UX for Career Website for Interns & Employers

Context

The JCU Career Services website served three very different audiences under one roof: students, alumni, and employers, each with distinct goals and no clear path to reach them.

Design Challenge

The existing site buried information across scattered channels with no clear hierarchy, making it difficult for students, alumni, and employers to find resources or understand the full range of services offered. The site needed a structure that could serve three audiences with different needs without forcing any of them to dig.

Key Responsibilities

I led the research, information architecture, UI design, and front-end development for the redesign. This included conducting card sorting and user interviews, building personas for each audience, defining the new site structure, designing the visual system in Figma, and coding a responsive site in HTML/CSS.

Research Process

Research began with understanding who used the site and why they were struggling to find what they needed.

Problem Details

Through user interviews, card sorting, and a heuristic evaluation of the existing site, three core audiences emerged, each with a different intent: students preparing for their careers, alumni maintaining post-graduation access, and employers looking to recruit talent. All three groups reported the same underlying issue: unclear entry points and no dedicated path to the information relevant to them, whether that meant CV resources, alumni events, or job posting submissions.

Why It Mattered

A career services site with unclear navigation does more than frustrate users, it undermines the department's ability to demonstrate its own value. Students unaware of available resources don't use them. Employers unclear on how to submit opportunities look elsewhere. Alumni without a clear reason to return disengage from the university community. Fixing the architecture was a matter of usability and of representing Career Services' full offering accurately.

Strategy

With three distinct user types identified, the strategy centered on designing around intent rather than department structure. It was very important to understand the use-function of the site, in order to cater to students, alumni, and employers. The revised information architecture understands three distinct user-flows and to have information readily available under distinct & clear tabs.

Opportunity

Rather than organizing the site around internal categories, I identified an opportunity to structure it around user intent: what a student, alumnus, or employer is actually trying to do when they land on the page. This meant separating the site into distinct, clearly labeled sections (Career Services, Internships, Career Fairs, and Employers) so each audience could self-select into the right path immediately.

Goals

• Give each audience (students, alumni, employers) a clear, dedicated entry point

• Reduce the number of clicks between landing on the site and finding relevant resources

• Establish a clean, consistent visual system (Poppins typography, a focused color palette) to support clarity

• Build a responsive, mobile-first site that performs consistently across devices

• Communicate Career Services' full value and role as a bridge between education and employment

Solution

The redesigned site organizes content into clear, audience-specific sections, Career Services, Internships, Career Fairs, and Employers, replacing the fragmented structure of the original. A focused typography and color system built around Poppins and a simple blue, black, and yellow palette reinforced clarity across every page. Built responsively with a mobile-first approach, the site performs consistently across desktop and mobile. The result is a more intuitive experience for all three audiences and a clearer representation of Career Services' role connecting students, alumni, and employers.

View Full Site on Bēhance

Visit my Career Services for John Cabot University project page on my Bēhance to see the full case-study with images of the final website in the picture gallery.

Bonus Material: Print Design

This 32-page brochure/booklet highlights John Cabot University's Career Services Center, which guides students and alumni from academic life into professional success — including internships, career fairs, alumni stories, and employer partnerships. The visual direction combines JCU’s graduate color palette with a modern grid layout, balancing photography and concise storytelling.

Designed in a 21 × 21 cm format, the publication is used both digitally and in print for university outreach and employer engagement.​​​​​​​