Anchor

Designed as a centralized platform, Anchor streamlines the jobs and internship search process, enabling students to focus on their goals without the stress of managing disjointed tools. Guided by a user-centered design process, we integrated critical resources into a single, intuitive platform tailored to the needs of UMSI students.

challenge

Jobs and internships are a cornerstone of the student experience, providing opportunities to gain real-world skills and build professional networks. However, for many students at UMSI, navigating the job and internship process is an overwhelming challenge. Resources such as job boards, career events, and mentorship programs are scattered across multiple platforms, creating a fragmented and inefficient system. This disorganization often leaves students juggling competing priorities, missing deadlines, and feeling unsupported in their career journeys.

Problem Statement

How might we leverage and reorganize UMSI’s resources and network to increase the success rate of finding internships and post-graduate opportunities while decreasing the cognitive load for overwhelmed students?

User Research & Key Insights

To understand the challenges students face, we conducted eight in-depth user interviews with UMSI students representing diverse academic tracks and personal backgrounds. These interviews provided a rich foundation of qualitative data that shaped the design of Anchor.

💡 Our Approach

Our interview strategy aimed to explore both practical behaviors and emotional experiences. We sought answers to key questions:

• How do students currently search for internships, mentorships, and career resources?

• What are their biggest challenges or frustrations?

• What do they feel is missing from existing UMSI platforms like Handshake and CareerLink?

• How do they envision an ideal tool to support their goals?

We intentionally selected participants to reflect a diverse user base, including international students, first-years, and students transitioning into new fields. This diversity helped us uncover a range of pain points and opportunities.

💡 Key Themes

From the interviews, four dominant themes emerged, each shaping the design priorities for Anchor:

User Personas

To ensure that our solution reflected real user needs, we synthesized our insights into three personas, each representing distinct user groups. These personas guided our design decisions, keeping user needs at the center of every feature.

Meet our students Cher and Dave:

Meet our Alumna Jane:

information architecture

The sitemap was created to act as a map of how we would lay out our website and how our users would navigate through it. The sitemap also allowed us to prioritize our information architecture and determine which pages would be the most important for our user base.

User Flow Diagrams

The Feed page is a hub for students to connect with other students and alumni, keep track of any referral posts alumni may make, and post any achievements they have acquired.

User flow of the events page which houses all of The School of Information’s events across the different offices including the Engaged Learning Office, Career Development Office, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office. There is also a built-in calendar functionality to keep track of all upcoming events.

The job page is where students can find jobs or internships related to their career field. Jobs are specific to The School Of Information so you will see positions such as Product Designer, Data Analyst, Design Engineer, etc. On our referral page, the design highlights key things the hiring manager is looking for in a candidate which could include a specific major, experience on certain projects, and particular courses taken.

The University of Michigan is known to have a strong alumni base, with alumni constantly volunteering their time to help and support students through their college career. The flow shows the process of sending a mentorship request. Students can filter through alumni that best align with their future goals, comb through student feedback on how helpful an alum is, and schedule appointments to meet with alumni.

💡 Simplicity and Flow: By prioritizing Nielsen Norman’s principles of visibility and consistency, we created a straightforward navigation flow with clearly defined pathways for user actions.

Usability Testing

Results and Key Feedback

Metrics tracked during testing included error rates, success rates, and time on task. Key insights and feedback included:

• Feed Tab Introduction: Initially, the resources tab lacked a social angle and was difficult for students to navigate. Replacing it with a feed format — highlighting primary, secondary, and tertiary connections — aligned better with modern data consumption habits of students and enhanced retention metrics like daily active users. We borrowed elements of social feed from common social media apps, by implementing the Jakob’s Law. This change aimed to improve user retention and daily active users.

• Search and Filters for Personalization: Users disliked scrolling through long job lists. We implemented a search bar and advanced filters, leveraging principles like Hick’s Law (reducing cognitive load) and Selective Attention to personalize job and event results. This change aimed to improve click-through rates.

Participant Quotes

• “Last time I used UMSI career resources was when they first introduced them to us during orientation.”

• “I find the UMSI resources difficult to navigate.”

• “I try and find alumni with similar career trajectories so I can follow their footsteps.”

These insights confirmed the need for a social-first and intuitive design approach.

Design Iterations

Based on the feedback, we introduced significant design improvements:

• Feed Tab: Replacing the static resources page with a dynamic feed featuring connections and personalized content.

• Search and Filters: Simplified job searches with easy-to-use filters and a prominent search bar, focusing on personalization.

• High-Fidelity Prototypes: Refined visual designs with a consistent style guide, improving usability and aesthetics.

• Referral Cards: Redesigned flows to highlight critical features like referral cards to ensure visibility and ease of use.

Before-and-after visuals of these changes highlighted their impact on usability and alignment with user needs.

Final Design

The usability testing and iterations resulted in a more intuitive and user-friendly platform. The final high-fidelity prototype addressed user pain points effectively and was ready for deployment, promising to enhance retention, engagement, and overall satisfaction.

