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: Vince L, Kelly R, Sylvia T, Iris S, Hazie C, Santiago C, Brianna L
- My Role: Design system creation, Dashboard design
- My takeaways: How to create an educational user flow from scratch, how to manage stakeholders’ expectations and trade-offs, and how to make design consistent across the team.
A quick view of Cambiar Treks simulation experience
Cambiar is looking for a platform that connects student interests to real-world opportunities
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 leaves little time for individualized career planning.
We got to know students’ needs from 100 high school students feedback
- A visually appealing platform
-
Personalized experience
- Balance of fun, function, and realism
The insights from competitor analysis further pushed us to create a tailored career counseling platform
So we intended addresses this gap by offering a tailored, continuous mentorship experience through an AI-powered career counselor. That’s how Nova came alive.
-
Welcome screen provides context about the current state of the web app
-
Role types carousel allows users to explore a set of predefined role types and enter career simulations affiliated with each role type
-
Immersive simulation allows users to see first-hand what careers pertaining to their chosen role type are like in a gamified format. Aimed at helping them gain an understanding of whether a certain career is a good fit for them
-
Dashboard displays role types and simulations the user has explored and their potential next steps
- Nova (AI counselor) interactes with users to assist them in gaining career insights from their simulations
We created a design system and drafted the initial design
Style guides: blue and yellow color for energetic, youthful, and exciting.
AI career counselor Nova: fun, approachable advice and encouragement.
Low-fi & Mid-fi
10 usability testings & heuristic evaluations before finalizing the designWe found 3 major issues in our design and changed them:
1. Cluttered & text-heavy dashboard
2. Green and red could bias users toward green unintentionally.
3. Dashboard lacked immersive, game-like experience
Final Designs
Further Steps
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.”
- Client Testimonial
Reflection
- 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)
- Built a design system that helps the efficiency and consistency
- Considered accessibility in design
- Created a comprehensive user flow from scratch
- Good collaboration
-
Iterate more quickly and collect more student feedback
- Think about the mobile version
- Provide examples on other simulation types