Games to Goals: Engaging Career Exploration for High School Students
This project partnered with Cambiar Education to support Cambiar Treks in designing an end-to-end simulation that helps high school students build durable skills through career exploration and work-based learning.
Info
- Timeline: Apr 2025 - Aug 2025
- Team: Iris(me), Vince, Kelly, Sylvia, Hazie, Santiago, Brianna
- My Role: User research, Design system, Prototyping
A quick demo of Cambiar Treks’ simulation experience
Why are we designing such a platform
Cambiar Education, as a nonprofit education organization, wants to help k-12 students explore their future career interests.
We listened to 100 high school students’s thoughts on their future career and current confusion. Students want to make informed college and career decisions, but it is hard because they are flooded with career information without personalized guidance to make sense of it, and they have limited access to counselors, which leaves little time for individualized career planning.
What they were looking for is:
- A visually appealing platform
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Personalized experience
- Balance of fun, function, and realism
The insights from competitor analysis further pushed us to create a tailored career counseling platform, which often lack personalized guidance and ongoing career mentorship, leaving learners without consistent support in navigating their career journey.
So we intended to address this gap by offering a tailored, continuous mentorship experience through an AI-powered career counselor. That’s how Nova came alive.
We then figured out the functional requirement and structured the Information Architecture
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Welcome screen
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Role types
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Immersive simulation
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Dashboard
- Nova (AI counselor)
Developing the design idea
Before starting wireframing, we created a design system to ensure design consistency
- Style guides: blue and yellow color for energetic, youthful, and exciting.
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AI career counselor Nova: fun, approachable advice and encouragement.
Troubleshooting and Iteration: Fixing 3 major issues found in 10 usability tests and heuristic evaluations
1. Dashboard was cluttered & text-heavy
2. The color usage could unintentionally bias users toward green
3. Dashboard lacked the immersive, game-like experience
Final Designs
Impact
Once fully deployed in two years, 105,000 students will access the platform, and 33,000 learners will complete one cycle of career exploration and receive personalized career counseling.
“These designs incorporate student preferences for a visually appealing, consistent, and intuitive user interface, embracing a "video game aesthetic" with clear navigation and simple, yet engaging, color schemes. The designs also prioritize reducing visual clutter and excessive text to make the platform easy to navigate.”
- Cambiar’s Testimonial
Reflection
What I learned 💁🏻♀️
- Rapid iteration and early failure detection accelerated our path to optimal designs
- Implementing quick feedback loops and maintaining open dialogue with stakeholders about design decisions
- How to deal with the trade-off (we only prioritized the major tasks and fully developed them)
What we did well
- Built a design system that helps improve efficiency and consistency
- Considered accessibility in design
- Created a comprehensive user flow from scratch
- Good collaboration
What we could do better
- Iterate more quickly and collect more student feedback
- Think about the mobile version
- Provide examples of other simulation types