Jobcase AI Career Coach
20+ customizable coaches generated and animated using AI tools (MidJourney + Runway)
Problem
Members often struggled with confidence and direction in their job search.
Many didn’t know how to start, lacked guidance, or didn’t feel represented by traditional job platforms. Leadership challenged us to create a career coach that could feel personal, supportive, and approachable but the investment needed for fully lifelike, talking AI avatars wasn’t practical at scale.
Hypothesis
If members could choose a coach that felt relatable and alive, they would feel more engaged and supported.
We believed that a library of personalized, animated coaches, each with a distinct style and personality, would make members more likely to interact with the app, apply for jobs, and return for ongoing support.
Creating the Coaches
We combined generative design exploration with AI tools to create a lifelike set of career coaches.
Leadership tasked us with designing a full library of coaches that reflected different coaching styles and personalities. Members could pick combinations like Motivational + Strictly Business or Laid-back Guru + Warm & Friendly.
Illustrated vs. a more photorealistic style
We began by exploring both illustrated and realistic styles in MidJourney, generating a wide range of coach directions that varied in age, attire, tone, and cultural background. To understand member preference, we ran a quick test with 30 users.
Twenty-two participants chose the more realistic style over the illustrated one. They explained that job searching is a serious, real-world task, and realistic coaches felt more appropriate for the context. The illustrated versions, on the other hand, were described as cartoony, silly, and game-like, too playful for the purpose. Realistic coaches were consistently described as professional, trustworthy, and relatable.
Illustrated version had 8 preference votes
Photorealistic version had 22 preference votes
Based on these insights, we curated down to 18 initial coaches, each with a distinct persona and style that felt approachable and trustworthy.
Moving from Midjourney to Runway
From static portraits to lifelike presence
MidJourney gave us a strong starting point, but static images alone felt too flat and impersonal. If members were going to build a relationship with their coach, the experience needed motion, presence, and subtle human-like behaviors that made the characters feel alive in the app.
I experimented with Runway’s Act-1 and Gen-3 & 4 models to bring movement into the coaches. Full lip-sync animations that read out messages from the coach were too costly to scale, so I pivoted to idle animations, subtle gestures like blinking, head tilts, and small smiles.
After testing dozens of prompts, I learned that short, simple prompts (“slight head tilt, natural smile”) produced the most natural results, while long, descriptive prompts often created uncanny distortions.
When I tried longer prompts, such as “no camera movement, person stands still smiling softly, looking at the camera” the outputs were unnatural, the opposite of the subtle, lifelike presence we wanted.
Shorter prompts like “Idle animation, smiling” often had better outputs, producing more lifelike and natural motion.
Solution
From AI assets to product experience
Once we had a library of lifelike coaches generated and animated, the challenge became figuring out how members would meet, customize, and start engaging with their coach inside the app.
We first designed the app architecture, which generally followed our existing Jobcase web experience but was simplified for an MVP release. Leadership wanted to launch quickly, then iterate. The coach was required to be part of onboarding, since it was positioned as the app’s core differentiator.
The Onboarding Flow
After sign up or log in, first-time users are immediately entered into the coach customization flow.
They begin by choosing a coaching style and their coaches personality
To reinforce ownership, members then gave their coach a name of their choice.
Based on their chosen style and personality, the system surfaced available coach looks from our library.
