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ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TEAM
4 Designers
2 Product Managers
2 Tech Leads
TIMELINE
3 Months
SURFACE
Mobile and WebApp
A 0-1 Design Execution for GradRight SuperApp, that is a tool to funnel the right university and course for Aspirants of Higher Studies abroad.
GradRight SuperApp
9 MINUTE READ
An AI-powered one stop solution for everything masters abroad.
B2C
FINTECH
EDTECH
AI NATIVE
2x
Improvement in User Onboarding.
95%
implementation of GRiDS design system across products.
~4x
Increase in KYC submissions for edu-loan userflow.
Product Verticals for SuperApp version 1.0
SelectRight
Aspirants funnels down the right university and course based on merit and preference.
FundRight
Aspirant applies for education loan after getting accepted to his/her desired University.
InsureRight
Aspirant applies for mandatory Insurance prior to getting enrolled for the semester.
Accommodation
GradRight helps student secure an accomodation through partnership channels.
Refinance
Post Graduates can apply to refinance their education loan for optimal interest rates
ConnectED
A Forum for students to discuss anything related to studying masters abroad.
01
The Spark
By the time the Superapp got greenlit, the problems were well understood, and we just got a reason to fix them together now. There were Six verticals, 6 pods, six inconsistent visual languages. They didn't look like they belonged to the same company.
Onboarding was losing 76% of the students who showed interest. Three out of four people who opened the app to find a university never made it to a shortlisting page. GradRight's proprietary university dataset combined with LLM, genuinely one of GradRight's strongest assets, had low visibility in the products. Verticals were web-first, a mismatch for a target audience that uses multiple apps a day and hardly a browser tab. The microcopy, the visuals, the interaction, the pacing, none of it read like it was designed for someone in their twenties who are about to make one of the biggest decisions of their life.
None of these were separate problems. They were symptoms of an ecosystem that had grown on a per-vertical basis, missing the point of designing for users moving across the verticals.
In short..
76% onboarding dropoff
6 verticals, 6 Visual Languages
Low AI visibility
Web-only design
Tone didn't read GenZ
Examples of older web-app design
04
Team management
03
What was broken
Compact Design Team
A compact team meant we had to pull our weight, however, it presented me with an opportunity for a closely knit team that worked effectively and efficiently.
UX of SuperApp
The idea of a seamless ecosystem experience, blurring the lines between the verticals was pushed for the second release as it required substantial backend re-work.
Design System
Lack of a robust tokenized design system also reflected in the gap between design hand-off vs what was implemented. This increased rework and front-end effort.
Scope for Backend
The backend was constrained to the existing tech and features for the 1.0 release. However, I took advantage of any leeway that I could find to improve UX of the product.
GradRight wanted to be prepared for the upcoming summer season for academic year 2026. Therefore, the app was to be launched within a span of 3 months, starting November 2025. Spirit was high, deadline was real and so were the challenges.
02
Constraints
24.6% → 51.3%
Onboarding completion, driven mostly by the 6-paths-to-3-steps redesign.
Product integration
Elaborate and planned Information Architecture enabled verticals to be a part of an ecosystem.
95%
Implementation of GRiDS design system across the products ensuring cohesiveness and consistency.
350x
KYC document submission, the gate to loan financing.
Relentless pursuit of perfection, bringing the team, and stakeholders back again and again to the context and vision of the product, and constantly empathizing with what we should ask of a student was where most of the energy got invested.
The idea was born out of an internal hackathon. I, alongside a team member (team of 2) pitched one singular app holding the entire journey together - university matching based on preferences, admission support, financing of education loan, future plans to include accommodation, insurance, refinance post graduation and community for User Retention. It won enough conviction that when the VP of Product and Engineering greenlit it, I was asked to lead the design.
Why is it not "Counseling"?
