Career Guide
INCOR / 2025
UX/ UI Designer
About project
A mobile-first app that helps students explore careers through real, unfiltered experiences instead of guesswork. It combines a TikTok-style feed of honest “day-in-the-life” content, quick interactive simulations to try real tasks, and low-pressure chats with professionals—allowing users to discover, test, and validate career paths before making decisions.
What I did
Market Research
Competitive analysis
User survey
Flow diagrams
Wireframes
Prototype
High-fidelity UI
Accessibility evaluation
Market Research
The Promblem
The modern career journey is defined by a "discovery deficit." 75% of high school graduates feel unprepared to make career choices, which leads to 50% to 75% of college students switching their majors at least once. This lack of early direction has long-term consequences: 50% of all workers—and 70% of Millennials—now regret their career path.
The Solution
The solution is to shift career decisions from guesswork to guided discovery. By giving students early access to personalized career exploration—through real-world insights, skill assessments, and clear roadmaps—they can make informed choices before committing years and money.
Competitive Analysis
I analysed 3 most popular platforms in the field - looking both at the user experience and negative app store comments to find patterns
Forage
Xello
Mindler
The good
Leading career platforms like Forage, Xello, and Mindler already provide strong foundations for career discovery by offering structured guidance, personalized career recommendations, and exposure to different career paths through assessments or simulations. They help students understand their interests, align them with potential careers, and in some cases gain practical insight into real-world tasks, making them valuable tools for initial exploration and informed decision-making.
The bad
Despite their strengths, platforms like Forage, Xello, and Mindler fall short in delivering an engaging, reality-first experience. Forage’s simulations are often too long and feel like formal training rather than quick exploration, Xello relies heavily on structured assessments that feel institutional and lack real-world context, and Mindler focuses on psychometric testing that keeps career discovery theoretical instead of experiential. None of these platforms combine real, unfiltered day-to-day job insight, low-friction interaction, and human connection, leaving students still unsure what careers actually feel like in practice.
Problems from the comments
User Survey
I started with a broad hypothesis that a career exploration app could help students make more confident decisions, but at the beginning it was unclear what features would actually be most useful or how students truly prefer to explore careers in practice. To better understand their real needs and pain points, I conducted interviews with high school and early university students to explore how they currently discover career paths, what influences their decisions, and where they feel most confused or unsupported in the process.
What is the biggest thing you wish you knew about your current career path (or major) before you actually started it?
8
participants
Interactive Elements
80%
Building Process
75%
Architectural Comparisons
60%
Educational Value
34%
Notable Comments
“I thought I wanted business, but I have no idea what people actually do in it day to day.”
Maya
High School Student
“The workload and stress are way higher than I expected, it doesn’t feel like what I saw online.”
Sofia
“The workload and stress are way higher than I expected, it doesn’t feel like what I saw online.”
“I wish someone showed me real examples before I chose this, not just the fun parts.”
Daniel
Design Student
Initial research shows
Students struggle to make confident career decisions because traditional tools feel boring, abstract, and disconnected from real work. To address this, CareerGuide transforms career exploration into a TikTok-style, dopamine-driven experience that keeps users engaged while learning through action. The MVP also includes a “5-Minute Test Drive” that lets users quickly experience real job tasks through interactive simulations, and a “Coffee Chat” feature that enables low-pressure conversations with professionals for fast clarity and guidance. Together, these features turn career discovery from passive reading into an engaging, experience-first loop that helps students explore careers in a more realistic and motivating way.
Flow Diagram
To out line all the necessary functionality I created a simple flow diagram of the main tasks users can do. One of the flows is shown below.
Main Client Flow
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Once the flow is established , I stared creating the low-fidelity wireframes of the main flow.
High-fidelity UI Design
Once the initial flow was complete. I started by creating a couple of the main screens of the app. I started by defining the fonts and colors
Color palette
Accent, primary, secondary, background
Main CTA button color
Font
Inter
High-fidelity walkthrough of the Career Guide app showing onboarding quiz, TikTok-style Real-Day career feed, 5-Minute Test Drive simulation, and Coffee Chat messaging.
Figma File
A snapshot of my Figma file.
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