Cambiar Education
Educational Nonprofit
🗓️ Timeline
4 Months
✒️ Role
Lead UI Designer
🧠 Skills
Design System
Prototyping
User Reserach
🤝 Team
1 Product Manager
1 Design Manager
1 Lead UI Designer
6 UI Designers
📜 About
Quest Treks, a Cambiar Education initiative, empowers high school students with hands-on career exploration, AI-powered reflection, and effective action planning. With a value for equity in educational systems, the mission is to equip every student with the tools, confidence, and guidance to navigate meaningful and informed career paths.
🪜 Objective
Quest Treks needed a scalable way to provide personalized career guidance that goes beyond static information, helping students connect their interests to real-world opportunities and take concrete actions toward their goals despite limited counselor availability.
To address the needs of stakeholders, we created a flexible web platform that pairs immersive career simulations with AI-powered reflection tools. This approach helps students explore careers, reflect on their fit, and receive tailored action plans.
🧑🤝🧑 Users
QuestTrek’s primary users are high school students, mainly those in 9th and 10th graders. where their main needs are:
Understand personal interests and how they align with careers
Explore realistic job simulations
Receive personalized, AI-powered reflection and guidance
Take meaningful steps toward career goals
The platform’s secondary users include:
School counselors tracking student progress and wanting students to make informed decisions on their future
(Indirectly) parents or guardians engaging with students on their career plans
🔬 User Research
Users wanted a visually appealing platform, with personalized experience and a balance of fun, function, and realism.
Cambiar received feedback from 100 students in May 2025 about what they wanted the Treks platform to look and feel like. Here are the main points:
Visual Appeal and Engaging Aesthetics
Students consistently desired a simple, consistent color scheme with strategic "pops of color" (favoring blue and yellow), a preference for cute characters and drawings over real people (like Nova), references to pop culture, and a distinct "video game aesthetic" including stat charts and character customization.
Interactivity and Personalization
Students highly valued interactive activities and simulations where they could make decisions and observe impacts, the ability to personalize Nova (e.g., changing outfits or seeing Nova evolve), and progress tracking on a dashboard.
Balance of Fun, Function, and Realism
The platform needed to feel educational without resembling traditional "school", focusing on gamified learning and helping them understand "what a real job actually looks like" through experiential learning. They also desired concrete next steps and resources after simulations, such as a checklist, summary of learning, or links to related careers/opportunities.
👋 Meet Nova
To create a more personalized experience, we designed Nova, the platform’s AI-powered career counselor. With a fun style, Nova guides users through their career journey, offering tailored advice, encouragement, and a sense of companionship every step of the way.
🧱 Design System
Since this was a new project, our team was also tasked with created a new design system to be used later down the line when the team would end up adding more content such as simulation to the platform.
⬆️ Design Improvements
Cluttered and text-heavy dashboard layout
Based on mentor feedback, there was an overwhelming amount of text, a lack of visuals, and a “boxy” layout on the dashboard. This made the page feel cluttered and reduced the prominence of insights, which the client intended to be the most important element.
Simulation lacked immersive, game-like experience
Participants felt the interface didn’t capture the excitement or realism they expected. Several wanted it to resemble a video game or a real car dashboard, with dynamic visuals, interactive components, and motion to make the experience feel more engaging and authentic.
📷 More Screenshots
