Website Redesign for Job Corps
What this demonstrates: brand and positioning strategy built under constraint, finding the audience when user research was off the table.
Role: Senior Web Designer (contract, U.S. Department of Labor)
Scope: Brand direction, information architecture, front-end animation prototyping
Outcome: Applications increased 160% the year following launch
The situation
Job Corps is the largest residential education and job-training program in the United States, serving roughly 60,000 young adults a year with GED and ESL programs, stipends, and vocational training. By the time of this project, applications had been declining for years. The website ran on an aging proprietary CMS, and the assignment was to redesign it while migrating its content to Drupal 8. I joined after an earlier round of redesign proposals had been rejected.
Research without permission
We weren't allowed to do user research in the initial design phase — no surveys, no usability testing, no diary studies, not even interviews with former students. We did get to talk a little with a guy who shared our office space, a DoL employee who had gone through the program himself, but information was thin on the ground. We were tasked with designing a meaningful experience without knowing whom we were even talking to.
Thankfully, we live in the smartphone age. It turned out a whole lot of current, former, and prospective students were putting up their opinions about Job Corps on YouTube. Their videos were raw and unfiltered — what daily life was actually like, what they cared about, what they thought they could get out of the program — with no marketing or jargon in the way. Honestly, the videos surprised me with their media savvy; some of these kids should have been running Job Corps' ghost-town social media accounts. That became our research base.
The Challenge
There were a number of challenges to this project. The first most fundamental one was how to present a government jobs training program to disaffected youth in a way that was engaging. Job Corps had seen a radical drop in applications in the years leading up to this redesign. Job Corps offers a lot for disadvantaged young adults looking to better their lives, but it can’t do them any good if they never hear about it, or it’s not presented in a way that’s exciting and highlights the boosts it gives them.
The difficulty of this challenge was increased by structural issues that were beyond our control as designers and developers. The main one being that we were not allowed to do any user research in our initial design phase. Surveys of the target demographic, A/B testing, usability testing, diary/camera studies, or even former/potential user interviews were not allowed. So we were tasked to design a meaningful experience without necessarily knowing to whom we were even talking.
The message
What came through the videos was a real desire to better their situations: skills, pay, independence. The message needed to appeal to that self-interest — the pragmatic, concrete advantages of job training — rather than lecture anyone about their future. And it needed to present the work itself as valuable and worthy of respect.
That second part matters because our culture holds up college as the default aspiration; a welding certification can out-earn many degrees, but nobody makes it look like a future. If the redesign was going to move applications, it had to present skilled labor as dignified and aspirational — work worth wanting, not work you settle for.
The visual design drew on traditions that already carried that message: WPA/FSA-era graphic design with its pride in labor, and photography of young, diverse craftspeople shown as owners of their work rather than beneficiaries of a service.
Inspirational quotes from leaders who laid the foundation for these programs.
The typography used in fitness motivational Instagram pages that are also very popular with our demographic.
The websites of blue-collar friendly companies like tool manufacturers and craft breweries.
And in the vein of craft breweries, I looked for depictions of young people engaged in their work in a “craftsman-like” fashion, particularly emphasizing a diverse and “alt” representation that would appeal to young people. Men and women, people of color, tattoos, bearded guys with dirt on their face etc. The emphasis here was on the ownership of the job as craft that the young person could take.
Job Corps isn’t just offering a training program. It’s offering a new identity. The opportunity to reinvent yourself, make something new.
This visual design is not superfluous aesthetic to the purpose of Job Corps. Rather it is the medium through which the message is transmitted.
This brings us to the second goal. Visual design can transmit the values and promise of Job Corps, but the information still needs to be organized in a rational and accessible way. This is where visual design meets systems/information design.
We had a lot of existing information that needed to be transferred to the new website from the old, but by breaking this information into 4 topics, which also mirrored the application process we could make things easier to digest and also reinforce the theme of the website’s messaging.
The proposal
My redesign proposal reorganized the site's sprawling legacy content into four themes that mirror the applicant's own journey, Find Your Purpose, Master a Trade, Live Your Life, Start Your Journey, so the structure itself walks a prospective student toward enrollment. Each theme carried the visual system: full-bleed duotone photography of real trades and bold, motivational typography.
You can also see here the full view of my original redesign proposal to the team.
Design in code
I prototyped the first version of the menu and its animations directly in code, which gave me full control of the motion design and gave the front-end engineers a working starting point instead of a static mockup to guess from.
What shipped
The production site adapted this direction across the full content migration. The year after launch, applications rose 160%.