Digital Transformation, NPD, Prototyping, Design Thinking, Product Design, Social Impact, Qualitative and Quantitative Research, Human-Centered, Visual Trends, UX/UI Design, Branding.

IECD, a French organization, has had a program in Lebanon since 2012 called GET that aims at bridging the students’ transition gap from academic education to technical education and later to the employment sector.

Following COVID-19 to reshape the nature of education, IECD approached us to digitally transform this program and its tools, including presenting it in an accessible format for field staff and students.

To create a framework for this project, we met several times with the team, and we agreed that:

The project would concentrate on creating new digital experiences that empower students through a contemporary user-centered approach.

The main actors of the system are students and officers.

This initiative was named: “Mehnati”, which means “My Career”.

Literature research carried helped to understand the context of Lebanon.

I conducted a series of interviews and two surveys with officers and students.

Students’ decision-making processes are influenced by their inaccessibility to orientational resources and their parents.

There’s a generation gap between students and officers.

Only 2 of 18 officers believe mental health is required.

The Lebanese crisis influenced the students to lose confidence in the educational system.

Students asked for support in the mental health space, subsequently to the humanitarian difficulty of Beirut’s port explosion.

Officers said the work they do today is monotonous; The time gets allocated on technical support rather than skill development plans.

Three visual directions are created as concepts and not refined. The aim here is just to sense how the visual outcome can satisfy the earlier research and discussions.

The developer was involved from the start of the Ux design process to build the final user journey map and navigation flow.

For the brand logo, the letter M in Arabic was used to draw four main icons related to the four stages of the career development process, each one color-coded. These four icons occupy half the volume of the entire logo, to symbolize that the typography will come only as an explanatory element during the navigation of the project. The unique typeface was also hand-drawn so that the letters from both languages feel complementary.

The visual direction was chosen following a voting exercise; All onboard actors (managing team, creative team, selected students, selected officers) voted for only one direction.

The purpose is to develop an equal experience wherever the website is used, mainly more than 78% of the students said they are using mobile phones to follow up with their learnings.