Reel In
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
DURATION
6 months
Winter to Spring 2025
TEAM
1 Developer Lead
1 Design Lead
9 Developers
4 UX/UI Designers
SKILLS
UX Research
UI Design
Prototyping
01
PROBLEM
THE PROBLEM
The job market for college students is highly competitive.
Being a student in engineering and technology fields is not what it used to be 20 years ago. Nowadays, the job market is getting harder and harder to break into, and hands-on project experience is crucial to stand out in the sea of applicants.
THE CHALLENGE
How might we streamline access to career-building, entry-level project opportunities for STEM college students?
02
RESEARCH
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We analyzed LinkedIn, Indeed, and Handshake to identify gaps in their project posting, browsing, and filtering functionalities.
Here, we found that there isn't a platform that exists solely for project opportunities. Users have to dig through thousands of job postings to find project work, which is time consuming and inefficient.
USER INTERVIEWS
6 college students were interviewed to understand their struggles when joining project teams.
Our interviewees consisted of engineering and technology majors. Some notable quotes include:
“A lot of projects are looking for Civil & Environmental rather than Mechanical. It’s also hard finding the motivation to work on resume stuff.”
“Networking is difficult because I’m shy and it’s hard to put myself out there.”
“I felt scared to apply due to my lack of experience, but the opportunity was good.”
03
SOLUTION
OUR SOLUTION
Reel In is a centralized hub that provides a platform for students to connect and collaborate on projects.
This solution aims to give students broader access to projects right at their fingertips. Similar to other job posting sites, Reel In allows users to discover opportunities that best match their goals.
04
DESIGN
PERSONAS
Meet Milah, Dylan, Sean, and Cassie— 4 college students who are interested in finding and creating projects.
These fictional personas were created based on interview data and allow us to empathize with the audience we intend to design for. These representations allowed us to gain a clearer understanding of what users require from our application.
FLOWS
We created user flows for individual tasks to visualize how a potential user might interact with and navigate through our application.
Flow 1: Project seekers can search for projects based on tags.
Flow 2: Project seekers can save a project on the explore page for later viewing.
05
PROTOTYPE
DEVELOPER HANDOFF
The design and development team held iteration sessions to ensure that the prototype aligned with technical feasibility.
In doing so, the transition from design into development was significantly smoother and reduced confusion and miscommunication. We used a shared document to keep each other accountable and ensure that all issues were properly addressed.
06
OUTCOME
RESULTS
After pitching Reel In at FusionCon 2025, our idea was recognized as the Most Innovative Solution amongst 4 other teams.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Usability testing is a crucial step in any design process.
Due to a hard deadline set by the developer team, we did not have enough time to conduct sufficient usability tests for our high-fidelity mockup. As a result, the developers found many discrepancies in our prototype, which caused confusion and required immediate clarification.
Moving forward, we learned to be thorough in each stage of the design process, especially when iterating, to ensure that user and developer needs are met, prior to handoff.