Choosing Your Uni

Context

Long-term freelance engagement as the sole designer on the project. When I joined, there was nothing - no design system, no product UI, no marketing assets. I built everything from scratch over 1 year and 5 months.

Choosing Your Uni is a free educational platform helping Australian high school students figure out what to study and where. It's used in 400+ schools across Australia.

The problem

Australian high school students face a confusing university selection process. Existing resources are scattered across dozens of university websites, government portals, and generic career advice blogs. There's no single place that personalizes the experience based on a student's interests, location, and academic profile.

The platform needed to serve multiple audiences simultaneously: students discovering their path, parents monitoring progress, career advisors managing cohorts, and schools tracking engagement. Each role needed a distinct experience, but everything had to feel cohesive.

The solution

I designed the complete product from zero:

• Landing page - conversion-focused marketing site explaining the value prop and driving quiz signups
• Quiz-based discovery system - an interactive flow that recommends fields of study and universities based on student preferences
• Multi-role dashboards - distinct interfaces for students, parents, career advisors, and schools, each showing relevant data and actions
• Design system - components, tokens, typography, and patterns that scale across all surfaces
• Marketing materials - kakemonos, flyers, and physical collateral for school events
• Pitch deck - investor-facing presentation for fundraising

The design challenge was balancing engagement (students need to feel motivated, not lectured) with information density (career advisors need data-rich dashboards). I solved this by creating two distinct visual modes within the same system: playful and exploratory for student-facing flows, structured and data-forward for advisor/admin views.

Outcomes

The platform is now live and used in 400+ Australian high schools. The quiz-based approach drives strong engagement - students complete the discovery flow because it feels like a personality test rather than homework.

Retrospective

This was my first real product design project, and it took me completely out of my comfort zone. No experienced design leadership to guide me, no art direction to follow. I had to figure out every decision alone: what patterns to use, how to structure the system, where to take the product visually.

The biggest challenge was the lack of direction. When you're the only designer on a team, nobody tells you where to go. You have to develop your own conviction about what's right, then defend it. That forced me to grow faster than any guided environment would have.

But that's also what I loved about it. Because I was the only designer, I got pulled into everything: pitch decks, physical marketing materials, dashboards, landing pages. The variety was incredible. And it was rewarding to discover that I could handle all of it, learning by doing each time.

Learnings

Learn by doing, then never be afraid again. This project proved to me that I could pick up anything from scratch. Pitch deck design? Never done it. Kakemonos? Never done it. Multi-role dashboards? First time. I just learned as I went. Since CYU, I've applied that same mindset to everything: if I haven't done it before, it just means I'll learn it now. That's exactly what carried me through building apps at 14x.

Set up systems that outlive you. I knew from the start that this project would continue after I left. So I built the design system, the file structure, and the documentation to be self-sufficient. That discipline of thinking "what does this look like when I'm gone?" made the work better for everyone, including me while I was still on it.