The Vision
On average, there is 1 guidance counselor for every 376 students nationwide.
With such high student-to-counselor ratios, it’s nearly impossible for every student to receive individualized career guidance.
To help address this gap, my manager hired me and another designer to create a gamified app that enables high schoolers to explore and discover careers on their own.
Designed as a tool for schools, it centralizes career information and empowers students to proactively learn about opportunities beyond what counselors alone can provide
(video of) Hi-Fi Prototype
Schools need an engaging, centralized solution that empowers students to independently discover and learn about career opportunities beyond what counselors can providesource to help guide them through their options
Define
Empathizing with User Research
My design partner and I conducted interviews with five high school students and five educators to gain insight into the challenges both groups face with career exploration.
Student Interviews
I interviewed four students that were in high school, and one student that is a first year at UVA.
Participants were at different points in exposure to careers. some had a path informed by extracurricular activities, while others were still unsure how their interests and skills translated into careers.
Interview Goals:
How do students currently explore potential careers?
What challenges do they face when trying to learn about different career paths?
Educator Interview
I interviewed three UVA Career Guidance Counselor, one high-school teacher, and one professor.
Interview Goals:
Understand how educators currently support student career exploration
Identify challenges in guiding students through career discovery
Learn about existing career exploration tools and their limitations
Problem Statement
Based on the user research, I refined the problem statement to include the pain points and insights from the user interviews.
Students currently lack an engaging, values-based way to explore real-world careers; without a resource that meets them where they are many are unsure what career paths fit them.
Key Insights Gained
I designed with two personas in mind...
Neal the High School Student
A sophomore in high school, he’s not sure what he wants to do for his career. He’s involved in clubs, like FBLA and an engineering club.
Gina the Guidance Counselor
A guidance counselor that doesn’t have the bandwidth to provide individual advice to her 250 students. Passionate about helping students with career exploration and wants to encourage early career exploration for students
...and focused on this POV/ HMW statement to guide which features should be included in the app.
Students need authentic exposure to daily career realities because current resources often present idealized or oversimplified versions of jobs, leading to misconceptions about various professions.
How might we provide realistic, nuanced simulations of different careers that showcase both challenges and rewards while maintaining student engagement?
Develop
The Site Map
Initially, in our site map we had the Career Funnel accessible only from the home screen once users completed the onboarding quiz. But we shifted direction: instead of gating entry, we let users dive straight into the funnel (similar to TikTok’s model) so they can immediately engage with relevant content. This makes the experience more seamless, reduces friction, and lets users discover value from day one. It provides an instant gratification and feedback loop and facilitates early and continuous engagement, which leads to higher retention.
The Career Funnel
The career funnel is the core idea that my manager started with. The idea is that the user would be able to get a quick snapshot of a career, and could choose whether they would want to explore more.
This was heavily supported by our user research, with “Real World Exploration” being the biggest cluster category in the affinity diagram.
Level 1
Quick snapshot of career
Level 2
Deeper overview of career
Level 3
Living a “Day in the Life”
Exploration in L1 Screen
Version 1
Version 2
Usability feedback led us to adopt Version 2, which delivered a more streamlined snapshot and improved comprehension compared to Version 1.
We decided to implement left–right swiping for navigation. As a next step, I plan to conduct a usability study to evaluate whether swipe direction (left & right vs. up & down) influences usability.
Values Driven Career Exploration
Three out of five educators I interviewed said they guide students toward careers aligned with their personal values. To reflect this insight, I incorporated the RIASEC framework throughout the app.
A card that the user sees after completing the onboarding quiz
What is RIASEC?
Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional. A personality test developed by John L. Holland that pairs values with careers.
User can filter the careers that they want to explore based on value.
User can access their onboarding RIASEC quiz results on their profile page.
Maintaining Engagement
Maintaining user engagement was a key priority for this app. Drawing inspiration from learning platforms like IXL and Khan Academy, which use badges to encourage exploration, I designed a badge system that gives students a sense of accomplishment as they progress.
Design System
I independently built the design system. I ensured that the Primary/Text colors complied with WCAG Standard.
Hi-Fi prototype
Finalized User Flows
New user onboarding process.
User viewing their badges.
User going through career exploration funnel.
Conclusion
Reflection and Next Steps
Conducting a Usability on the Hi-Fi prototype
Although I carried out extensive preliminary user research, my next step would be to conduct a usability study on the high-fidelity prototype to evaluate whether the swiping direction affects engagement and to assess the intuitiveness of the navigation.
Future Features
Future features I plan to implement include enabling users to search across the entire app and providing opportunities to connect directly with real-world industry professionals.
Educator Feature
Designing a dashboard for educators so that they would be able to see the student’s progress.
@2025 Aryaa Deshpande
A Day in the Life
Creating an app for students to explore career paths through exploring a “Day in the Life”.
Team
2 designers, 1 project manager
Timeline
January 2025-April 2025
Tools Used
Figma