ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
1 Product Manager
1 Tech Lead
TIMELINE
7 Months
SURFACE
WebApp
A Question Bank Repository System that was made General Availability Product with features like User Roles, Permissions, file system with search indexing and more.
Inspera Item Bank
5 MINUTE READ
30s → 7s
A 4x reduction in task retrieval time for daily users
6+
feature integrations in a dashboard thus proposed
A11Y
Fully compliant to WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines
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 Plot
04
Core decisions
03
What was broken
05
Impact
Decision 05 : 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.
Decision 04 : 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.
Decision 03 : Program Card designed for scanning
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
Decision 02 : Simplifying onboarding and reducing friction
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.
Decision 01 : A new design system, GRiDS (GradRight intelligence 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.
TOKEN + COMPONENT DESIGN SYSTEM, WITH AN AI HUMAN IN LOOP INTERACTION APPROACH AND AI MASCOT "GRADDIE".
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 AI matching engine, 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 vertical by vertical, while not having the design for users moving across all of 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
The idea came out of an internal hackathon. I pitched one 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 students, 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 for students without charging students a single penny.
We split ownership by genuine interest: I designed GRiDS and its component work along with a team member, and co-created Graddie character. Then rive became my friend for doing motion, and the rest split the verticals between them.
TIMELINE
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
02
Leading the Design
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.
24.6 → 51.3%
Onboarding completion, driven mostly by the 6-paths-to-3-steps redesign.
↓ errors
Elaborate and well thought Information Architecture ensuring Fewer navigation errors in usability testing.
1 Design System
GRiDS ensuring a consistency across all product verticals, having the GenZ aura in cohesiveness.
350x
KYC document submission, the gate to loan financing.
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.
