01Problem
Learning, events, and community lived apart
Courses, events, and conversations were isolated destinations built around desktop navigation, while students were arriving on their phones.
Selected work Case study 02
N.S.L.S.
Making learning and community easier to carry with you
Leadership · Learning & community
The mobile experience
A clearer way to keep learning.
Course discovery and progress in one mobile view, with community and events a tap away.
The problem
Everything students needed existed. Nothing connected it on a phone.
02Why it mattered
Finishing a task was the end of the visit
Nothing pointed a student toward what came next, so completing a course or an event did not lead back into chapter life. Active, inactive, and new members all landed without orientation.
03Solution
One mobile-first path through the work
A single navigation model that connects learning, events, and community, placing the next meaningful action beside the task a student already came to finish.
Case overview
Students came for courses. The product gave them little reason to stay connected.
The National Society of Leadership and Success had learning content, events, and discussion spaces, but those experiences felt fragmented and were difficult to use on mobile. I helped redesign them as one mobile-first product where students could understand what to do next and stay involved with their chapter.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Company tenure
- 2022 to 2025
- Project
- 8 months in 2024
- Team
- Product manager, engineering lead, front-end developers, and QA
- Ownership
- Research synthesis, product direction, UX/UI, prototyping, and launch collaboration
01
One navigation model connects learning, events, and community.
02
Course access and progress move into the mobile flow.
03
Community actions sit next to the work students already came to complete.
Customer signal
The problem was not a lack of features. It was a lack of continuity.
Student interviews, product analytics, support themes, and feedback from a volunteer student group pointed to the same issue. Each part of the platform asked students to reorient themselves, especially on a phone.
01
Mobile access created friction
Students were trying to use the platform on phones, but the experience was still organized around desktop navigation and long, disconnected tasks.
02
Community felt separate from learning
Courses, events, and conversations lived as isolated destinations. Students did not have a clear reason to move between them or return after completing a task.
03
Different students needed different entry points
Active, inactive, and new members arrived with different levels of context. The experience needed to orient each group without adding more navigation.
Product direction
Design around the next meaningful action.
Rather than reproduce the desktop site in a smaller frame, we reorganized the product around what a student needed to continue: resume a course, find an event, respond to a conversation, or see what changed in their chapter.
One mobile navigation model
Learning, events, and community shared a predictable structure and vocabulary.
Clear progress and next steps
Students could see where they were, what remained, and how to continue without rebuilding context.
Community in the flow
Relevant discussions and chapter activity became part of the experience instead of a destination hidden in a forum.
One student journey
Make progress.
Keep the connection.
01 Learn
A next step, always in sight.
Discover a course, pick up where you left off, and see what comes next.
02 Connect
Community belongs in the flow.
Chapter conversations, events, and learning share the same everyday experience.
A shared navigation model keeps both experiences connected.
Validation and delivery
Test the flow, sequence the release, keep listening.
We reviewed prototypes with student volunteers, watched for places where navigation or language still required explanation, and worked with engineering to sequence the core journeys within the semester timeline. The goal was a coherent release, not the largest possible feature list.
Customer first
Student interviews and volunteer feedback shaped the information architecture and launch priorities.
A small, complete first release
A semester deadline forced clear sequencing. We focused on a useful end-to-end path through learning, events, and community instead of shipping isolated pieces.
Learn from the misses
Ideas that looked engaging in isolation did not always create a reason to return. We used that signal to connect community actions to learning and events.
Deliver a measurable result
We tracked adoption, participation, and course completion separately so a gain in one area could not hide a weakness in another.
Outcome
Separate measures, one clearer product.
Internal product analytics from the first three months after launch showed gains across mobile use, community participation, and learning completion. Each metric is presented in its original unit.
75%
New users on mobile
During the first three months after launch, 75% of new users accessed the platform through the mobile experience.
+41%
Forum activity
Internal product analytics showed a 41% increase in forum activity during the same three-month post-launch window.
27% to 62%
Course completion
Course completion rose from 27% to 62% during the three-month post-launch period after classes became accessible on the go.
Reflection
Connection became useful when it supported a real student goal.
The early temptation was to treat engagement as a destination and add more community features. The stronger direction was to connect conversations, events, and courses around the next action a student already cared about.
If I repeated the project, I would segment the outcome data by new, active, and returning students earlier. The overall gains are encouraging, but cohort-level behavior would make the product decisions more precise.