Designerrs — Learning Experience Design
Redesigning India's fastest-growing design school platform for 40,000 learners across 8 cities
Designerrs had outgrown its first platform. With 40,000 learners across 8 cities and an expanding online program, the original course delivery system was built for 500 students, not 50,000. Sessions were hosted across four disconnected tools. Mentors and students were managing relationships over WhatsApp. Portfolio submissions came in via Google Forms.
Understanding How Designers Learn
Design education is fundamentally different from technical courses. Progress isn't linear, motivation is highly social, and feedback quality matters more than feedback speed. Before touching a single screen, I spent three weeks doing research:
Student Diary Studies
12 students across beginner, intermediate, and career-switcher cohorts kept weekly diaries for four weeks. The biggest theme: learners felt 'invisible' to their mentors between live sessions.
Mentor Interviews
8 mentors were spending 40%+ of their time on admin (finding submissions, tracking progress, coordinating sessions) rather than actually mentoring. The tools were working against them.
Drop-off Analysis
Cohort drop-off peaked at Week 3 and Week 7 — right before the two major project submissions. Students who hadn't shared work-in-progress were far more likely to disengage entirely.
Platform Redesign
Unified Learner Dashboard
Consolidated sessions, assignments, feedback, and community into a single dashboard. The 'Today' card shows exactly what needs to happen today — no more tab-switching between four apps.
Work-in-Progress Sharing
Added a lightweight 'WIP post' — a 3-tap flow to share a screenshot or Figma link with your cohort. WIP posts receive peer comments and mentor reactions before formal submission, dramatically reducing Week 3 and Week 7 drop-off.
Mentor Dashboard
A dedicated mentor view with a submission queue, inline feedback tools (annotate on Figma frames, voice notes, structured rubric scoring), and a cohort-health heatmap showing which students are at risk of falling behind.
Portfolio Builder
An integrated portfolio tool that turns project submissions into a public portfolio page. Students graduate with a live, shareable portfolio — not a pile of Figma files. Template-based but deeply customisable.
Community & dtalks
Redesigned the community space around Designerrs' signature 'dtalks' format — informal weekly conversations with practitioners. Live event pages, recordings, and discussion threads all in one place.
The platform now feels like it was built for someone who actually wants to become a designer, not someone who just wants to tick boxes.
— Student, Designerrs UX Programme, Cohort 24
Visual Design
Designerrs' brand is vibrant, warm, and community-driven — a deliberate contrast to the cold, corporate aesthetic of most ed-tech platforms. The redesign uses a purple/orange primary palette, generous whitespace, and expressive illustration to feel energising, not institutional. Every empty state, error screen, and loading skeleton was designed to be encouraging rather than neutral.
The platform launched in August 2022 and handled the company's largest-ever cohort intake (1,200 students in a single batch) without any support escalation related to the platform — compared to 340 tickets in the equivalent period the year prior.
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