Impact

19 new sales contracts

96% positive student reviews

22% conversion rate for peer session bookings

Problem

The demand for peer tutors outweighed the supply

Challenge: Strong student tutors are crucial for Knack's success. While rigorous selection ensures quality, attracting enough tutors, especially at smaller schools, can be difficult.

Impact: Students struggled to find tutors, leading to disengagement and platform abandonment.

For Universities: Partnering with Knack worried universities - inadequate student tutor supply could hinder Knack's effectiveness and limit their growth.

⭐️ Final solution / MVP

Introducing 2 new ways to receive support: Submit async questions & On-demand sessions

In order to achieve our goal of providing students with support when they need it, we introduced:

1. A way to submit questions to receive a response by a Pro Tutor within 24 hours

2. A way to virtually connect with a Pro Tutor within minutes

Seamless integration of Professional Tutoring with Peer Tutoring

We launched Professional Tutoring as a discoverable option alongside peer tutoring CTAs. This minimized development time and allowed us to efficiently gauge user engagement. Positive results will inform the creation of a dedicated landing page for future optimization.

Matching students with the right tutor

Prioritizing speed and user familiarity, we streamlined the MVP development by leveraging the existing flow of how to connect to a peer tutor. This not only saved valuable engineering time but also ensured a seamless user experience.

A portal for students to view responses

Students can review their submitted questions and their states (Submitted, In Progress, and Completed. Questions that are in "Submitted" state are able to be edited by the student.

A simple portal for professional tutors to respond to requests

To efficiently test engagement with the feature, we launched a basic portal prioritizing requests by First In First Out. The focus initially was on functionality - we would prioritize design refinement once positive user feedback validates additional resource investment.

Improvements to the Online Classroom

We added a Code Editor and File Hub to enhance the virtual experience with both Professional and Peer tutors.

⬇️ Want to know more about how I got there? ⬇️

Context

Empowering student success at scale: Knack's B2B2C model

Knack tackles a critical need in higher education: providing accessible academic support to students. Through its innovative platform, Knack connects students with free, in-person and online peer tutoring.

Universities are the "B" in B2B

Universities subscribe to Knack's SaaS platform, offering cost-effective, scalable academic support to their student body. This win-win solution empowers universities to enhance student success rates while Knack partners with institutions to deliver its valuable service.

Business requirements & constraints

Designing for the needs of 4 stakeholders while balancing business objectives

Together with the VP of Product, CTO, and COO, I engaged in discovery conversations to understand how this solution would exist among our flagship feature: connecting students with peer tutors at their school.

Research

What are students experiencing after they sign up?

Our data showed that, on average, 36% of users who submitted a request for a tutor were unable to connect with one.

What are our competitors doing?

Our competitive analysis revealed a critical gap in Knack's B2B offering. While established tutoring platforms like Skooli, Tutor.com, and VarsityTutors boast extensive networks of professional tutors, Knack primarily relied on student tutors.

This lack of a professional tutor option posed a significant hurdle in university sales conversations. Universities expressed concern about their ability to meet all student needs solely with a student tutor pool. This insight became a key driver in developing a solution to address this critical gap.

Goal

Enable students to discover and connect with a pool of professional tutors

"The near-peer model is at the heart of our approach, with empathy and growth baked into the core – encouraging those who have “been there before” to lend a helping hand to those in need of learning assistance."

At the end of the day, Knack's values are grounded in the power of peer-to-peer tutoring. We did not want to replace that with professional tutors, so it was crucial to ensure that this feature did not compete with student tutors' opportunities.

Metrics

I collaborated with 2 data engineers to track analytic events:

• Number of students who could not connect with a peer tutor, yet found value with a professional tutor

• Number of total students who received any type of tutoring support

• Number of students that converted to active users after using professional tutoring

Scoping

Chunking out the project into 4 phases

This project presented a unique challenge: building a first-of-its-kind feature (no prior examples within Knack) with complex constraints. To ensure a successful rollout, we adopted a phased approach, leveraging the expertise of a cross-functional team.

The team comprised two back-end engineers, one front-end engineer, and myself (lead designer), all guided by the invaluable insights of the VP of Product. We strategically divided the project into four phases, allowing for iterative development and user feedback integration.

Learnings

It can be tempting to design for edge cases - but don't

There were moments when I got lost in designing the perfect experience for 1 specific type of user. However it's more important to get the feature out in the market to see how people would respond. Enhancements and iterations come later on.

Assumptions are answered by research

The beginning of the project operated on a lot of assumptions about our users: if students prefer professional tutoring over peer tutoring, if this feature was widely requested, etc. If we had more time, I would have advocated to spend more efforts on our students' study habits and needs.