A career-prep platform for Indian students who are 92 days from placement and already frightened. The whole design problem was the fear, not the features.
Every other product in this portfolio is used by a professional doing their job. This one is used by a final-year student who is scared. Indian placement season is intense, unstructured and public — everyone knows who got an offer and who didn't — and the student has no idea what to do next.
That reframes the brief entirely. The ask was “combine five tools into one platform”. The actual job was to make an anxious person feel they are making progress today, without lying to them about where they stand.
Which sets up the hard part. A dense BI dashboard is the honest way to show someone their real position. It is also the fastest way to overwhelm them.
Tone is usually the last thing anyone specifies and the first thing that drifts. So the system spec includes a banned vocabulary and a set of mandatory reframings, written before any screen — because for this user, the language is the interface. A student who reads “Test Failed” closes the tab and does not come back.
A structural rule, not a copy rule: on every results screen the strong subjects render above the weak ones. Same data, same honesty, opposite emotional outcome — and it costs nothing to enforce.
Exactly one #BD1313 button anywhere on a screen. A paralysed user does not need options, they need a next step — and the rule is what stops a dense dashboard turning into a wall of equal choices.
The interviewer is “Aria”, and starting a session says “take a breath”. Giving the AI a name and a manner is what lets it be practice rather than assessment.
A 64px icon-only sidebar and a three-column grid, specified to fit one viewport — everything needed to answer “what do I do today”. In the build that rule had to bend; see below.
The score trend shows the real sequence — 62, 58, 71, 68, 74, 79, 74 — including the drop at test two, ringed rather than smoothed. Hiding a bad week would make the good ones meaningless.
English 88 first, Aptitude 52 last. The weak subject is still there in red — it just isn't the first thing he reads about himself.
Three of eight unlocked, and the five he hasn't earned are shown greyed with their names — a target rather than a hidden surprise. The tasks card does the same job daily: three ticked, one small thing left, +30 XP.
XP, streaks and a leaderboard are motivation mechanics borrowed from products people use for fun. Pointed at someone terrified of not getting placed, the same mechanics become pressure — a broken streak is one more failure, and a leaderboard is a daily reminder that two people are beating you.
I kept them, with three constraints: XP is only ever awarded, never deducted for inactivity; the ladder is named in aspiration rather than rank (Starter → Champion, no numeric position); and XP buys real relief in a store — a Streak Shield, an AI review, a resume template — so effort converts into something that reduces the workload rather than just a bigger number.
Twelve items across six categories, and the most-bought are deliberately the ones that lower pressure rather than raise status: a Streak Shield at 500 XP forgives a missed day, an AI Resume Review at 400 XP does work for you, an XP Boost Rocket at 600 XP accelerates the ladder.
Profile frames and Elite badges exist too, priced similarly — but a student who is behind can spend their way to relief instead of decoration. That is the difference between a game and a support tool wearing a game's clothes.
I designed an anxiety-aware product without testing it on an anxious student. Every rule here — strengths first, banned words, XP that only goes up — is reasoned rather than observed, and the whole thing rests on an assumption about how a frightened 21-year-old reads a dashboard. Five students and a think-aloud session would have been worth more than half the spec.
It is also desktop-first for a generation that lives on a phone. That was the brief, and I should have pushed on it.
Emotional state is a design constraint you can write down. Once “the user is frightened” is in the spec next to the colour tokens, it produces testable rules — an ordering rule, a vocabulary, a limit of one primary action — rather than a vague instruction to be friendly.
It is also the clearest evidence in this portfolio that I can design for a consumer audience, not only for domain experts doing their job.
Ten role-gated workforce reports across 847 employees.