Leaguers Essay Review System
1 Designer
(5 Months)
Overview
Project Context
Leaguers is an education platform that connects college mentors with high school students to support the college admissions process, with a key focus on essay feedback and mentorship.
Leaguers moved away from using Google Docs and developed its own web-based essay review system. Students and mentors wanted everything—from submissions to feedback—in one place, without the privacy concerns of sharing personal documents via email or external links.
However, the current interface feels outdated and unintuitive, falling short of user expectations for ease and clarity. Leaguers is now looking to redesign its platform to offer a modern, streamlined experience that better supports growth, trust, and long-term engagement.
Problem
Leaguers' current essay review platform restricts future development and overwhelms new users, leading to an unnecessarily complex user experience.
The current platform is:
· Outdated in design, with cluttered layouts and inconsistent visuals.
· Overwhelming for new users, especially high school students.
· Intuitive: Helping high school students and mentors give and receive feedback without confusion or friction
· Modern: Delivering a clean, welcoming interface that feels current and trustworthy to a younger audience
Research
User Interviews
I conducted interviews with 10 participants, including existing Leaguers users and individuals who had experience with other college application support platforms. They were divided into two groups: high school students and college mentors.
· 5 high school students currently working on college applications: understand their struggles with essay writing, how they manage feedback, and what tools they wish existed to make the process easier.
· 5 college student mentors who have provided essay feedback through Leaguers or other platforms: identify their workflow challenges, time constraints, and what makes delivering helpful feedback difficult or rewarding.
For existing Leaguers users, the focus was on their experience with the current web platform—specifically how they navigate the feedback process, interpret mentor comments, and track progress across versions. For non-users, the goal was to understand their past experiences with mentorship platforms and common frustrations with tools like Google Docs or informal email exchanges.
Findings From Interview
High school students:
· Want clearer guidance on how to improve their essays beyond surface-level edits
· Often feel overwhelmed by multiple versions and scattered feedback
· Prefer feedback to feel personal and encouraging, not clinical or generic
College mentors:
· Struggle to manage multiple students and essays without a centralized dashboard
· Find unstructured feedback (via email or open Docs) hard to track and follow through
· Want to provide better help, but need tools that make feedback more efficient and organized
Both groups:
· Feel that essay writing is deeply personal and emotionally taxing
· Expressed the need for a structured yet flexible system that supports clarity, empathy, and progress tracking
Design Statement
How might we make essay feedback easier to give, clearer to receive, and smoother to manage—for both students and mentors?
Major Design Decision #1
In-Line Feedback Interface
We replaced the outdated essay feedback layout with a clean, modern interface that allows mentors to leave comments directly next to each essay paragraph. This structure mirrors the natural reading and feedback process, reducing context-switching.
Improve Feedback Flow
Mentors can now highlight and comment in-line, making their feedback more precise and easier to act on for students.
Clarify Intent
Grouped comments by type (grammar, structure, content, etc.) help students understand the purpose of each suggestion.
Major Design Decision #2
Essay History & Feedback Timeline
The Essay History view enables both high school students and mentors to easily track the evolution of feedback over time. Its goals are:
Enhance understanding
See how essays have improved through revisions and feedback cycles
Improve mentorship
Help mentors tailor feedback based on a student’s past work and revision trends
Improve version clarity
Avoid confusion by clearly separating and labeling each essay draft.
Before
Result
Measuring Success
The redesigned essay feedback system was developed through user interviews and usability testing with high school and college students. Although it wasn’t launched due to organizational changes, it was projected to serve over 1,500 users and reduce mentor response time by 30%, based on findings from user testing.
Had the system launched, these metrics would have been tracked via backend data and user analytics to assess performance, identify friction points, and guide future iterations.
Feedback Efficiency Metrics
· Feedback Turnaround Time: Track how quickly mentors respond to submitted essays
· Draft Revisions per Essay: Measure how many revision cycles each essay goes through on average
Mentor & Student Engagement
· Submission Rate: Monitor how frequently students submit essays through the new system
· Mentor Activity Rate: Track how often mentors log in and provide comments
Task Completion & Usability
· Task Success Rate: Measure how easily users complete tasks like submitting a draft or viewing feedback
· Drop-off Points: Identify where users abandon the process (e.g., incomplete drafts or ignored feedback)
Team Feedback
Reflection
Learnings
Bridging design and engineering
Balancing ideal and viable
This project made me a more thoughtful, flexible, and collaborative designer—and I’m excited to bring those skills into future projects.
Milestones
