BridgeUs
Designing a forum-based website focused on facilitating healthy communication between parents and students regarding career-based conversations.
TOOLS
Figma
ROLE
Designer
TIMELINE
9 months (2023)
UX/UI Design
User Research
SKILLS
● THE CHALLENGE
Facilitating open, supportive career conversations
Figuring out a career path can feel overwhelming, and talking to parents about it isn’t always easy. Parents want to help but may not know how, while teens hesitate to open up. BridgeUs creates a space for honest, judgment-free conversations through anonymous, prompt-based discussions—helping families navigate career decisions with more understanding and support.
● SOLUTION SNAPSHOT
Improving parent-child communication with BridgeUs
Driven by a commitment to improving career conversations, my team and I developed BridgeUs to help students and parents navigate career exploration with ease. This project is built on the idea that open, judgment-free discussions can foster deeper understanding, empowering both sides to communicate with confidence and clarity.
Our interactive community responses page helps users explore shared emotions and perspectives. With themed prompts and hoverable cocoons, students and parents can navigate career conversations through an intuitive, data-driven experience.
Unlock meaningful career insights
Guiding prompts for honest conversations
Thoughtfully designed prompts help students reflect on their career journey while guiding parents toward supportive, productive discussions—fostering deeper understanding on both sides.
With BridgeUs, students can reflect on their career aspirations, engage in anonymous discussions, and gain valuable insights from parents—fostering meaningful career conversations, one prompt at a time!
How did we shape this solution from idea to execution?
● PROBLEM STATEMENT AND USER PERSONAS
For many teens, figuring out a career path is overwhelming, and discussing it with parents can feel just as daunting. Parents want to support their children but often struggle to find the right balance between guidance and pressure. On the other hand, teens may hesitate to share their true aspirations, fearing judgment or misunderstanding.
Understanding the challenge
How might one design technologies that help support authentic career exploration conversations between parents and teens?
This disconnect raises an important question:
To answer this, we took a deep dive into understanding our users—their challenges, motivations, and needs.
Beginning the ideation process, we focused on developing user personas for our two user groups to understand our target audience, with user personas and empathy maps to identify key motivations, frustrations, and needs.
Our target users
User 1: Valerie (High School Student)
User 2: Ryan (Parent of a High Schooler)
● USER TASKS AND FLOW
Designing for honest and meaningful conversations
Our research revealed that students hesitate to share their true aspirations, while parents struggle to offer guidance without pressure. To bridge this gap, we designed BridgeUs as an anonymous, classroom-based platform, creating a safe space for open, judgment-free career discussions.
Why make this platform centered around anonymity?
We designed BridgeUs as an anonymous, classroom-based platform to help students share their true thoughts without fear of judgment while ensuring a safe, structured environment. Anonymity fosters honest expression and allows for plausible deniability, while keeping discussions within classrooms reduces risks and encourages meaningful conversations.
Guided by our user personas, we brainstormed and refined features that best support students and parents. After voting and iterating, we finalized three core screens:
Defining key features
01.
Prompts page
Users respond to guided career reflection questions.
02.
Community responses
Users explore shared insights from others.
03.
Discussion
Anonymous, structured conversations unfold through prompts.
With a clear understanding of our users' needs and the importance of anonymity, we mapped out the user flow to ensure a seamless experience.
User flow
● SKETCHING AND BRAINSTORMING
Keeping in mind our key features and pain points, we began to sketch what this website could look like. With our first round of sketches, we received feedback that the ideas and main pages were solid, but we needed to think outside of the box more in terms of how to visualize this platform.
Visualizing our platform
After the second round of sketches, we decided to use the idea of cocoons to create a unique experience on this platform, with these cocoons representing bubbles of ideas/responses.
● DESIGNING BRIDGEUS
We first aimed to create a design system to figure out how we wanted our platform to look given. Utilizing color theory principles, we chose our primary colors to be purple and orange, as these complementary colors foster creativity, learning, and wisdom.
Our BridgeUs design process
When initially turning our lo-fi designs into hi-fi designs, we soon realized that the cocoon-style designs did not allow for a variety for prompts. Therefore, we decided to integrate the cocoon style by filtering responses by the emotions that the prompts elicited for students to help create community through this feature.
Designing for community responses
How can we identify the influences to one’s career path?
Before creating a finalized version for the community response page, we worked with the research team to create a list of finalized prompt ideas based on the literature we reviewed.
We concluded that there are five main themes for the prompt questions that would be included in the platform based on the literature:
Community Influences = Mentor influence + Community (Parent/peer influence); Career Exploration = Career planning + anxieties + confusion; Internal Reflection; Fulfillment = Career fulfillment + personal preferences; Media
● PROMPTS
Creating prompts to help guide reflection
Each set of prompts is categorized as “Chapters,” where the user is presented with questions targeting each theme. There are three views: Overview (both students and parents’ responses show), Student view, and Parent view. Students and parents will be given a different set of questions, but the questions are extremely similar to each other, allowing for a statistical comparison to our end users.
When creating these prompts, we kept the following goals in mind:
Students will utilize these prompts to help them reflect deeply on their internal feelings and thoughts for healthy and honest expression.
Parents will utilize these prompts to better understand how to approach their children with career conversations with productive, healthy communication.
Conducting a literature review as research
My team and I individually did our research, finding research papers surrounding themes such as: role model figures, home environment, personality traits, etc. After doing so, we each logged these papers in a shared spreadsheet along with the corresponding theme and generated prompts. We aimed to emphasize creating prompts that facilitated healthy communication between students and parents through understanding each other’s perspectives.
● DISCUSSION GUIDE
Creating a guide towards healthier communication
Good communication doesn’t just happen magically. It can be hard to know how to start a conversation. Becoming better at communication requires lots of learning, practice, and time. While this platform is for students to anonymously ask questions to parents (both users kept anonymous), we still wanted to emphasize that this website was to also be used as a tool to facilitate in-person conversations with students’ own parents.
Practice, understand, reflect
To help with this process, we decided to create a discussion guide to guide our users with tips to keep in mind while answering prompts on our platform, along with in real life conversations. This guide guides the user to learning how to set up mutual agreements in conversations, conversation expectations, and much more.
● FINAL DESIGN
Combining everything that we had done, from ideating, sketching, research, we had completed our first round of hi-fidelity BridgeUs designs.
Our BridgeUs screens
Each prompt corresponds to a different theme, and for responses, users can hover over the cocoons and see which set of individuals answered with the same emotion.
Community Responses Page
Prompts page
The prompts are laid out in sections by themes, in which students and parents can use these to help guide them on reflecting on their own thoughts and feelings.
This page provides tips on how to effectively communicate. Furthermore, there is a reflection section at the end that provides scenarios and questions for users to reflect on and answer.
