persona, then diverge again into feature ideation before converging on MVP priorities through Buy a Feature prioritization.

The first stages involved a series of research techniques, where we evaluated Curatace viability as a business, as well as the different aspects and nuances of its subject. Then, in the convergence stage, we converged and ideated a solution, shaping up what we believe Curatace should be.

Double Diamond Research - Divergence

First, we analyzed the landscape of the industry, comparing would-be competitors in a UX competitor analysis. As we evaluated Curatace’s primary competitors, we saw that each offering put a large focus on the Seeker and Giver relationship, particularly through mentoring.

We also saw that Curatace could invest in analytics, so colleges can have greater visibility into what their students and alumni require as they prepare to search for a job.

This competitor analysis helped us identify opportunity areas, particularly in features where competitors were doing poorly

After that, the next step was to find out more about what students, alumni, faculty and other potential stakeholders had experienced thorough their professional journey. The idea was to identify pain areas that Curatace might try to alleviate. For this, we conducted a series of exploratory interviews (short ones through the semester, and almost 30 in total!), which where then analyzed and coded using an Empathy Map.

Key interview insights included:

• 23 of 30 participants mentioned they felt frustrated about being "ghosted" by recruiters
• Recent graduates (10/15 interviewed) felt unprepared for interviews despite career center resources
• Students mentioned access networking opportunities as one of their top unmet needs (18/30 mentioned)

Our primary finding from the empathy map was that early graduates or unemployed professionals are tasked with juggling many activities, leaving them feeling stressed and lost when preparing to apply to jobs

From the 30 interviews, we identified that 18 participants (60%) were recent graduates or final-year students actively job hunting. This cohort consistently reported feeling overwhelmed by simultaneous demands: building resumes, networking, preparing for interviews, and managing applications. We validated the 'Seeker' persona by conducting 5 follow-up interviews specifically with this group, confirming shared pain points around lack of structured guidance (mentioned by 16/18) and difficulty accessing experienced mentors (14/18). These insights shaped 'Sam the Seeker' as our primary persona.

In order to better understand what a Seeker might have to go through, and to better identify possible needs, wants and pains, we pieced together a customer journey map based on this Seeker persona, who we humanized as ‘Sam the Seeker’.

Double Diamond Ideation - Convergence

With the information from this first journey map, we tried to elaborate how Curatace might be viable as a business that could supply people like Sam with the job-seeking advice and reassurance he needs. To do this, we used a Business Model Canvas, outlining the inner workings of what we envisioned Curatace should do.

The BMC. Here we had to sit down and think about how might Curatace work

When we first created Sam’s journey map, we focused on building out his experience with the goal of receiving a job offer. Based on sponsor feedback and additional rounds of interviews, we changed our journey ‘lens’ to focus solely on Sam’s experience as he prepares to apply to jobs.

We wanted to better understand how Curatace might fit into this persona journey, and so we did two versions of the Customer Journey Map, one before Curatace, and one when the Seeker has access to Curatace.

Sam’s Journey Map without Curatace

Sam’s Journey Map with Curatace

Feature Design

In order to create a prototype of what Curatace might look like, we did a brainstorm to identify possible, concise features which might fit into our expected customer journey with Curatace. These ideas were then curated through a Buy a Feature exercise, where every team member was given a budget and each feature a prize based on complexity.

The journey maps directly informed which features to prototype. For example, Sam's 'Prepare Materials' stage showed high frustration without expert feedback, leading us to prioritize Mock Interviews and Feedback Reports as must-haves. Similarly, the 'Professional Networking' stage revealed anxiety around cold outreach, validating Mentor Matching as the highest-value feature. During the Buy a Feature exercise, we presented features aligned to specific journey stages, helping participants understand context and make realistic trade-offs.

After testing our feature ideas with participants, we were able to categorize them into 3 groups: The must-have features, which were ranked the highest and determined as critical to have in Curatace’s MVP. The should-have features, which were the runner ups to the must-have features. * The could-have features, which were deemed the lowest priority.

In this concept map, we highlighted how all features would interact, must-haves are colored blue, should-haves in yellow, and could-haves in pink

Here’s an example of how the must-have features would look like prototyped

At the end, all of our findings were presented to Curatace’s team, hopefully they take them into account when creating their MVP.

Stakeholder Collaboration & Outcomes

Throughout the 14-week project, we held four working sessions with Curatace's founding team:

• Week 3 (Post-Competitor Analysis): Validated analytics as a differentiation opportunity; stakeholders confirmed university clients requested this feature
• Week 7 (Post-Empathy Map): Aligned on Seeker focus over Giver (alumni) focus for MVP scope
• Week 11 (Mid-Ideation): Reviewed journey maps; founders requested we emphasize pre-application prep over post-application tracking
• Week 14 (Final Presentation): Presented feature recommendations

Curatace recognized 6 of our 8 must-have/should-have recommendations, prioritizing Mentor Matching and Mock Interviews.

Tools Used

• Mural.co for building most of the deliverables
• Google Slides for the Customer Journey Maps
• Good old paper and pencil for some feature sketches
• Zoom to conduct remote interviews

Learnings

This project was a great way to do exercise and practice a lot of UX tools and best practices, with some sparks of Design Thinking and prototyping during the later stages. Overall it was a great way for me to familiarize myself with some of these techniques, and I will definitely be using those in the future, in fact I have used some in subsequent projects.