Dash Beyond is an artificial intelligence tool that recommends personalized career and education options to students 13 years and above, enabling them to explore the future of education and work. Its gamified counseling process is powered by a library of short career documentary films, machine learning algorithms, and psychological science designed to help students achieve their long term career goals.
The ecosystem
Dash Beyond was offered to assist the career ecosystem of students, counselors and parents, to increase transparency and support for high school kids in their career exploration journey.
My work · Part 1
My work · Part 2
Design intervention
I led the research for parents and counsellors to help Dash Beyond achieve its goal of developing a career encyclopedia and counselling journey. This led to the design of their subsequent platform, as described below.
Dash Beyond is a gamified career encyclopedia that enables better conversations about children’s future career options by keeping parents and counselors in the loop of their exploration process.
Part 1 · B2B
An app that allows counsellors to know the interests of students, suggest activities and reading material, and generate reports that support conversations with parents about a student’s career exploration and interests.
We started with an assumption
To get the student in the ‘perfect’ college
To provide assistance to students in search of college and career
Our approach
We chose to design for counsellors first, as a B2B offering that helps schools support their students’ career exploration. When the product is validated by the school and embedded in a larger ecosystem around the student, parents feel at ease if their children are using it. The idea was to give counsellors a glimpse into students’ interests, so they could use that data to have informed discussions with parents about their child’s interests and potential.
Brainstorming board
Interview insights
Counsellor journey map
Scroll sideways to follow the full timeline.
Testing the existing product
Existing prototype. Click an image to enlarge it.
The insight
The exploring happens in conversation with kids.
Low fed wireframes
Prototype
Tested with counsellors by a team of three, led by me. The final counsellor product was piloted with 2 schools.
Explore the full prototype in Adobe XD
Dashboard · Scroll the feed and click the highlighted circles to explore.
Notes
Counsellors gather student data through conversations and sessions with students, so notes were a crucial part of the product.
Notes Landing · Click the highlighted circles to move through the app.
Part 2
Keeping parents in the loop of their child’s career exploration process.
Synthesis
How parents help their children explore career paths, from identifying interests to applying.
Trusted channels
I plotted the channels and sources that prove to be trustable amongst our targeted parents, on a scale of source credibility.
Edge cases
Edge cases to understand the students we are designing for, which help us center the student, even as we design for counsellors and parents.
User flows
The result
Before we could begin the parent prototype, Dash Beyond was acquired for its student and counsellor platform by Alison, an online course platform with over 50 million users. I was brought on as a Senior UX Researcher to lead product growth in India and Africa.