Last summer, fourth-year computer science students Sana Imtiaz, Kelly Ng and Sharon Lee shared the difficult feelings they were experiencing about starting their career journeys after university.

"Many students have little insight into what career paths lie with their future jobs, how much salary to expect or what requirements that job will have," says Lee.

The discussion led to a plan for their capstone project: JUXTA, a web application that helps users make better decisions about their desired careers through the use of side-by-side job detail comparisons, comprehensive data visualizations and a career suggestion feature.

A few weeks into the Fall term, their project supervisor, Dr. Mohammed Elmorsy, informed the group of an opportunity for an interdisciplinary collaboration with a student from the Bachelor of Design program.

The first thing they did when they teamed up with third-year design student Grace Zimmel (and later Rochelle Kriewaldt in the final stages), was to complete a "design sprint," a series of questions and activities to discover the scope of the project and decide key features for the app. Once they narrowed down the details of their project, Zimmel worked on the front end to establish the app's look, style and layout. Then, the computer science students created a close to pixel-perfect translation of the design in the final product, resulting in an app that is functional and user friendly.

"The team and I all agree that we would love to see JUXTA as a resource for students so that we can aid them and make career planning easier and provide them with the necessary tools to make an informed decision on what career is the best fit for them," says Zimmel.

Throughout the project, the students learned a lot about the importance of teamwork and communication, as well as tapped into their passions for technology and user experience design.

"And while we did not intend this, I’m also super proud that we built this app as a diverse, all-women developer team," says Lee.

To be considered for a future Student Snapshots story, or to suggest someone we should feature, please contact our communications team (communications@macewan.ca).