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.
College admissions is a high-stakes process that requires students to make many interconnected decisions, from school selection and academic planning to extracurricular positioning and essay development.
However, access to quality college counseling is highly uneven. In the U.S., the recommended student-to-school-counselor ratio is 250:1, but the national average remains much higher, meaning many counselors are responsible for hundreds of students at a time. Public school counselors also spend only about 21% of their time on postsecondary planning, compared with 47% in private schools, while counselors in the highest-poverty schools spend less than 20% of their time on college planning.
This gap has real consequences. NCES data shows that 83% of students who met with a counselor about college attended college within three years after high school, compared with 60% of students who did not. Among students whose parents did not have a college degree, the gap was even larger: 74% attended college after meeting with a counselor, compared with 49% among those who did not.
For Cledge, the design challenge was not simply to organize admissions information. The bigger challenge was to design a product that could help students interpret their own profile, understand their options, and take action without feeling overwhelmed or judged.
The MVP focused on three core needs:
Helping students understand their current competitiveness.
Providing personalized guidance based on academic and extracurricular information.
Supporting students through key application tasks, especially essay development.
Instead of designing Cledge as a generic AI chatbot, we structured the experience around guided inputs, visual analysis, and actionable recommendations. This allowed the product to feel more like a college counseling workflow than a question-and-answer tool.
After the first version was built, we conducted usability testing and user interviews to see how students responded to the product in real scenarios. This stage uncovered several important signals that reshaped our design direction.
One key insight stood out: students were not just asking, “Does this work?” They were asking, “Can I trust this?” That shift led us to rethink how the product explains AI-generated guidance, builds confidence, and supports students through complex college planning decisions.
Those insights directly informed several critical product iterations and helped shape the MVP that later contributed to Cledge’s early traction. Due to NDA restrictions, I can’t share the full design process publicly.
Please contact me and I’d be happy to walk through the process in more detail in a conversation.
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.