Anchor Empowering UMSI students to achieve career success.

A career search that lives in six tabs

Participant insight · U3

"Resources such as job boards, career events, and mentorship programs are scattered across multiple platforms, creating a fragmented and inefficient system."

UMSI students don't lack resources — they lack a coherent way to find, sequence, and trust the ones already available to them. Handshake, the UMSI Slack, the Engaged Learning newsletter, individual office emails, Iris alumni search, peer Google Docs: each is useful in isolation, but together they form a maze that disproportionately punishes students with less social capital and less time.

A double-diamond process
built for a tight semester

Anchor ran on a compressed 12-week academic timeline, so the team designed the process around three forcing functions: every research artifact had to inform a design decision, every design decision had to be testable, and every test had to feed back into a single shared source of truth.

Methods

We used a mixed-methods approach — qualitative interviews to surface the lived experience, and structured usability protocols to validate the design once it took shape.

Four themes that
shaped everything

The affinity work consolidated into four themes that became the design team's shared vocabulary for the rest of the semester. Every screen, every interaction, every cut had to trace back to one of these.

Who we designed for

Three personas captured the most common UMSI career-search modes. They were the team's tie-breaker tool — every contested design decision had to be defensible against at least two of these three.

Reframing the problem

The four themes and journey map pointed at one underlying truth: UMSI doesn't have a discovery problem, it has a coherence problem. The resources are already there. We re-stated the brief as a How Might We to keep the design conversations grounded in that distinction.

Design principles

To keep an opinionated team aligned across four parallel workstreams, we agreed on three design principles up front. Every screen review used these as the rubric.

What success looked like

• 01

  Centralization

  Combine job boards, career events, and mentorship into one platform — eliminating tab-juggling across UMSI tools while preserving the office-by-office context where it matters.

• 02

  Personalization

  Mentorship matching and filters for visa sponsorship, role type, and student-rated mentor helpfulness — making invisible information visible.

• 03

  Guidance

  Reduce cognitive load with streamlined navigation, clearly defined pathways for each user action, and consistent visual language across every flow.

From sketch to system

The IA reorganized UMSI's existing resources around three primary hubs — Feed, Events, and Jobs — with a mentorship layer that connects students to alumni through every surface, not as a standalone tab.

User flows

Before building screens, we mapped 11 end-to-end user flows across the four primary surfaces. Each flow traces a single intent — sign in, RSVP to a session, send a mentor request, cancel a registration, save a job — from entry to confirmation, with explicit error-prevention states for cancellation flows.

Wireframe → Hi-fi progression

We worked in three deliberate stages, validating with peers between each. Holding off on visual polish until the third stage kept critique focused on flow and clarity, not aesthetics.

Stage 01

Hand sketches

Pen-on-paper sketches per primary tab (Feed, Mentor, Jobs, Events). Layout decisions made fast, before any pixel got pushed.

Stage 02

Low-fi wireframes

Grayscale Figma frames testing IA, button hierarchy, and content density across all four tabs. Validated in the first round of usability testing.

Stage 03

Hi-fidelity prototypes

Branded Anchor screens with the UMich navy/maize system, real strings, photography, and full interactive prototype wiring.

Design system

Anchor's visual language leans into Michigan's identity — navy authority, maize energy — paired with a quieter Mulish/Fraunces type system that lets the content lead.

Four flows, one platform

Three features doing
the heavy lifting

Three flows did most of the work to make Anchor feel different from CareerLink or Handshake. Each came directly out of an interview insight and was validated through usability testing.

Feature 01

Mentorship Dashboard

A formal mentorship program rather than a one-off coffee chat. Alumni profiles include customizable expectations for mentees — relevant coursework, projects, or skills — so students can align their goals with industry demand before they even reach out.

• Ongoing relationships instead of single touchpoints
• Transparent alum expectations per profile
• Goal alignment built into the matching flow

Feature 02

Group Mentoring Sessions

Group mentoring sessions, real-time chat, and asynchronous message boards — designed in response to feedback that the career search felt isolating. Inclusive of varying schedules and communication preferences.

• Live and async formats side by side
• Networking flexibility participants explicitly asked for
• Lower-pressure entry into alumni conversations

Feature 03

Application Tracker

A single surface for tracking deadlines, application statuses, and employer feedback — consolidating what CareerLink and Handshake forced students to do across separate logins. Timeline structures and reminders are tuned to internship cycles.

• One source of truth for every active application
• Cycle-aware reminders for tech-industry timelines
• Status + feedback captured per application

What changed between
v1 and v2

Testing surfaced two design decisions that we'd convinced ourselves were "obvious enough" — and weren't. Both got rewritten before the final stakeholder readout.

Validating the design

We tested with 8 UMSI students recruited across MSI tracks (MHI, Big Data, Agile Development, LAKES). Sessions ran 15–20 minutes over Zoom, recorded with Loom; one in-person session was also captured. Participants worked through tasks against low-fi Figma prototypes.

Tasks covered

• 01

  Finding and connecting with a mentor

  Filtering alumni, reviewing peer-rated helpfulness, and sending a request.

• 02

  Registering for events or group sessions

  Locating the right office's events and RSVPing in-platform.

• 03

  Applying for jobs through alumni referrals

  Navigating from a referral card to an application with the right context.

• 04

  Saving jobs and updating skills

  Maintaining a persistent shortlist and a profile that mentors could actually act on.

We tracked error rates, success rates, and time on task, then ran a short post-session interview to surface the why behind each metric.

In their words

Two of the testimonials we received from UMSI students during testing and post-readout sharing:

Measured outcomes

Full interactive prototype

The complete case-study prototype is embedded below — click through to test sign-up, Feed posting, event RSVPs, job applications, and mentor requests end-to-end. Error-prevention modals for cancellation flows are wired in.