UX Case Study · Product Management · MHCI Capstone 2026
RoboticsCareer.org
A career platform that moves with you — turning a one-time visit into a tracked journey from curiosity to career.
my role
Product Manager, UX Designer
timeline
MHCI Capstone · Jan – July 2026
client
ARM Institute
delivery partner
fivestar*
MHCI Capstone Team —
Rachael Shivam
Caelan Moglovkin
Stephen Chen
Kayla Windust
Tian Zhou
The results
82.5 SUS
System Usability Score for the redesigned Career Interest Quiz (up from 75.8).
+122% result transparency
+110% career discovery
+150% reuse intent.
Capture
Longitudinal engagement data for ARM's funders through 4 validated return drivers
Recommended job
Application tracking
Saved alerts
Journey mapping
"Not only the most well researched ARM capstone project, but the most well researched project I’ve seen in MHCI."
— Director, Carnegie Mellon MHCI Program
See it in action
Three connected experiences, straight from the prototype: find your fit, see the path, and track the journey.
roboticscareer.org
Career Interest Quiz — find your fit
roboticscareer.org
Career Journey Map — see the path
roboticscareer.org
Career Dashboard — track the journey
Research
the problem
RoboticsCareer.org gets visitors, but access alone hasn’t translated into awareness, inspiration, or lasting engagement with robotics careers.
our goal
Understand who RC.org’s users are, grow that user base, and increase engagement and stickiness on the platform.
our solution
Three connected experiences — an interest quiz, a career journey map, and a personal dashboard — that turn a single visit into an ongoing relationship.
a few of the methods along the way
Man-on-the Street Interviews
Contextual Inquiry
Platform Research
User Survey
Participatory Workshop
Affinity Diagramming
what we found, across man-on-the-street intercepts, school workshops, and platform usability testing
Young people don’t reject the work — they just can’t picture themselves in it.
When we asked high schoolers whether a robotics role could be for someone like them, the most common answer was “maybe” — never for identity reasons, just that nothing connected the work to their own interests.
The site loses people before it shows its value.
Our usability work catalogued 82 issues, and testers asked out loud why they’d use RoboticsCareer.org at all if applying just lands them on LinkedIn.
The upside lives behind the login.
Logged-in users engage at around 95% on desktop and mobile alike. The people the platform wins, it wins hard — it just wasn’t winning many.
five insights from spring research (n=190)
By college, the window is already closing
Lack of specificity, not interest → Career Interest Quiz
Categorization, not reputation → Career Journey Map
People build the pipeline → Career Dashboard for ARM
Parents are open, just never asked → future work
how might we
Redesign RoboticsCareer.org to help turn user interest into a concrete path?
And make this journey trackable, so ARM can measure impact?
four audiences we sized the opportunity for
~459K
Gen Alpha
~286K
Gen Z
~63K
Veterans
~26K
Career Switchers
1
Understand current and future users of RC.org
2
Grow the user base of RC.org
3
Increase engagement and stickiness on RC.org
Design process
1. Platform research
We started with the current site: 7 usability tests and 5 heuristic evaluations, targeted at the areas with the most issues and the most reach in our timeframe.
We redesigned the landing page, job search, and sign-up flow around what we found (UX Improvements).
2. Three connected solutions
The current journey has many uncertainties: users get sent away from the site with no way for ARM to track them, and no way for them to picture where they fit. We synthesized findings into three responses, one per gap:
Catching interest — the Career Interest Quiz
Goes in depth into how a user’s interests fit into a robotics career.
Creating a plan — the Career Journey Map
A roadmap derived from the quiz that serves as the user’s north star, guiding them toward a set of career directions.
Supporting the journey — the Career Dashboard
Tracks the career journey and provides measurable outcomes back to ARM.
3. Testing and iteration
28 usability sessions across three rounds of prototyping surfaced real frictions in each of the three experiences.
Career Interest Quiz
Before: the quiz was lacking trust. “I don’t see any correlation to the questions and how it might predict a result.” It also locked people into one role — operators felt the quiz thought they “weren’t capable of much.”
After: we surfaced the why behind every match, with confidence bars for every role and a training path to bridge the gap for whichever one they choose.
Career Journey Map
Before: a quiz result isn’t a plan. Testers matched to a role, then just said “I’d google these roles on my own” and left.
After: the map turns a match into a path — find match, set target, training, find jobs, first job, next goal — and, after testers pushed back that “a career is not a linear line,” branching routes back to training after a first job.
Career Dashboard
Before: the idea was solid, but our first execution was off. “I was like, what am I looking at, this is scary.”
After: we kept the idea and fixed the execution. “Applying is a chaotic process that could really be streamlined by this.” Three things we held to: it builds itself around you, you’re still in charge of it, and honest data or none — no ads, no locked widgets, no faked progress.
where we landed
Complete documentation and prototypes handed off to ARM for implementation — giving them a way to measure engagement against real users and keep proving impact to funders.
if we had more time
Test the prototypes directly with high schoolers, run more iterations on the journey map, connect the dashboard to real data sources, and test more formats of the quiz.
Meet the team
Rachael, Caelan, Stephen, Kayla & Tian — on final presentation day
say hi
Let’s get in touch!
Would love to talk projects, collaborations, or anything design!