My involvement

Before I joined, Univariety was a primarily service providing company, without any established product team, let alone a design team. I was responsible to hire, mentor, and lead the eight member design team which included visual designers, frontend developers, and user research interns. Apart from managing the team, my responsibilities also included going out to schools for user research, meeting students, teachers, and parents, designing the flows and collaborating with then new established engineering and product team.   

Key results

We significantly reduced the drop-off rates from many important pages by almost 20%, as well as increased the number of online student signups by almost 70%.  It was only after six months into development and three months after launching did we find out that our wins were not actually sustainable for the business. Student traffic was increasing, but the conversions from online signups to paid members was barely moving. We did some more digging by having conversations with students, and their parents, to find out that we were trying to create a new behaviour in a space full of skepticism. Our rate of going up was not high enough, and hence, we failed 😞

We pivoted and changed the platform to an online service model, to be able to help more students by reducing costs. This time our users also included the counsellors, and teachers, who helped us shape the user-flows and processes. We were able to create and capture a new user segment of International Schools. We replaced in-person counselling with online counselling and training tools, and managed to reduce the cost of services by a whopping 85% 😱