reframing a feature launch to save the mentor experience.
Sole UX/UI Designer
Product design | Cross-functional strategy
7 weeks (Apr - May 2025)
1 CTO, 1 PM, 3 Engineers
Internship at Curious Cardinals
context.
Curious Cardinals (CC) matches mentors to mentees and their guardians for academic and passion-based mentorships.
The edtech platform makes mentorship easy for mentors and facilitates communication about the mentee's progress with guardians. As the sole UX designer at the time, I improved the visual treatment of an existing task management system and designed a new feature for mentors.
overview.
What Curious Cardinals Needed
User flow and design for Progress Updates—a new type of task that mentors complete to update guardians about a student's progress.
What I Did
Using an existing design system, I identified challenges and prerequisites to designing Progress Updates and redesigned an existing task management system for 650+ users to ease the introduction of Progress Updates.
Key Outcomes
A streamlined task completion and visually enhanced task queue
Post-session task flow: what was shipped
Components for a new feature that's one of the highest customer touch points
Progress Update task: what was designed and handed off
Impact on Product
These designs were shipped in June 2025 as part of the overall platform redesign.
Increase retention metrics by converting guardian-driven reactive fulfillment to mentor/platform-driven proactive fulfillment.
Set the stage for a new touchpoint distinct from sessions, with the potential to bring a mentor-guardian communication channel online that is both billable and data-rich.
Metrics coming soon!
research.
TL;DR
CC wanted to increase mentors-guardian interaction by proposing a new feature called Progress Updates but my audit revealed existing bottlenecks that prevented the introduction of a new feature.
Existing Bottlenecks
Progress Updates would depend on the timely completion of existing tasks — namely, Attendance and Session Notes. But there were 2 problems:
10.3 days
Why is this a problem?
Progress Updates will be released every 4 Sessions. They use data from the 4 subsequent Session Notes. When Session Notes are delayed, Progress Updates end up using inaccurate data.
13.4%
% of sessions without AI notetaker
Why is this a problem?
Relying on mentors to write and send Session Notes isn't efficient when an AI-powered transcriber reliably produces Session Notes, which can then be leveraged by Progress Updates.
User Flow Diagrams
Currently, when mentors have overdue tasks, problems arise, impacting the end customer—the guardians.
My audit of the status quo uncovered key bottlenecks in the post-session task flow. Delays in task completion and inconsistent AI tool usage were impacting the greater mentor fulfillment cycle.
Identifying the Root Cause
Lags in post-session task completion were due to Attendance and Session Notes being decoupled as separate tasks.
The current design of Attendance and Session Notes tasks
Without CC Notetaker, the delay of Session Notes is even longer, because manual entry requires more effort from the user.
If that status quo persists, introducing Progress Updates is more harmful than helpful, because
Progress Updates doesn't have up-to-date accurate Session data to work off
Non-chronological completion of Session Notes makes Progress Updates also go out of order.
strategy.
TL;DR
I tackled the problem in 2 steps, enabling Curious Cardinals to introduce Progress Updates with lower risk to the existing platform's operation.
Steps
Signals of Success
Couple Attendance and Session Notes into a 2-step post-session task to enforce completion
Increased completion rates of Attendance and Session Notes & decreased average time to complete Session Notes
Design the new Progress Update task and flow as a 3-step post-session task
Ticketing and shipping the feature, as well as launching email-based Progress Updates to guardians
Decline in follow-up questions from guardians about session progress
design.
step 1. couple Attendance and Session Notes.
Attendance and Session Notes
Currently, Attendance is completed in a modal and Session Notes in a drawer. The transition between the two is jarring.
The current Attendance-to-Session Notes task flow
To enforce linear completion, I designed a 2-step modal, merging Attendance and Session Notes into a single component.
Post-Session Task Card
I merged Attendance and Session Notes into single task cards that unlock only if preceding ones were complete; otherwise, mentors selectively complete all Attendances and skip and delay Session Notes.
Explorations of a multi-step post-session task card
I flagged the benefits and tradeoffs of the merge, especially with Engineering constraints in mind.
Benefits: frames both tasks as mandatory and paired, adjusting Mentors' mental models
Tradeoffs: greater lift for Eng. because the system would need to regularly run a query that checks that status of transcript processing in order to indicate the readiness of Session Notes
User Flow Diagrams
Using a locked, multi-step task card, I resolved the existing blockers in the unhappy path.
😔 path
step 2. design a Progress Update.
Product Requirements
A Progress Update's key difference from the 2-step post-session task is the review of Milestones and Artifacts from the past several Sessions.
How the 3-step post-session task compares against the 2-step post-session task
Wireframing
I explored ways to introduce Milestones/Artifacts after Attendance and Session Notes in the 3-step post-session task.
Explorations of Milestone/Artifact components within the post-session modal
Cross-Functional Collaboration
I documented the designs for feedback from the CTO and 3 engineers.
Ultimately, one Eng. constraint was having to use existing Milestone/Artifact components that pre-exist in other parts of the platform. With this in mind, I delivered final designs.
Design documentation and feedback with the CC Product team on Notion
outcomes.
Multi-step post-session task cards that display status of individual tasks and locks to enforce chronological completion
Post-session task flow: what was designed and handed off
Design of a new mentor task: Progress Update
Progress Update task: what was designed and handed off
reflections.
As a single product designer, I had immense ownership that taught me how the influence of design on the greater organization.
For the past 3 years, Curious Cardinals lacked a product designer. As a result, I was able to reframe product changes as thoughtful experiential improvements, rather than just quick technical fixes,
Working with a startup means priorities are constantly shifting, but it trained my ability to move with high velocity and think at a systems level, because the priorities are all interconnected.
Designing with such ambiguity forced me to think long-term too, evaluating solutions based on their adaptivity and scalability.