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CYCLOPES

Designing trust for an algorithm that picks your school

Cyclopes landing page — Start Your Journey hero, search, and the discovery illustration
Cyclopes search results — 300 matches for the United States, each school carrying its QS rank, acceptance rate and tuition, with save and compare controls
Cyclopes course profile — Aeronautical Engineering MEng, with a course summary and the key stats made comparable
Cyclopes on mobile — a university profile and the matched results, with add-to-list, compare and contact-consultant

Traditional education consulting is deeply personal: families put their trust in a counsellor sitting across the desk. Cyclopes was asking them to place that trust in an algorithm instead — to hand over a teenager's next four years to software from a brand nobody had heard of. The design problem was never the interface.

Fig. 01 / Artifact · 2019
Cyclopes illustration cast — the monocled counsellor gesturing toward two students, drawn instead of photographed
Cyclopes illustration — the counsellor sending two students off on their journey, plane and Cyclopes eye in the scene
Cyclopes illustration — the counsellor handing a student a result, beside a product screen
Cyclopes spot illustration — the eye mark and the counsellor at a laptop with a message
The moment you show a person, you promise a person.

So we shipped a site with no photographs of people on it. The category default is smiling graduates and a counsellor mid-handshake, but the moment you show a person, you promise a person — and Cyclopes is self-service. Photography would have bought trust on the landing page and spent it in the product. Illustration kept the brand warm without lying about what was behind the screen.

Fig. 02 / Comparison · 2019
Cyclopes character exploration — two professional counsellor versions beside the literal one-eyed giant, which read heavy and slow
Mythic silhouette, professional posture. The literal version read slow.

The cyclops came from the client; working out what it could mean was mine. Most people file him under monster, but the older sources have the Cyclopes forging Zeus's thunderbolt — craftsmen, one eye aimed at one thing. That became the brand: single focus, one answer pulled out of thousands. The tension was that mythic giant and credible professional fight each other on the page, and drawn literally the character felt heavy and a little slow.

Fig. 03 / Screen · 2019
Cyclopes questionnaire — the guided onboarding across location, interest and academic-result steps
The only place the promise got tested, and the one number I never asked for.

I shipped this before I had learned to ask for numbers. The questionnaire was the only place the promise actually got tested, and I don't know its completion rate — the one metric that decides whether the rest mattered. If I ran it again, drop-off per question would be the first thing I'd instrument, and I'd expect it to move the design more than any moodboard did.

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