curious cardinals: redesigning mentor engagement
ROLE
Sole UX/UI Designer
SKILLS
Product design
Cross-functional collaboration
DURATION
7 weeks & ongoing
Apr - May 2025
TEAM
1 CTO, 1 Product Manager, 3 Engineers at Curious Cardinals, an edtech startup
CONTEXT
Curious Cardinals' core product offering is passion-based learning and mentorship for K-12 students.
The edtech startup was redesigning how mentors evaluate sessions with students and engage with their guardians. As an intern and 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 to ease the introduction of Progress Updates.
KEY OUTCOMES
Components for the new Progress Update feature
A Progress Update is a 3-step post-session task composed of steps to review Attendance, Session Notes, and Milestones/Artifacts. All three are bundled into a monthly summary emailed to guardians.
Prototype of streamline task completion and visually enhanced task queue
I proposed major UX decisions (e.g., locking tasks) to improve task completion rates and improved visual treatment to the task queue UI.
IMPACT ON PRODUCT
These designs are under consideration for ticketing during the summer of 2025 as part of the overall platform redesign.
As a result of this project, I was offered a paid internship position for another quarter, and I'm currently the sole Product Designer at Curious Cardinals.
I delivered my designs to the PM, who presented them to 650+ mentors during the 2025 Summer Orientation product updates.
Screen captures from the virtual summer orientation session (06.08.2025)
research.
TL;DR
CC wanted to increase mentors-guardian interaction by proposing a new feature called Progress Updates but discovered pre-existing issues that may hinder success of the feature.
I asked questions about mentors' current behaviors and uncovered key bottlenecks in the post-session task flow, revealing how delays in task completion and inconsistent AI tool usage impact the greater mentor fulfillment cycle.
PRODUCT PREREQUISITES
Progress Updates require timely completion of Attendance and Session Notes after every session.
Because Progress Updates will occur every 4 sessions, they depend on prior session data, especially the Session Notes.
Through an analysis of task completion data, we found 2 obstacles to meeting this prerequisite:
Mentors take an average of
10.3 days
after a session to complete Session Notes.
Why is this a problem?
Of all emails sent to guardians, Session Notes have the highest open rate — a clear signal that it's the most interacted email touch point. Delayed delivery of Session Notes doesn't reflect well on mentors and CC.
13.4% of sessions
don't use CC Notetaker, an AI-powered recall bot, for recording and transcript generation.
Why is this a problem?
Because the CC Notetaker produces better-quality notes at a more reliable cadence than Mentors’ manual entry. By relying on mentors to send manual Session Notes to guardians, CC creates a point of failure.
USER FLOW DIAGRAMS
Currently with the way the platform is designed, the happy path (left) presents no glaring issues; however, the unhappy path (right) creates challenges with how the platform times its communications with guardians.
😊 path
😔 path
IDENTIFYING THE ROOT CAUSE
I deduced that the lag in post-session task completion was due to Attendance and Session Notes being decoupled as separate tasks in the queue:
The current design of Attendance and Session Notes tasks
On average, Attendance is competed within 20 minutes of a Session’s conclusion since mentor pay is directly dependent on that.
To mentors, Session Notes are a lower priority and the lack of enforcement enables them to be completed in bulk after deadlines or not completed at all.
Without CC Notetaker, the delay of Session Notes is even greater, because manual entry requires more effort from the user.
If that status quo were to persist, introducing Progress Updates could be harmful than helpful, because
Progress Updates would not have up-to-date accurate Session data to work off, and
the ability to complete Session Notes non-chronologically renders Progress Updates also out of order.
Why not have CC Notetaker auto-join and Session Notes auto-send?
CC takes the approach of keeping a human review step in its AI-generated content
Other constraints: privacy and data concerns from parents
ideation & strategy.
TL;DR
I tackled the problem in 3 steps, helping the team reach a point where introducing Progress Updates would be less disruptive to the existing system.
STEPS
SIGNALS OF SUCCESS
Redesign the tasks queue UI to better use pixel real estate and communicate Task status
Scroll depth / visible task density (i.e. how many tasks fit above the fold)
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
A decreased need for follow-up questions from guardians about session progress
design.
redesign the task queue UI.
IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS IN THE CURRENT DESIGN
The original task queue design causes cognitive fatigue due to unclear visual cues, inefficient layout, and critical information being pushed below the fold.
A viewport-sized capture of the CC platform home page where the task queue lives
I redesigned a task queue with task cards that use color and space more purposefully and demonstrates more visual consistency.
A close-up of the current task queue, showing task cards in their various states
A redesigned task queue
New teaching opportunities are a special type of task that also needed a redesign
couple Attendance and Session Notes.
IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS IN THE CURRENT DESIGN
Currently, Attendance is completed in a modal and Session Notes in a drawer. The transition between the two is jarring.
Moreover, despite being itemized into separate tasks, submitting Attendance automatically opens Session Notes. In effect, the platform encourages mentors back-to-back completion but leaves room for mentors to exit mid-way, which is one of the reasons that Session Notes are delayed.
The current Attendance-to-Session Notes task flow
To enforce linear completion, it was important to merge the tasks.
I designed a 2-step modal, merging Attendance and Session Notes in a single component. The decision to use modals was due to Eng.'s shift away from drawers to modals to frame it as a quick and easy task.
Wireframing the 2-step modal
The 2-step modal at higher fidelity
POST-SESSION TASK CARD
I recommended merging Attendance and Session Notes into single task cards that unlock only if preceding ones were complete, because delayed Session Notes were attributed to mentors selectively completing all Attendances but skipping Session Notes.
Explorations of a multi-step post-session task card
I flagged the benefits and tradeoffs, especially with Eng. 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
Due to the upcoming addition of Progress Updates, the team decided to pursue my recommendation for 2-step post-session task cards.
As a result of these redesign conversations CC decided to:
require mentors to complete post-session tasks in the order that Sessions happened, locking future ones until previous ones were complete
merge Attendance and Session Notes into 1 task card
auto-send AI-generated Session Notes after 72 hours
dismiss Session Notes altogether if CC Notetaker was absent and mentors haven't written them, because delayed Session Notes underscore the mentor's lack of promptness and harm guardians’ perception of the mentorship
A diagram outlining the dependencies between the task card and the task itself
USER FLOW DIAGRAMS
With the redesign, both the happy (left) and unhappy path (right) present no glaring issues.
😊 path
😔 path
design a Progress Update.
PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS
A Progress Update's key difference from the 2-step post-session task is the reviewing of Milestones and Artifacts from the past several Sessions. These Milestones and Artifacts, along with Session Notes, serve as a more substantial monthly summary for parents.
This would serve retention metrics by converting guardian-driven reactive fulfillment to mentor/platform-driven proactive fulfillment.
It also set the stage for a new touchpoint distinct from mentor-student sessions, with the potential to bring a mentor-guardian communication channel online that is both billable and data-rich.
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
How the 3-step post-session task compares against the 2-step post-session task
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
deliverables.
Prototype in CC's testing environment
Prototype and recommended UI treatment for a visually enhanced task queue and home page
Multi-step post-session task cards that display status of individual tasks and locks to enforce chronological completion
Design of a new mentor task: Progress Update