Smart
Dreams

A Smart Dreams helps students plan their futures. The problem: they opened it once and never came back. We rebuilt the experience around daily momentum — and made progress feel like something worth unlocking.

Year

2026

Client

Homewood Children's Village

Service

Interaction Design

Team

Ishita Bhardwaj

Minjee Jeong

Brief

Smart Dreams is a live app used by Homewood Children's Village to help Pittsburgh students navigate college and career planning. We were tasked with reimagining the experience to improve clarity, engagement, and long-term usefulness.

Problem

They opened it once. Then never came back.

Goal-setting tools fail students not because students don't have dreams — but because the tools aren't built for the journey. The original Smart Dreams app had the right intention but the wrong experience.

Research

We started by evaluating the existing app — before designing anything, we needed to understand what wasn't working and why.

Research

The app wasn't broken. It just wasn't built for students yet.

Research

ENGAGEMENT

"There's no incentive for you to keep coming back to the app."

Research

SCOPE

"They're setting goals that are too broad. And the app does not do enough to help us do it better."

Research

STRUCTURE

"It should have enough guidance that you can get from start to finish. In its current form, it does not do that."

Research

TRUST

"We know that the app is not sticky, people set goals when they're with mentors, but after that they're not returning."

Initial Concepts

Before testing, we built a lo-fi prototype focused on one core idea — what if breaking a goal into milestones and daily habits actually worked?

In the Field

We brought a lo-fi prototype to the Homewood Brushton YMCA and tested it with 5 students from 6th to 11th grade. Their task was simple: create a custom goal. We watched, listened, and let them lead.