Timeline
May 2025 –August 2025
Client
Cambiar Education
(via Develop for Good)
Team
7 Designers
1 Product Manager
1 Product Lead
My role
Pages I led: Role Carousel, Role Page Information, Simulation Launch Day
Pages I collaborated: Dashboard, Results Flow
Client and platform
QuestTreks, a Cambiar Education initiative, helps high school students explore careers through game-like simulations followed by AI-guided reflections. In each simulation, students step into realistic career scenarios, make decisions, solve challenges, and see the outcomes unfold. The AI counselor Nova then connects their in-game choices to real-world skills, interests, and career paths.
Problem
The existing Quest Treks platform was not engaging for students and lacked features that guided them through the career exploration process.
Key pain points:
THE CHALLENGE
SOLUTION
Final impact
All students expressed positive emotions toward the AI guide, with strong interest in continuing to interact with it.
The majority of students found the new simulations easier to read and more motivating to complete.
Understanding the user
Designing for 9th–10th graders with limited access to career counseling
Once fully deployed, the platform will reach 105,000 learners — with 33,000 completing a cycle of career exploration and receiving personalized counseling.
User Research
Users wanted a visually appealing platform, with personalized experience and a balance of fun, function, and realism
The Cambiar Education team gathered feedback from 100 high school students (May 2025) about their expectations for QuestTreks. These students shared what would make the experience engaging, motivating, and easy to use. Based on the data from these feedbacks, I found 3 major themes:
THEME 1
Playful
Students wanted playful characters and illustrations over real photography, subtle pop culture nods, and a distinct video game feel
THEME 2
Personalization
Students wanted options to personalize Nova and their own profile
THEME 3
Educational but fun
Students wanted the platform to be educational without feeling like schoolwork or a traditional learning management system
Understanding the problem
The career guidance gap
Across the U.S., the national average is one counselor for every 376 students
As a result, 75% of high school graduates report feeling unprepared for post-secondary decisions.
The long-term impact is that over half of college graduates work in jobs unrelated to their degree.
designs
Early designs
During the early stages, I was responsible for:
Role carousel
Role page information
Simulation launch day
Designing the Role Carousel
What layout can best guides users to choose a role?
The goal of the Role Carousel was to present clear, relevant information about each role, helping students choose one that matched their interests and guiding them toward the right simulation.
Key insight: Students identified skill tags as the most important piece of information when deciding which role to explore.
The final 3 contestants out of 10 iterations:
Designing the Role Page Information
How to make students interested in starting a simulation?
The role page served as a space for deeper exploration, enabling users to:
Learn more about the role
Go to simulations
Learn about possible career paths
I explored two versions of the Role page: one using a menu-based navigation and another structured as a landing page. Both presented the same content, but in different layouts. After reviewing the options, the client chose to move forward with the landing page design.
Designing the Simulation Launch Day
How can I create a visually engaging simulation but still displaying all important information?
Challenge: The initial design was text-heavy, which risked losing user attention before they even began the simulation.
User testing
Expanding My Role: Refining Dashboard and Results Page
After my initial screens were approved by the client and validated through three rounds of user testing with 10 students, I expanded my contributions by collaborating on the dashboard and results pages. The team also received weekly feedback from the client and our team mentor to guide refinements.
Dashboard
Challenge: Mentor feedback indicated the dashboard was cluttered and overly text-heavy, with a “boxy” feel and lack of visuals. This made it harder for the insights section (the client’s intended focal point) to stand out.
My contribution: While I wasn’t the original designer, I collaborated on post-testing revisions to improve usability and visual hierarchy.
Results Flow
Challenge: Users were unclear about their progress and results. The original design combined performance scores and AI-generated insights on a single page on the end of the simulation, which felt overwhelming.
My contribution: After discussions with the client, I proposed restructuring the flow and collaborated with the initial designer to redesign the results page.
I redesigned the results flow to show users their Launch Day performance first, giving them concrete data to reflect on. After this reflection step, students receive additional results that guide them to interact with Nova and explore meaningful next steps, allowing them to process their own learning before receiving AI-generated insights.
more designs
Nova
To create a more personalized experience, I also helped in the ideation of Nova, the AI-powered career counselor. Nova gets a friendly and engaging style, changing their outfit depending on the role. Nova guides students through their journey, offering tailored advice, encouragement, and support.
the Final screens
Final designs
Note: Full prototype is under NDA.
CONCLUSION
Next Steps
Due to the limited project cycle, we had to prioritize delivering the final designs to Cambiar Education, which meant some areas were deferred for future development. Given more time, I would focus on:
Enhancing Accessibility: Integrate voiceovers, videos, and alternative input methods to reduce reliance on reading and typing, especially in the reflection portions of the simulations and when interacting with the AI career counselor, Nova.
Expanding Device Support: Design Chromebook versions to accommodate students who access the platform at school, minimizing scrolling and maintaining usability on smaller screens.
What I Would Do Differently
Prioritize Accessibility Earlier: In the early design stages, some elements—like buttons and the role carousel—had limitations in color contrast, keyboard navigation, and animations that could challenge users with sensory sensitivities. While I helped the team identify these issues, tight timelines and the absence of an accessibility expert made it difficult to explore solutions fully. In future projects, I would integrate accessibility from the start to ensure all users can navigate and enjoy the experience.
Conduct more independent user research: our user research primarily relied on materials and insights provided by the client. While this informed many decisions, having additional, direct research early on could have clarified uncertainties and informed more confident design choices. For instance, when designing the simulation screens, we weren’t sure which information would best engage students, so we had to make assumptions rather than relying on user insights.
Document design decisions since day 1: working on a large team with multiple screens and components made it challenging to maintain consistency throughout the project. We had to review all screens multiple times to ensure spacing, colors, and typography matched our design system, and then again at the end to create handoff documentation for developers. This process could have been more efficient if we had maintained a detailed, centralized record of design specifications from the start.