Green valley with wind turbines and mountains in the back

Guiding higher-ed students with personalized resources

Role

Product Designer

Company

Wayble

Timeframe

6 months

Year

2024 - 2025

Read time

10 min

Summary

Wayble Co-Pilot is a platform feature that helps higher-education institutions efficiently convert, onboard, and guide students. I designed end-to-end workflows that tailor resources to individual student needs, improve engagement, and reduce administrative workload.

Context

Wayble is a web platform providing a suite of student support tools for higher education institutions globally. Colleges and universities use Wayble's flexible tools to help convert candidates into enrolled students, onboard new cohorts and ensure retention through timely guidance and support.

Before Co-Pilot, the platform offered several standalone features including job board, learning events, resources, mentorship access, partner network deals and immigration FAQ.

‍While each feature provided value to students in different areas of their academic and personal lives, they existed as separate tools with little connection between them. Through conversations with partner institutions, Wayble discovered that different departments wanted to provide a more personalized student experience while reducing the administrative effort required to manage the platform. They needed a flexible way to guide students toward specific outcomes throughout their academic journey.

Problem

Students had access to a wide range of valuable resources, but the platform offered a rigid way of accessing them. Because these tools were disconnected, the overall experience felt fragmented, it was hard to drive students towards specific goals and engagement levels were lower than expected.

Goals

To help institution clients achieve their internal goals and improve the student experience, we focused on creating a new flagship feature for the Wayble platform called Co-pilot. The feature aimed to:

Centralize access to platform resources in one place
Personalize student journeys based on their current stage
Provide a clear, step-by-step structure to guide students toward their goals

Design Process

A key part of the research and ideation process was determining what information we should collect from students to personalize their experience without asking for excessive personal data. Regular conversations with partner institutions helped us understand which insights were most valuable for different departments to support student success.

To better understand what drives engagement in learning platforms, we also looked at products such as Khan Academy and Duolingo. These examples showed that progression systems, goal setting, and a sense of achievement are powerful motivators that encourage users to stay engaged.

Based on these insights, we developed a concept for Co-Pilot where students would receive resources as structured activities that could be completed to progress through different stages of their journey.

At this stage, I began creating wireframes to facilitate internal discussions with the product and development teams while slowly increasing fidelity with each iteration.

Challenges

One of the main challenges was limited development time and resources. As a result, we had to prioritize the most essential parts of the experience. Some planned gamification features such as badges, leveling systems, and notifications were postponed for future iterations.

Another challenge was balancing personalization with simplicity. We needed enough information from students to tailor the experience, but asking too many questions during onboarding could discourage participation. To address this, we designed a system that connects a small set of onboarding responses with relevant resources, allowing for meaningful customization without overwhelming users.

Finally, Co-Pilot needed to support white-labeling across multiple institutions. This created additional technical and design constraints, requiring several UI iterations to balance visual clarity with the flexibility needed for institution-specific branding.

Solution

> Co-pilot onboarding

The onboarding flow introduces the value of Co-pilot and explains how it helps students navigate their journey. It consists of only a few screens, including a short set of personalization questions.

The goal was to move students to the interactive part of Co-pilot as quickly as possible while collecting enough information to tailor their experience. Keeping onboarding short reduces friction and increases the likelihood that students complete the setup.

> Main dashboard

The Co-pilot dashboard presents students with a tailored set of activities relevant to their current needs. Activities are displayed as a checklist, a familiar pattern that makes it easy to understand what to do next.

On-platform activities are marked complete automatically when the user visits the related resource page. Activities that link to external resources are marked as in progress until the student confirms completion.

The dashboard also includes stage navigation and progress indicators. Stage goals group related activities, while long-term goals track progress across multiple stages. This structure helps students focus on clear next steps without navigating multiple parts of the platform.

> Stages and activities

To create a sense of progression, we introduced stages that organize activities into manageable steps. Breaking the experience into stages helps students focus on achievable tasks instead of an overwhelming list.

Once a student completes all required activities in the current stage, they can move to the next one if it has been configured and opened by the institution. Administrators can create stages, add resources, and control when stages become available. Previously opened stages remain accessible so students can revisit resources or repeat activities.

Wayble also collects a small set of personalization inputs at the beginning of each stage and feedback at the end to help institutions better understand student progress.

> White-labelling

Co-pilot’s interface was designed with white-labelling in mind. Institutions can quickly apply their branding through the admin dashboard, creating a cohesive experience that feels like part of their ecosystem.

This flexibility allows institutions to adopt the feature without compromising their brand identity, helping build trust among students.

Outcomes

I designed a personalized student experience that was deployed across multiple partner colleges and universities. Institution teams adopted Co-pilot to create program-specific journeys that guide students through relevant resources. Its flexibility allowed teams to use it as a central hub for student support, reducing the time spent connecting students with academic, personal, and social resources.

Role
Product Designer
Company
Wayble
Timeframe
6 months
CEO / Project Manager
Pat Chaisang
CTO
Mark Biciunas
Front-end
Amir Saraee
Back-end
Atal Atal
Company website
Visit Website

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