Volare

Introduction

Preparing for a job interview can be daunting. Imagine spending hours researching potential questions, practicing answers, and wondering if you’re focusing on the right skills — only to walk into the room (or log into a virtual platform) and face questions you never expected. The anxiety, the guesswork, and the lack of tailored feedback leave many candidates feeling stuck and underprepared.

With the rise of online interviews on platforms like HireVue, where algorithms analyze everything from your word choice to your facial expressions, the stakes are higher than ever. Yet, traditional resources like generic guides or mock interviews fall short because they don’t adapt to your unique needs or the specifics of the job you’re pursuing.

That’s where Volare comes in. Designed to empower job seekers, Volare is an AI-powered interview preparation platform that combines the power of advanced language models with interactive, personalized coaching. Whether you’re preparing for a technical role, a behavioral interview, or industry-specific challenges, Volare tailors its feedback to your goals — helping you navigate the toughest questions with confidence and precision.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the features that power Volare , including its advanced language models, job-listing input, real-time question generation, and adaptive feedback system. While still in development, Volare is built with the goal of revolutionizing how job seekers approach interview preparation, bringing the power of AI to help candidates achieve their career aspirations.

The Team

Timeframe

October 2024 — December 2024 | 6 weeks

October — June 2025 | 22 weeks

Tools

Design — Figma

Development — Next.js, Groq, HumeAI, Tailwind CSS, ShanCN, OpenAI Whisper, Supabase, Docker, TypeScript

Maintenance — Jira, Notion, Slack, Github

The Project

Design

Design Project Summary

Volare’s design team plays a critical role in crafting an intuitive, accessible user experience. From understanding our user and their needs (anticipated and unanticipated) to translating research into compelling interfaces, the design team is responsible for making sure Volare is not only a functional service, but one that ultimately supports our founding purpose of empowering users to succeed in interviews. By iterating through mid-fidelity and high-fidelity designs, we are able to hone Volare’s stand-out elements, such as the real-time analytics and AI feedback features.

Volare Dashboard

User Research

Identifying User Pain Points

Our initial vision for Volare was to build an AI-driven platform that supported interview preparation for users at all career stages, from entry-level to senior professionals. However, the key challenge emerged early: how to replicate the nuances of a real interview while addressing the diverse needs and comfort levels of users. To tackle this, we conducted extensive research, including literature reviews, competitive analysis, and user interviews and surveys, which highlighted the need to balance advanced AI features with authenticity and accessibility.

Our findings revealed that regular AI users appreciated personalized feedback and scalable tools but still sought human-like interaction, while AI skeptics doubted the accuracy of feedback for soft skills and the realism of simulations. Additionally, users across the spectrum noted that existing platforms failed to provide meaningful feedback on non-verbal cues and lacked natural flow. Recognizing the most urgent needs among entry-level users — college students and recent graduates navigating their first job searches — we narrowed our focus to this demographic. This shift allowed us to develop a more targeted and impactful solution.

Synthesis and Ideation

Tackling the Challenge

How could we design a platform that felt human-like and addressed both technical and behavioral preparation needs? This became the guiding question for our iterative design process. Initially, Volare’s feature set included a chatbot for passive assistance, such as answering career questions and providing resume feedback. However, users expressed a stronger need for active, hands-on preparation that felt immersive and realistic.

We shifted our focus to prioritize an AI-powered mock interview tool, designed to simulate the experience of interviewing with a real person:

• Interactive AI Mock Interviews: Simulating realistic interviews with detailed, real-time feedback.
• Behavioral and Technical Analytics: Insights into both soft and hard skills, helping users improve holistically.
• Entry-Level Focus: A tailored approach designed to empower college students and new graduates as they navigate the job market for the first time.

Mid Fidelity Wireframes

The Volare mid-fidelity wireframes showcase a comprehensive and user-focused design that seamlessly guides users through the AI-powered interview preparation process. The wireframes outline key features and user flows, starting with a clean landing page that introduces Volare and prompts users to sign up or log in. The onboarding process follows, where users provide their career field, job position, and interview challenges to tailor their experience. The dashboard, a central hub, features intuitive navigation for accessing session history, analytics, AI tips, and settings.

