JUURNI
Bridging passions and career
by exploring diverse pathways.
Role:
Designer
Hackathon:
UXhub Design Sprint
Duration:
4 Weeks
JURNI is a digital platform designed to help students discover and share diverse career pathways by connecting their academic background, interests, and non-traditional experiences.
Why JUURNI?
Which led to the question:
⭐
How can I find the overlap in my studies and what I am passionate about?
Through initial surveys and interviews with students, we validated the problem space with key data.
of students mention that their passions moderately to not at all relate to their prospective career
of students believe that their passions are not seen as valuable or professional.
Three key pain points we identified:
Fear of judgment when sharing non-traditional interests.
Social anxiety in traditional networking environments.
Unaware of how to translate creative or niche interests into viable career possibilities.
authentic connection
academic priorities
desire for mentorship
social anxiety in networking environments
unaware of career possibilities
fear of judgment
time constraints
We focused on two representative users to guide our solution.
JENNY is a 1st year COGS student unsure about career options. She avoids academic or club events due to intimidation and limited time from her part-time job. She prefers solo creative hobbies and rarely joins events. She wants clear, low-pressure guidance on how her creative interests connect to future cogs careers.
HARKIRAT is a fourth-year Biology student feeling stressed about post-grad plans. He enjoys creative club roles, especially graphic design, but feels disconnected from his major. He keeps up with sports news and dreams of working in social media for a sports team but lacks guidance on translating his creative skills into a career path.
These user stories reflect situations based on real people that we know!
Identifying gaps in existing platforms.
We noticed that services that allow students to view various career paths tend to foster a competitive environment, focus on a limited outlook on possible career paths, or is built as an early-stage planner with a pre-determined career path.
The key platform I wanted to emphasize in our analysis was LinkedIn, since JUURNI had a lot of overlapping features.
A professional networking platform where users showcase experience, job history, and connect with recruiters and peers.
Networking, messaging, endorsements
Job postings & recruiter outreach
Profile + Resume-style experience
BUT...
Its professional, accomplishment-focused
environment makes students hesitant to share their personal passions.
A platform that connects students with mentors for informal 1:1 conversations about careers and experiences.
BobaTalks
Personalized advice
1:1 virtual chats (“boba chats”)
Mentor–mentee matching
Mentorship is centred on mainstream industries, which overlooks students whose interests fall beyond those common career paths.
BUT...
An assessment tool that recommends college majors based on a student’s academic strengths and interests (US only).
Job Descriptions + Skills Needed
MyMajors
College, Career, Majors Search
Major and career matching quiz
BUT...
Built for early-stage students choosing a college or major, but it confines users to one predetermined path.
Based on this competitive analysis, we realize that students need a low-pressure, identity-centric space where they can discover diverse career paths beyond their degree by showcasing their full journey (academics, passions, club roles).
Performed user task analysis to understand critical features.
We identified 3 potential user flows to focus on:
User’s onboarding process | Creating user’s profile | Conducting a career search
Once we understood the main features we wanted for JUURNI, we did crazy 8's to brainstorm design concepts for our UI. Below are four conceptual lo-fi sketches we came up with..
Prototyping JUURNI
Since I had prior experience prototyping a website using Figma, I was able to guide my teammates in creating the mid-fi and hi-fi. After a few iterations, we settled on a prototype that we believed balanced the option for users to do a quick browse or detailed research.
Landing page
Explore page
Journey details
Creating JUURNI's design system.
Utilizing my prior UI experience, I created a rough design system for JUURNI. I wanted to emphasize a muted, colourful pallet and characters that users could find relatable. I used Figma to create the four main avatars as well as the JUURNI logo.
Although its not perfect, this quick design library allowed the team to keep our design consistent and more efficient. I also had a lot of fun creating Fish, Kat, Puffy, and Urchy!
My team then applied this design system to the hi-fi:
Landing page
Explore page
Journey details
Meet, JUURNI!
Next Steps:
While we were proud of our final results, there are a few key things that we couldn't add because of time constraints. Additionally, looking back there are a few things that we should have considered when building the product:
More user flows — such as the option to compare different journeys, create/edit a profile, and customize a personal avatar
Creating incentive - since the platform is anonymous, we should of thought more about how to build incentive for users to share and consistently update their journeys.
Building engagement - right now, the platform does not require users to create a profile, so how might we re-consider that feature to promote engagement and returning users.
Overall, JUURNI has taught me so much about user research and design — and I am so fortunate to have an amazing team!
With JUURNI being our first UX design project, we ran into a lot of road bumps that became important learning experiences.
Since the prompt was so broad, it pushed us to slow down and really sit in the problem space instead of rushing into solutions. It forced us to spend more time reflecting, discussing, and questioning each other to uncover more meaningful problems. Additionally, even though we came up with a lot of ideas, it was important that we stayed user-centric by checking our assumptions against real user emotions and needs.
Overall, I had a lot of fun learning through work shops and mentors. Although this was a low-stakes design sprint, I learnt a lot about the importance of good quality research and design practices.
Shoutout to my awesome teammates! I had such a great time getting to know everyone throughout the design sprint, this project would not have been successful without all of your hard work <3
