April 2025
SkillMatchAI was created for Knight Hacks Project Launch in Spring 2025 as an AI-powered career guidance platform designed to help users better understand which career paths might fit their skills, preferences, and working style. The application guides users through a 30-question self-assessment covering areas such as technical abilities, soft skills, learning preferences, and work style. Those responses are then analyzed using Google’s Gemini AI to generate three personalized career recommendations along with explanations for each suggestion.
My role on the project focused on UI/UX design and frontend presentation. I helped establish the application’s visual identity by defining its color palette, typography hierarchy, and component styling, with the goal of creating an interface that felt consistent, approachable, and easy to navigate. Because SkillMatchAI relies heavily on a multi-step survey experience, designing clear visual feedback was especially important. One of the challenges our team addressed was making unanswered questions noticeable without overwhelming the user or distracting from the rest of the assessment.
The frontend itself was built using React and Tailwind CSS, while the backend used Node.js and Express to process survey responses and communicate with the Gemini API. Working on SkillMatchAI gave me an opportunity to think beyond the appearance of individual components and consider how design decisions could support the overall flow of an AI-powered application.
This project was an important early experience for me as a UI/UX designer because it showed me how visual consistency, usability, and technical functionality need to work together. Rather than treating design as a finishing layer, I was able to contribute to an experience intended to make a fairly complex process—evaluating a user’s abilities and generating individualized career guidance—feel straightforward and accessible.