Users can initiate a new interview session by answering prompts about their career field and goals, allowing Volare to generate relevant questions. During the interview, real-time AI-powered feedback — such as the quality of responses, risk of language errors, and communication scores — appears on-screen, enhancing the user’s understanding of their performance. The session history page enables users to review past interviews, access AI-generated feedback summaries, and pinpoint areas for improvement. The analytics page features interactive graphs that visually track progress over time, empowering users to measure their performance metrics like response quality, general attitude, and time management.

Next Steps in Design

Next steps for Volare’s design process including refining and enhancing the Volare user’s experience:

1. We plan to conduct user testing to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement.
2. Using our user testing feedback as a foundation, we will finalize high-fidelity designs, emphasizing key feature highlights to ensure clarity and usability.
3. Additionally, we aim to adapt the interface for responsive screen sizes, including mobile, tablet, and desktop, while introducing a light/dark mode for user customization.
4. Finally, we will solidify Volare’s branding to create a cohesive and recognizable visual identity.

Development

The development of our project was broken down into 3 different stages: behavioral interview, technical interview, and company specific practice. Our initial focus is on solving the behavioral interview pain point and to do this we use several different technologies and techniques. We wanted to create a comprehensive application that kept the user at the center of every feature. So our tech stack came out to be next.js, several external API’s such as Hume AI and Whisper, as well as Tailwind CSS, Supabase, Docker, and TypeScript.

We decided to use Next over the standard react implementation because of next.js’ server side rendering capabilities. Specifically, the flexibility that comes with being able to update to new next dependencies without worrying about breaking other portions of the code was a primary reason for using it as a part of our frontend development. Along the same lines, we also decided to use a docker container so that we could simplify our deployment of Supabase, which underlines our backend services and helps us ensure a near-instant response to queries. Supabase was chosen over firebase because of its versatility; it’s easily scalable, open source, and also supports SQL queries. Putting all of this together was challenging but rewarding. All of our technical decisions were made after understanding our technical strengths, the requirements needed to ensure we could support a large userbase at scale, and also the end user, students like us. We had the unique advantage of having our customers be a demographic that we were well aware of and this allowed us to optimize our technical design to perfectly complement hardworking students looking to improve their interview-readiness.

Takeaways & Challenges

External APIs

Our project combined innovative technologies and utilized external AI APIs to deliver a highly engaging and personalized user experience. By integrating the Groq API, we were able to dynamically generate more related interview questions for the specific positions that the users applied for. This made each interview feel unique and relevant, offering users a realistic way to prepare for their target roles. Complementing this, Hume AI served as the virtual interviewer, with a friendly and natural-sounding voice that made the interactions feel approachable and conversational. The combination of these two technologies created a seamless and effective interview simulation. Together, these features provided users with an authentic practice environment to build their confidence, as in the actual interview.

Additionally, developing these features came with its own challenges. Integrating external APIs required precise data flow management to ensure a smooth user experience. For example, Groq sometimes returned irrelevant questions in an extended format that was difficult to read, and the response time from the API could occasionally be slow in real time. To address these issues, we implemented input validation to pass in the job title as a parameter to the API calls and added a 3-second countdown timer to give users time to prepare before the virtual interview actually begins. This minor adjustment significantly improved the flow and usability of the system.

AI Call Screen

On the Hume AI side, we plan to fine-tune the voice responses to balance the professionalism and approachability of the AI to enhance the overall user experience further. This involves experimenting with different tone parameters, speech pacing, and conversational nuances to make the virtual interviewer feel more natural and engaging. We aim to create an interaction that mirrors a real-life interview.

Finally, solving these difficulties has once again proved the power of teamwork and effective communication in our team. In the hybrid environment, collaborations were the only way to keep in tune with each other and solve emerging problems efficiently.

Cross Functional Teams and Responsive Development

A significant consideration when integrating development within our project included the implementation of responsive development and cross functional teams which respond to various user issues preemptively. Through various meetings we discussed ways the user might experience pressure points on our platform and how we can mitigate those issues.

Responsive development ensures that the user experience is always at the forefront of development when integrating our design elements. To ensure this, our development team focused on creating front end components which are responsive to various screen sizes, widths and layouts. It was especially important for development to be in constant communication with our design team to ensure this is able to be accomplished with our respective design choices.

