Pathways - College and Career Exploration
June, 2023 | Data Visualization, UX Design & Research, Web Development
A Screenshot of Pathways
Pathways is an interactive web application designed to help graduating high school students look for a future career and colleges. This is the main project of Stefany Arevalo’s master thesis. I originally joined with the interest of studying how animations and visual effects can benefit data visualization applications. This is particularly helpful since Pathways is designed for high school students.
We went through the entire product development process: iteratively prototyping on Figma, developing the application, and conducting user study. I was mainly responsible for laying out the program structure in React.js, and developing the landing page in p5.js. We then categorize our major and career data, allowing the users to switch smoothly between visualizing major and career information through shared categories.
Pathways is compared to other similar services such as CollegeBoard. Its design prioritizes the ease and pleasure of use. This is immediately evident on the landing page, where much work was done to reduce visual clutters and emphasize responsiveness. Our user study, including interviews and coding through Dedoose, shows that students were much less likely to feel overwhelmed by the application. Stefany’s thesis provides full quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data and the design process.