Helping Formerly Incarcerated Individuals Achieve Their Dream Jobs

Context Overview

ACTS - Social Support App focuses on supporting individuals who have faced incarceration and are working to rebuild their lives. The app addresses the challenges of overcoming societal stigma and adapting to a world that often judges them. It offers targeted training, certifications, and personalized consulting to help these individuals turn their struggles into success stories and foster reintegration.

Key Objectives

• Reduce Social Stigma: Provide empowering support to help users overcome prejudice after incarceration.
• Training & Certification: Enhance users’ skills and credibility through relevant training programs.
• Personalized Consulting: Offer tailored guidance for career planning and overcoming personal challenges.
• Facilitate Reintegration: Ease the transition into society with resources and support for social reintegration.
• Improve Quality of Life: Equip users with tools for personal and professional stability.

Challenges Faced by Formerly Incarcerated Individuals Over 50: Health, Depression, and Family Responsibilities

According to the statistics, most incarcerated individuals in Singapore are men aged 30 to 60 with lower educational backgrounds. Those over 50, in particular, face challenges such as deteriorating health, higher risks of depression, and the responsibility of supporting their families while enduring societal stigma.

Given this, I designed a simple and intuitive app specifically tailored for users over 50, addressing their difficulties with technology and easing their post-incarceration reintegration.

Research showed key user needs: Family, Employment, Peers, Activities, Well-being.

Based on the project brief and research, I assumed that the app should provide:

• Support for five key areas: Family, Employment/Education, Pro-social Peers, Pro-social Activities, and Spiritual & Mental Well-being.
• A matching system connecting mentees with mentors through agencies/support groups.
• Both mentoring and non-mentoring activities.
• Advertisements from verified mentors and PIE mentees only.

Given that most formerly incarcerated individuals in Singapore are men aged 30-60 with lower educational backgrounds, I conducted user interviews with individuals in this demographic to validate these assumptions and refine the app's features.

Based on the user interview results, I want to gain a deeper technical understanding. To achieve this, I plan to create user personas, empathy maps, and experience maps. This will help me better understand the user's perspective in more detail. Additionally, I will conduct a competitor analysis to identify any relevant features that could be added to the app.

For the competitor analysis, I identified key strengths and weaknesses of competing platforms. Based on my findings, I decided to prioritize a matching system that aligns job opportunities and group mentoring with users' specific preferences.

This system will provide resources like job listings, training, and certifications relevant to their needs. My goal is to help users, especially former inmates of all ages, reintegrate into society with improved skills and a supportive environment, fostering a harmonious system.

Exploring the Application: Using Card Sorting, User Flow Techniques, and some sketches.

With sufficient information gathered, the next step is to sort and organize the data into a practical design. To achieve this, I will use card sorting and user flow techniques to create a structured and intuitive user experience.

Key Screens: Showcasing Core Features of the Mobile App

In this section, I’ll present several key screens that effectively represent the overall design and functionality of the mobile app. These screens highlight essential user flows and interactions, giving a comprehensive view of how the app addresses the needs of formerly incarcerated individuals, from accessing resources to engaging with mentors and more.

Now I will conduct usability testing on the application. I will set the condition that if my design score is below 70 using the SUS scale, I will redesign my application

SUS score

Overall average SUS score across all test flows: 82.5

This indicates that overall, users find the system quite easy to use, useful and satisfying.

Some areas for improvement based on user feedback:

• Increase size of form input fields
• Provide examples and tips for filling out forms
• Clearer instructions in profile and registration forms

Key features like search, filters and chat were rated very positively by users.

Key learning

Fostering Community and Support

• Community Building: Insights into how users interact with community features (e.g., forums, messaging) can help in fostering a supportive and active community within the app.
• Support Needs: Identifying common issues or support requests can guide enhancements in user support and educational resources.

Improving User Retention

• Retention Strategies: Analyzing user retention rates helps in identifying successful strategies and areas where users might drop off. This can guide the development of features or content that improve retention.
• Onboarding and Engagement: Assessing the effectiveness of your onboarding process and initial user engagement can help refine these elements to better support new users.

Competitor Analysis

• Competitive Edge: Evaluating how your app compares to competitors helps in identifying unique value propositions and areas for differentiation.
• Market Gaps: Observing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses can reveal gaps in the market that your app can address.