The final design of Anchor embodies a seamless fusion of design thinking principles and Nielsen Norman’s usability heuristics to create an empowering, accessible, and intuitive platform for MSI students. By reimagining CareerLink, Anchor transforms the student experience into one that fosters connection, clarity, and career readiness.

Style Guide and Visual Design

The visual and interaction design of Anchor reflects a strong commitment to accessibility and usability. User interviews repeatedly flagged resource discovery and navigation as key pain points, with participants describing CareerLink as opaque and difficult to use. Anchor addresses these frustrations by integrating clear navigation paths, reducing clicks, and offering search and filtering options tailored to user preferences. The color palette was carefully selected for its color-blindness-friendly properties, ensuring readability and accessibility for all users. Typography and layout were chosen to minimize cognitive load, with intuitive layouts and consistent information hierarchies guiding users effortlessly through the platform.

The visual design of Anchor further amplifies its usability and accessibility. The color palette, chosen for its color-blindness-friendly qualities, balances complementary hues that ensure high contrast and readability. Typography and layout choices minimize cognitive load by creating a clear hierarchy of information and maintaining consistency across the platform. These decisions reflect a commitment to inclusivity and align with design thinking principles that prioritize empathy and usability.

Click here to view the fully detailed style guide document.

Key Features

1. Mentorship Dashboard

Anchor’s Mentorship Dashboard is a cornerstone feature designed to address inefficiencies in alumni engagement. Through a formal mentorship program, students can establish ongoing relationships with alumni beyond one-off coffee chats. This functionality leverages insights from user interviews, where students highlighted the need for deeper mentorship connections and transparency in alumni career paths. Alumni profiles on Anchor include customizable sections where they can specify their expectations for mentees, such as relevant coursework, projects, or skills. This transparency allows students to align their goals and curriculum with industry demands, fostering tailored and effective career development.

2. Group Mentoring Sessions

Interactive tools like group mentoring sessions and real-time chat features foster a sense of community among students, alumni, and mentors. These tools were designed in response to feedback highlighting the isolation many students feel in their career search. For instance, participants noted that networking flexibility and approachable event formats were critical. Anchor accommodates this by offering asynchronous options like message boards and live chats for real-time engagement, ensuring inclusivity for varying schedules and communication preferences.

3. Application Tracker

The Application Tracker streamlines the internship and job application process by providing a cohesive space to track deadlines, application statuses, and employer feedback. User research revealed the fragmented nature of existing systems like CareerLink and Handshake, which often required students to navigate multiple platforms and log in multiple times. Anchor consolidates these processes into a single, intuitive interface, reducing redundancy and confusion. To further address participant concerns about tech industry cycles and deadlines, the tracker includes timeline structures and reminders tailored to internship cycles, offering students clarity and reducing stress.

Interactive Prototype Demo

Navigate through user flows and interfaces, including the Feed, Mentorship, Jobs, Events, and Account tabs, to experience the platform’s seamless design and functionality.

Project Impact

Comments like “Anchor feels like the tool I’ve always needed” underscore the platform’s success in aligning with user needs. By integrating user feedback into iterative design, Anchor embodies design thinking’s emphasis on empathy, prototyping, and testing to create meaningful solutions.

The project offered significant learning opportunities for the team. We recognized the importance of reducing fragmentation in systems and creating intuitive, student-focused experiences. Future improvements could include expanded mentorship features like local job shadowing opportunities and advanced filters for connecting with alumni in niche industries. Additionally, a mobile-first design could enhance accessibility for students on-the-go.

🏆 Alignment with Goals: The platform seamlessly integrates mentorship, application tracking, and interactive elements, delivering on our mission to simplify career navigation while fostering meaningful alumni connections.

⭐️ Usability Metrics: Anchor not only meets but exceeds user expectations for intuitive and functional design.

👁️ Accessibility and Inclusion: Staying true to design thinking’s principle of empathy, we ensured that Anchor prioritizes inclusivity. High-contrast color choices, thoughtful typography, and scalable features make this platform accessible to a diverse user base.

Conclusion

Anchor reimagines the career navigation process, transforming it into a supportive, accessible, and empowering experience for MSI students. By addressing key pain points with innovative, thoughtful design, Anchor sets a new standard for how career platforms can serve students effectively. It not only provides a solution but also inspires confidence and connection in its users, ensuring their long-term career success.

The development process underscored the importance of iterative design and user feedback. By integrating these insights, Anchor evolved into a platform that exemplifies the best practices of design thinking. Future opportunities for the platform include expanding features such as resume reviews and advanced mentorship matching algorithms, as well as developing a mobile-first approach to enhance accessibility on-the-go. Anchor represents not just a tool but a step forward in creating meaningful, user-centered solutions that empower students to take control of their career journeys with confidence and ease.

Credit (to my amazing team): Feyi Apampa, Sabrina May, and Niket Kamat Satoskar