MARKET CONTEXT
~10 lakh Indian students aim to study abroad yearly; most traditional offline counselors earn 10-15% commission from the promotional universities and upto 5% commission as counseling fees, or from the universities they place students into. A public university that pays zero commission often gets called "too competitive" over a mid-tier private one that pays.
GradRight's bet: replace incentive-driven advice with data-driven university matching, put the best interest rates for financing, below industry insurance fees, and industry leading refinancing as services so the platform becomes the one stop solution without charging students a single penny.
05
The Milestones
MODULES
Design System
Introduction
Onboarding (SelectRight/FundRight/InsureRight)
Events and Registration
Navigation Bar
Notifications and activity
Profile
Settings
Community
Program Description Document (PDD)
FundRight Dashboard
Homescreen
Referrals and Rewards
Mascot and Motion
OWNED
GUIDED
CO-CREATED
I had split ownership by genuine interest and complexity, with me planning and scoping design goals with Product Managers and the Tech Lead, communicating design concerns of the team whenever it arose, and encouraging my team to ask questions, convey their ideas to stakeholders and me freely. The verticals were split further according to the sections of the App for production clarity, which we undertook accordingly.
TIMELINE VISUALISATION
Motion Graphics
AI Mascot Design
Building the rest of GRIDS
Design execution of Product Verticals
Foundation of GRIDS Design System
Wireframe Demo
Brainstorming
Discovery
MONTH 1
MONTH 2
MONTH 3
The team stayed consistent across six verticals in three months daily via daily standups, open-door policy, bi-weekly critique session with stakeholders, a weekly overview of Figma review file for GRiDS, a "component implementation" process into GRiDS, and the rule to combine upto 3 components if necessary.
06
Impact
1st core milestone : A new design system GRiDS (GradRight Design System)
Patching the old components would have been faster, but it wouldn't have fixed how the product felt. Students trusting us with money they'd saved for years needed something, conversational than a compliance form to build trust and familiarity. We also had to be careful with how AI showed up in the language, or in UI. So the design system framed AI as an assistant offering its best thinking, and not enforcing itself.
5th Milestone : Holding Graddie back, tastefully
It's tempting to put a new mascot everywhere once it exists. We chose not to. Graddie shows up in onboarding and a few key moments, and steps aside the rest of the time. This is a decision that involves a family's savings and years of planning, and AI needed to feel like help offered alongside human judgment, not a replacement for it.
4th Milestone : ConnectED forum as a reason to come back
In our research, students trusted a senior who'd already been through it more than any reminder we could send. We already had a community earlier, so we brought it back to life.
3rd Milestone : Program Card re-designed for scanning
Simplification of the product was throughout all user flows, UX and UI. For example, the old card tried to show everything at once, and it showed. Going back to how people actually scan a list, we kept only what tends to decide a second look, cost, match score, waiver tags, and moved the rest one tap deeper. Getting the team and stakeholders comfortable with showing less took more convincing than the visual work itself.
Before
After
2nd Milestone : Simplifying and streamlining onboarding
Graddie's conversational and expressive onboarding experience approach.
FundRight and SelectRight onboarded separately, repeating the same questions twice. SelectRight's version also led with "which country?" instead of first asking where a student actually was in their journey, which is what the drop-off was really telling us. We moved personalization to the background, asked fewer details and cut the first onboarding query to only three responses.
Being in a startup while undertaking a 0-1 design execution, there was a certain level of ambiguity despite product requirements and timeline being set. To weave through the ambiguity and transforming it to tangible outcomes, required an action plan and key decisions.
Reflection
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When you build from scratch, there is ambiguity in play. Every detail is a decision, and alignment of design team to the vision of the product becomes ever-so crucial.
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The thing I got better at was holding two levels at once. Zooming into a single field on the application form, then zooming out to ask whether the whole roadmap still made sense.
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I learned that consistency matters. You build it in early, through a system and a shared understanding, so the team moves fast without drifting apart. This also makes it easier to iterate quickly.
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If there is one line that sums up the job, it is this; My work was a balance between creation and decision.
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