An app aimed at helping Santa Cruz students access career advice and CTE information.
Project type
Class Project
Duration
10 weeks
tools
Figma
FigJam
Excel
role
I served as the Team Lead. I led the design process, involving product ideation, the visual design, and prototyping and testing. I played a core part in analyzing the data and wireframing our prototype.
project summary
Enhancing Career Education through Human-Centered R&D
Ascentia was developed during my "Human-Centered Design Research" class as a 10-week project focused on enhancing CTE programs in Santa Cruz (primarily done by the non-profit YFIOB). Through thematic analysis, concept validation, and prototyping, we created a well-received design that impressed non-profit executives and entrepreneurs at our project fair, despite not having resources for full development.
The Problem
project summary
High school students often enter college with unclear career goals and limited understanding of what specific jobs or industries actually entail.
A Massive Career Guidance Gap
Students lack structured career mentorship, with limited access to industry professionals and underutilized alumni networks. Schools fail to leverage these alumni networks effectively, and counselors struggle to provide guidance due to high student loads and limited industry experience.
Solution
Not another mentoring app?!?
Yes we designed a mentoring app.
What about LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the premier professional networking site, but students feel it is intimidating, and teachers feel it is too soon, too early.
Our Hypothesis
We hypothesized that if our app assigns mentor-mentee relationships, and students are bound to the app through the curriculum, then students should find using our app to be productive and useful.
Objectives + Goals
Help Students
Match students with mentors based on measurable commonalities for better compatibility.
Help YFIOB
Help YFIOB better leverage its professional network to connect Santa Cruz students with mentors more efficiently.
Make Mentoring Easy
Design mentoring to resemble familiar Learning Management System platforms like Canvas or Google Classroom.
research
After analyzing and coding the transcripts for each interview, we organized our insights in the form of themes and subthemes in an affinity mapping-hybrid style.
We created 4 provisional personas from our interviews, each with a problem statement outlining their background, goals, challenges, and feelings.
what we found
After analyzing our data, we identified a critical need to strengthen student-adult connections that support all students' personal and professional development, regardless of learning ability.
Prototyping
Starting with our personas, we developed 75 "How Might We" prompts that generated 150 solution concepts, which we narrowed to 3 potential solutions through multiple discussion rounds.
SOLution concept 001
UPD8
Born from the part-time teacher’s problem statement
UPD8, inspired by the couples’ app Tuned, helps students share their well-being with teachers, enabling greater visibility and personalized or group motivational messages.
OPEN STORYBOARD
“
...[B]ut I want to get to know them as people. I memorize each one of their names, and what they like or what they don't like, anything that can help me relate to that kid, or let me relate to the kid. So the student can feel like, Hey, this guy is showing me some love...
“
SOLution concept 002
Ascentia
Born from the CTE Teacher’s problem statement
Ascentia is a mentorship app that will help students have conversations with industry professionals within their field of interest. The mentor pool would be made up of the alumni network of the school, as well as the professional network of Your Future Is Our Business (YFIOB).
OPEN STORYBOARD
“
“So I think there's a whole lot of different levels, from counselors, to teachers to outside organizations, like yourself, and I think, some more support in being aware of the programs, helping students be aware of them, and showing what's out there and different internships or job opportunities would be really useful for a lot of high schoolers.”
“
SOLution concept 003
How2Career
Born from the CTE Administrator’s problem statement
Many first-generation and minority students lack resources to navigate adulthood or higher education. This platform bridges parents and students, providing guidance, discussions, and deliverables to foster communication and support career growth.
OPEN STORYBOARD
“
So I know parents. I'm a dad. So I know parents are very busy nowadays. You know, they work long hours and it's hard sometimes for a parent to come home and be one-on-one involved with that that student is doing. I get that because I live my own life.
“
After developing three solution concepts, we interviewed three students and a teacher to identify career exploration challenges, understand teacher-student dynamics, and assess feasibility.
“
But yeah, if you had careers that you were tying [classes] to, and those mentors in the careers, they can let them know, like, what you're doing in high school, what parts of your high school curriculum are really important for those kinds of careers.
- Liz, a highschool teacher
“
“
I fully rely on an algorithm to tell me what I want. And I feel like it would be better for me to like, talk to a person and get real feelings and perspectives about what I'm getting into in [my] career.
- Anya, a highschool freshman
“
“
The fact that I'm the first one in my family to do [college], so I don't have anyone to really help me with the applications, or help me with setting up schedules...
