In the confusing time students have a hard time deciding their career. Career councillors long forms and endless questions add to the exhaustion. A fun virtual game like application is an answer to the solution.
Assignment
American Students Assistance was looking into fun ways to engage the students in the activity at the same time help them make a career decision. Initial thoughts were to have game which would engage the users.
Team:
We were a team of three who were responsible for completing this project. A backend developer, a designer and a content writer. My role was to take the lead in designing the application.
Concept development
I did my research on a target audience aged between 12 to 16 years. I created user personas of 5 different personalities with different likes and dislikes. On the basis of my research I presented ideas to the team for the app. There were three ideas under discussion, a race car track, a rocket launch, a war game.
After a good discussion we all agreed upon the career launch pad. The user flow was designed with some mockups by me. These were presented to the product managers and other designers of the team for their feedback.
The initial feedback was to have a light weight quick game introduction through the screens. The app should not be text heavy and the text has to be big in size. The imagery cannot be cartoon like. The answers could be a yes or a no.
The office career councillors were requested to give in information about what questions are asked and how the calculations are made. A backend developer was added in the Team to add the algorithm and throw the result.
The mockups: Meanwhile I worked on different concepts for the application. The first one was the blue print style. My concept was we start with a blue print and at the end of finishing the game the rocket will be complete.
The team felt this was a little difficult concept to develop and finish. They would prefer a simpler approach to things.
The next concept was the launch pad and the space shuttle.
The launch pad did not look like an appealing design as much as the rocket in the space did. There was depth, possibility of incorporating astronauts and making the game more fun and interactive.
More mockups and pages were designed by me in line with the space shuttle.
After a set of questions a recommendation page was displayed.
After the mockups were complete the next part of my assignment was to apply these designs in the application. The front end work for setting up the application had been done by the backend developer. My job was to apply the styling, design and animation effect.
After the project was complete my colleague and I had created a video of the web-application to showcase to the management. Here is the link: http://shuchidesigns.com/video/vgcdemov3.mp4
This is the final product based on our prototype – https://asafuturescape.org/