The job postings and company names featured in this prototype do not represent real job opportunities or endorsements from the companies mentioned.
In February 2025, Tokyo Techies was approached by a private university in Japan to develop closed-network app for their students. This is a place where students can find job-postings from partnering recruitment agencies, connect with alumni, or hear about campus-wide events.
I was given 48 hours to build a click-through prototype, in both English and Japanese, to present to the University’s president.
The general theme of this product is a blend between LinkedIn, Reddit, and Meta’s Threads. The president sought after a prototype of what the student’s mobile experience with the following requirements:
The job postings and company names featured in this prototype do not represent real job opportunities or endorsements from the companies mentioned.
The challenge for me as a designer (and as a human) is never about having no ideas, it’s about having too many.
So, to help myself with the initial work, I pulled inspiration from what I already know and love: the visual style of Medium.com, the navigational structure of Threads, and information architecture of Reddit.
This project is a testament to my decision making, speed, and design process.
Working with just 3-4 shades of gray, and an orange, made it easy to make a low-fidelity, auto-layout design look put-together. By using the Apple’s iOS 18 iPadOS 18 library, I only needed to create a few custom components for repeated use.
The app should be light-weight and nothing should be difficult to find. This is one of my favorite aspects of Thread’s platform—there is very little placed behind a settings or menu icon.
Additionally, every point in the app should have redundant pathways, that is, multiple ways to get there.
In Japan, student's are categorized by evaluative rankings (成績評価) that describe whether the student is outstanding (秀), excellent (優), good (良), satisfactory (可), and so on. In America, students are generally ranked by their GPA.
This app had to reflect both languages and cultural specifications, since recruiters may be seeking for both English and Japanese-speaking candidates.
This app has a lot of lists—lists of spaces, posts, notifications, and users. So, I made sure to make each item clearly distinguishable in a long list of its own kind.
For this, I used thin lines, headers and sub-headers, and profile pictures to help create visual separation from each item.
The university president and a few of his board members really enjoyed the prototype. In fact, they weren’t expecting as many features as was delivered.
However, the deal reached a stand-still when our two companies were negotiating monetization strategies. As a result, we decided to not move forward, at least for now.
This project really put my skills to the test—challenging my speed, refining my decision-making, and pushing me to turn vague requirements into a functional prototype.
Designing for this two-day sprint was perhaps the most fun I’ve had at work. I’m grateful for the full creative freedom I had over both the user interface and experience, and I was even more honored (and terrified) by how high the stakes were.
If I had more time, I would’ve liked to add more interactions, an onboarding flow, direct messaging, a company profiles, and improved filtering and search.
'Till next time!