We aim to provide the user clear instructions on every page, making sure each page correctly links to the other when navigating through the platform. This was a bit of a challenge at first as there are issues we had to take into consideration such as how we can ensure the logging in process is smooth for the user. After various discussions, we came to the conclusion that integrating an authentication framework that would work for various email addresses would be the best approach to be responsive to different user choices.

Another crucial topic we had to take into consideration is if our platform would preemptively have questions ready in a database it chooses for the user or if the user would be able to generate questions specifically targeted for the role they are interviewing for. After much consideration with our design team, development chose to do the latter with the use of Groq as it would help facilitate a better user experience. It was a bit tricky at first to be able to integrate this AI capability within our backend framework but with persistence we were able to solve many issues. Having questions that are detailed to each user provides them more ease with using our platform and more personalized content which we wanted to highlight.

Finally, a session history page for Volare, backed by a well-structured database was implemented this quarter. This feature allows users to track their previous interview sessions, access detailed feedback, and review performance metrics. Responsive development was essential in ensuring that the page integrates seamlessly with the platform, offering a smooth and intuitive user experience across devices. By efficiently storing and retrieving session data, this enhancement empowers candidates to analyze their progress over time.

The ability to have responsive development is very important to our overall product. Highlighting a great user experience when using our platform is a sign of retainability on our users by being able to create solutions to possible pressure points. This requires a great deal of cross team collaboration and understanding to ensure our design and development can collectively provide the best features on our platform that the user is able to navigate with ease.

Session History Screen

Balancing Scope and Vision

Throughout the development of Volare, one of our most critical challenges was maintaining a clear, focused vision while managing the temptation to continuously expand our project’s scope. As an AI-powered interview preparation platform, we constantly encountered exciting potential features that could enhance the user experience. However, we quickly learned the importance of discipline in product development. By consistently returning to our core mission — creating an accessible, personalized interview preparation tool for entry-level job seekers — we were able to resist the urge to over-complicate our solution. We implemented a rigorous feature prioritization process that evaluated each potential addition against our primary user needs and project timeline. This approach allowed us to maintain agility, deliver a more targeted product, and avoid the common pitfall of scope creep that can derail many innovative projects. Our team learned that sometimes, doing a few things exceptionally well is more valuable than attempting to do everything moderately.

Next Steps

As we move forward into the next phase of development, our primary focus will be on refining Volare into a fully functional prototype ready for user testing. To start, we will continue enhancing our backend infrastructure to ensure that it can efficiently support the dynamic interview simulation experience. This will involve improving the integration with external APIs like Groq and HumeAI to ensure that responses are accurate, quick, and scalable. Optimizing these systems will be critical as we handle more complex requests, such as generating job-specific questions or managing multiple interview simulations at once.

Alongside backend improvements, we will refine the interview page to make it fully interactive and user-friendly. This will include enhancing the design and flow of the page, ensuring that the virtual interviewer is responsive and that users receive personalized feedback based on their responses. We aim to provide real-time feedback and suggestions, helping users better understand their strengths and areas for improvement during the simulation. Additionally, we will work on fine-tuning HumeAI’s voice modulation to make the interactions feel even more natural and approachable, creating an engaging experience for users.

Once the first prototype is ready, we will conduct extensive user testing to gather feedback on the platform’s usability, effectiveness, and overall experience. This phase will help identify any friction points in the user journey, whether in navigating the platform, understanding the interview questions, or interacting with the virtual interviewer. User feedback will be instrumental in prioritizing further improvements and fine-tuning the platform to meet user expectations.

Closing Remarks

As the fall quarter comes to a close, it’s been a remarkable sprint for Volare. We’ve made tremendous progress in laying the foundation for a platform that redefines interview preparation with cutting-edge AI. From designing adaptive feedback systems to integrating advanced question-generation models, every step has brought us closer to our vision.

Looking ahead, we’re excited to implement the next phases of development in the coming two quarters — fine-tuning our AI models, expanding the platform’s capabilities, and preparing for real-world testing with candidates. The journey is just beginning, and we can’t wait to see how Volare evolves to empower job seekers everywhere.