- Valeria, a UCSC freshman
“
Recognizing that we needed new personas, we came up with the following, a student persona and a mentor persona.
a young girl sitting in the grass holding a book
amy lu
✨
Demographics
🚀
Age:
17
🚀
Education:
High School
🚀
Hometown:
San Diego, CA
🚀
Family:
Living w/ parents
🚀
Occupation:
Student
📌
Goals
👍
Learn more about potential career paths
👍
Talk to a professional who can relate to her
👍
Get prepared and organized about her future
😡
Frustrations
👎
Every adult tells her to become a doctor or engineer
👎
Easily overwhelmed by an uncertain future
👎
Lacks the motivation to find a mentor
🎉
Brief Story
Amy is entering her senior year in highschool, which means that she needs to start choosing colleges to apply to and professions to investigate. Her parents want her to go to college, but she doesn’t know whether college might be the best fit. She wants to talk to someone who has walked a similar path as her to figure out what she really wants and what will really work for her.
Little Havana, Miami
David Obsidian
✨
Demographics
🚀
Age:
37
🚀
Education:
MA in Art History
🚀
Hometown:
San Francisco, CA
🚀
Family:
Married
🚀
Occupation:
Art Curator
📌
Goals
👍
Pass on their wisdom to the next gen
👍
Expand social network
👍
Find mentees/interns
😡
Frustrations
👎
Most kids are too timid to reach out
👎
Hard to find mentees interested in my field
👎
Difficult to know how to help the next gen
🎉
Brief Story
David loves what he does, but finding what he loves was quite a journey, involving many oddball jobs and oddball mentors. Today, David is a popular art curator, known for his well-designed exhibits in some of the top museums in the US, but he owes it all to the mentors he’s had since high school. Because of this, David loves to pay it forward, but finds it very difficult to find the right kids to mentor, for a number of reasons.
DESIGNING
Since our interview participants found Ascentia to be the most usable for them, we went forth  and designed Lo-Fi wireframes, structuring them around eight user tasks, each with its own user flow and wireframe set.
Student fills out profile & onboarding form
Mentor fills out profile & onboarding form
Student selects what they need help with on the Home Page
Student selects a recommended mentor for their area of need
Student schedules a meeting with the mentor
Student fills out “self-discovery” quizzes to discover areas of interest
Student completes suggested tasks based on the quiz results
Student links with mentors who provide feedback on completed tasks
We purposefully crafted these flows not only to expose students more to CTE programs and other careers, but to actively push them to take measurable steps to their goals, for example by taking discovery quizzes and using those results to automatically suggest goals and next steps for the student to take to reach those goals.
task 6
Student fills out “self-discovery” quizzes to discover areas of interest
see user flow
task 7
Student completes suggested tasks based on results of the self-discovery quizzes
see user flow
final design
Since our interview participants found Ascentia to be the most usable for them, we went forth  and designed Lo-Fi wireframes, structuring them around eight user tasks, each with its own user flow and wireframe set.
profile questionnaire
A data-driven system matching students with mentors based on interests, goals, and needs for better success.
mentor chat
The mentor chat allows for students and mentors to get to know each other before their relationship buds.
calendar
The calendar helps high school students stay organized and track application deadlines.
closing remarks
Project Fair
After 10 weeks of work, it was finally time to present our final project to the class and other guests. Our project garnered positive feedback overall, earning praise from numerous graduate students and non-profit guests for our design and efforts. Embracing the constructive critiques and diverse perspectives shared, we gained extremely valuable lessons. Despite the challenges encountered during the 10 weeks, instead of dwelling on defeat or attributing setbacks to external factors, we chose to view each obstacle as a chance to learn and grow.
Next Steps
- Design a mentor questionnaire and mentor-facing version of the app
- Develop the app
- Test the app with real highschoolers, especially those who are underrepresented and marginalized
Lessons learned
⚖️ Balance user perspectives.
We spent so much time ideating and designing for the student perspective, we forgot about the mentor perspective. We should have considered how we could design to incentivize mentors other than alumni or network connections to want to use our app, considering what scaling this app would like like if we wanted to serve as a competitor to say LinkedIn.
🌍 Stay true to your users.
We aimed to support marginalized students but failed to represent them in our second set of personas, leading to designs that overlooked their unique challenges. Many juggle multiple responsibilities, leaving little time for school and career growth—an issue our designs should have addressed from the start.
Rishab Bajaj © 2025
Contact
rishbajaj24@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/rishab-baj/