0-to-1 product design for an AI-powered college counseling platform, helping students navigate admissions through personalized guidance, competitiveness insights, essay support, and a more accessible planning experience.
Product Design
0-to-1 Products
Project Overview
Cledge began with a simple but uncomfortable question: what happens to students who have the ambition to go to college, but not the guidance to get there? As founding designer and solo product designer, I translated the early product vision into a clear, usable, and scalable digital experience for students navigating college admissions.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
1.5 Years
Type
0–1 Design
AI Product
Edtech
Startup
Designed and launched four core MVP features for Cledge’s first public release.
Recognized as a Top 14% IBM MassChallenge company and selected for Microsoft for Startups.
Choosing courses, exploring colleges, and preparing applications involves decisions that build on one another. Yet students approach this process with very different levels of support.
Public school counselors spend about 21% of their time on postsecondary planning, compared with 47% in private schools. In schools with the highest poverty levels, counselors devote less than 20% of their time to college planning.
Access to guidance is also associated with different educational outcomes. NCES data shows that 83% of students who met with a counselor about college enrolled within three years of finishing high school, compared with 60% of those who did not.
Cledge began with a simple ambition: make personalized college guidance accessible beyond the families who can afford private counseling. We envisioned an AI-driven platform where every student could receive guidance relevant to their background and goals.
For me, this raised a design question: How could we help students understand their options and take their next step with confidence?
We conducted multiple rounds of research throughout the project, combining surveys, in-depth interviews, usability testing, and competitive analysis.
Early research explored how students approached college preparation and accessed guidance. We examined how they searched for information and decided what to prioritize, while reviewing how existing products organized admissions resources and counseling support.
As the product developed, research and testing helped us revisit specific design directions. We explored how learning should be structured, what students should encounter on the dashboard, and how personalized insights and AI support could fit into their preparation.
Our early concepts made the vision tangible. They also exposed questions that the idea of a “personal counselor” alone could not answer: how much direction should the product provide, and how much should students have to figure out for themselves?.
The initial experience brought together a resource library, planning tools, student metrics, and AI chat. Each addressed part of college preparation, but connecting them into a guided experience required us to reconsider how they worked.
Four decisions shaped that evolution.
Our early learning experience made admissions content searchable and easy to browse. Students could filter topics and explore resources, but the interface still left an important decision to them: where should they begin?
Students seeking direction still needed to assemble their own path through the information.
Therefore, I redesigned the experience as a personalized learning pathway organized around grade levels and the application timeline. The platform could provide a starting point and a sense of progression, alongside the resources themselves.
An early direction combined the dashboard and learning pathway. As we refined their roles, we needed to decide what deserved attention when a student first entered the product.
I separated the two experiences. The dashboard became a place to review tasks and access relevant tools, while the learning pathway provided a dedicated space for working through admissions topics.
That separation did not settle the dashboard design immediately. We explored several versions, beginning with feature introductions and a to-do list, then emphasizing tasks more strongly before incorporating recent activity.
Each iteration reconsidered how much explanation, direction, and context the page should provide. The dashboard’s role became clearer: help students orient themselves before moving into a specific activity.
Student metrics helped students understand their academic and extracurricular standing. Early insights, however, offered limited detail about what they could do with that information.
I developed a more detailed, personalized experience that paired assessments of competitiveness with clearer suggestions for improvement. Students could review individual activity metrics and update their profiles as their experiences developed.
The design challenge was to connect an assessment with a useful next step. Showing students where they stood created an opportunity to help them consider how to move forward.
We began designing the AI chatbot shortly after ChatGPT emerged, but our early approach still reflected familiar customer-support patterns. Suggested questions, selectable options, and onboarding instructions taught students how to ask for college admissions guidance.
It looked like an AI counselor, yet the interaction felt closer to a virtual support agent. As AI conversations evolved, we recognized the limitations of that approach: it felt scripted and offered too little room for a student’s individual situation.
Moving toward a more open conversation addressed part of the problem, but raised a bigger question: if students could already talk to ChatGPT, what would make Cledge worth choosing?
We kept the chatbot as a convenient way to access guidance within Cledge, without switching to another tool. At the same time, we began exploring where our own resources could support a more distinctive experience.
One opportunity was college essay support. We began designing an AI Essay Tool that brought categorized feedback and relevant essay examples into the writing process. This opened a new direction for Cledge, extending personalized support beyond the chat interface.
Curious about the AI Essay Tool and how the project evolved? Get in touch, and I’d be happy to share more details.
I’m always happy to chat about design, AI, marketing, and new opportunities！ If you’d like to create something meaningful together, don't hesitate to reach out.