Kirsten Geiger

Summit Learning is an online tutoring platform that pairs students with tutors to help them learn and achieve their educational goals. After launching its online flow, the company had very low completion rates and received bad reviews for its confusing process.

Solution

A guided, four-step onboarding that builds confidence from first click to first lesson.

Step-by-step quiz

Broke a lengthy form into focused sections and reduced cognitive load.

Clear tutor profiles

Credentials, subject expertise, and a trial option gave students the confidence to commit.

Trust-forward payment

Restructuring payment screens to align with industry standards.

audit

What are the key issues?

I conducted a comprehensive audit of their onboarding flow to identify key issues in the user experience. This assessment enabled me to identify pain points that users might face and then prioritize which problems needed immediate attention.

Heuristic analysis

pain points

Lengthy Onboarding

Onboarding form increases the cognitive load by asking unnecessary questions and has confusing UI.

Confusing Selection

Tutor selection is minimal and constrictive. Lacks information to help users choose.

Untrustworthy Payment

The payment process doesn't follow industry standards, creating distrust and unreliability with the user.

ideation

What if onboarding was broken down into sections?

Based on the insights from the app audit and brainstorming various solutions, I pin-pointed the current form's length and unrelated questions to be one of the biggest pain points users face.

Current design

Lengthy Form

The current onboarding is a lengthy form with a confusing UI that doesn't follow industry standards and asks unnecessary questions.

Proposed solution

Bite-Size Quiz

A quiz with smaller sections could lower cognitive load and encourage users to complete the onboarding process.

I created a user flow to define what screens needed to be designed and tested.

user flow

User Onboarding

Tailoring the quiz to support real learning goals.

Mid-fidelity prototype

I rebuilt the quiz around what students actually care about: their subject, their situation, and what success looks like for them. The result is an onboarding that feels less like a form and more like a conversation.

Final design

Narrowed target users to high schoolers since they faced academic pressure and college applications.

Search bar replaced a static dropdown to easily find the required subject area.

Goal selection was personalized so students felt understood from the start.

Tutor selection

Helping students choose tutors with confidence.

Mid-fidelity prototype

Picking a tutor felt high-stakes to most students. They worried about wasting time or money on someone who wasn't a good fit. Reviews helped, but what they really wanted was to know: is this person actually qualified to help me?

Final design

Clear credentials and subject expertise gave students more confidence in their decision.

The trial period eases the pressure by offering the option to change tutors if needed.

Purchasing lessons

Building trust to complete a lesson booking.

Mid-fidelity prototype

They couldn't figure out the difference between pricing options, and nobody could tell what they were actually paying for today. That confusion was enough to make people abandon the whole process.

Final design

Pricing plans are side by side with simple bullet points for easy comparison.

Rewrote the confirmation screen to highlight the trial lesson and what comes after.

Thoughtful design starts with a conversation— Let's chat.

Resume