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A calm dashboard for an active job search.
A small product designed for the person on the other side of the application — someone who needs clarity at a glance and a sense of dignity through every rejection.
The brief
A job search is a project with no internal manager. Applications, recruiter conversations, take-home tasks, and follow-ups accumulate quickly. Most tools that promise to organize this work add another layer of pressure. The brief here was the opposite — a workspace that holds the search lightly, surfaces only what matters this week, and reads as kindly on a difficult day as on a good one.
Approach
The dashboard is organized around three lanes — open, in conversation, and closed — with quiet visual weight given to recent activity rather than overall counts. Status changes are phrased plainly; the word rejected is allowed but never alone, always with the date and the option to record a small note. Heading hierarchy is preserved end-to-end, so a screen reader can move from lane to card without losing its place.
Three small decisions
Numbers do not stand on their own. Every figure is paired with the period it describes. Empty states say what to do next without telling the reader they are behind. The first colour applied to any status is grey, not red.
Accessibility decisions, built in
All interactive targets are sized at 44 by 44 pixels at minimum. Form fields carry visible labels and one-line descriptions. Drag interactions have a keyboard equivalent through a status menu. Colour is never the only carrier of meaning — status is also conveyed through position and label.
Where it is going
The next iteration introduces a weekly review view, designed to encourage a short, honest pause rather than a longer scroll. [placeholder] Prototype screenshots and a short walkthrough will be added once the design pass is complete.