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Senior Product Designer leading the Study Groups initiative, driving research synthesis, feature strategy, interaction design, and design system expansion.
Applied behavior driven product design to prioritize lightweight interactive tools, increasing Study Groups engagement by 61% and strengthening Numerade’s long term retention strategy.
Numerade's platform thrives on providing students with valuable academic resources, yet engagement and content contributions have remained a challenge. To address this, the team proposed the feature Study Groups. This initiative was designed to offer students a collaborative environment where they could discuss academic topics, share resources, and seek support, ultimately increasing user engagement and content uploads.
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What I owned
Objectives → Design Framing
KPIs & Measurement Strategy
Engagement KPIs
Study Groups aimed to shift students from passive consumption to active learning. Without participation, the feature wouldn’t succeed.
These metrics would validate whether the design lowered the barrier to contribution and encouraged active behaviors, serving as early indicators of value before long term retention data.
Retention KPIs
Study Groups needed to increase platform stickiness beyond just homework help.
Retention would show whether collaborative learning became part of users’ regular study routines rather than a novelty.
Adoption KPIs
Broad adoption was required for Study Groups to meaningfully impact Numerade’s ecosystem.
Adoption would confirm the experience was intuitive, discoverable, and valuable beyond a small power user group.
Research Inputs
Insight
Students want help now, not later →
Large, open groups quickly become noisy →
Fear of asking “dumb” questions is real →
Trust matters when sharing notes/exams →
Design Implication
Prioritize real time chat over asynchronous forums
Start with smaller, topic based groups
Design low friction, informal chat experiences
Strong moderation & clear group ownership needed
How Objectives translated to Features
Chat Rooms 🗨️
Real time chat directly supports peer-to-peer learning and increases engagement.
Optimized for momentum, not perfection. Learning happens fastest when friction is low.
Collaboration Tools 🛠️
Students need lightweight ways to react, respond, and share without derailing conversations.
Prioritized behavior shaping over feature completeness.
Moderation & Safety 🛡️
Open collaboration only works if students feel safe and content remains relevant.
Designed guardrails that protect users without discouraging contribution.
Content Discovery & Sharing 🔍
Shared notes, lectures, and exams extend Numerade’s learning ecosystem beyond video answers.
Optimized for quality signals, not raw volume.
Personalization & Group Admin ⚙️
Different study groups have different norms, subjects, and engagement levels.
Designed for scalability through ownership, not centralized control.
Key Constraints
Engineering Bandwidth →
Moderation Scalability →
Existing Numerade Architecture →
Risk of launching an unproven social feature →
Key Tradeoffs & Limitations
Scoped MVP features to validate behavior before expanding
Reused existing design system components to move faster
Designed extensible interaction patterns that could evolve
Prioritized features that changed behavior, not just UI
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Component Library & System Thinking
Study Groups required a scalable component system to support real-time collaboration. I designed reusable components for chat, reactions, threads, uploads, content previews, moderation, and system states, all built to integrate seamlessly with Numerade’s existing design system.
Rather than designing one-off screens, I focused on composable components that could scale across different group types, reduce future design and engineering overhead, and enable faster iteration without sacrificing consistency.
To ship quickly and responsibly, I prioritized a focused set of interactions over feature completeness, accepted higher moderation complexity to enable real-time engagement, and optimized for extensibility rather than visual novelty. These decisions allowed us to validate core collaboration behaviors early while leaving room to evolve the system based on real usage.
Solution
Explore Study Groups
Users can search for any study group by entering keywords related to subjects, topics, or group names.
Each result includes key details such as the group name, description and number of active members.
Students can either join immediately or preview the group before joining.
My Groups
Displays all the groups a student has actively joined, sorted by recent activity to highlight ongoing discussions.
Curated suggestions based on the student’s academic interests, past participation, and trending topics within Numerade’s platform.
Messages
Users can send text messages, images, links, and file attachments to share valuable resources and information efficiently.
Users can react to a message with an emoji.
Users can react to a report inappropriate content or flag/spam for moderator review.
To keep discussions organized, threaded replies allow students to respond directly to specific messages, ensuring key points are easily traceable.
Important messages, such as exam tips, group schedules, or key files, can be pinned for easy reference.
Creating a Study Group
Users can initiate group creation from the "My Groups" section or directly from the Study Groups homepage.
Users can invite peers by sharing a direct invite link or selecting from their network within Numerade.
Video Prototype
Outcome & Impact
Engagement Impact
These metrics validated that interaction-first design successfully reduced friction to contribution and encouraged sustained participation.
Retention Impact
Retention data showed collaborative learning became part of students’ regular study routines rather than a novelty feature.
Adoption Impact
Adoption metrics confirmed the experience was intuitive, discoverable, and valuable beyond a small power user group.
If I had more time...
Embed Ace into Study Groups to summarize discussions, suggest next steps, and surface relevant content at key moments of confusion.
Evolve uploads into a searchable group library so high quality notes and resources persist beyond real time chat.
Introduce lo friction ways to prioritize topics, encourage participation, and reinforce helpful behaviors without incentivizing noise.
Conclusion
This project reinforced how I approach product design, to start with behavior, not features. By designing interaction first systems within real constraints, I helped shift Study Groups from passive content consumption to active collaboration, driving meaningful engagement and repeat use for Numerade.
