Leaguers

Role

Product designer

Team

1 Tech Lead, 1 Designer

Timeline

Oct 2022 - May 2023

Skills

Product design, interface design, interaction design, prototyping, usability testing

Context

Leaguers connects college mentors with high schoolers for college essay support.

The platform moved away from using Google Docs to a built-in essay review system for secure, all-in-one collaboration.

Problem

The current interface feels outdated and unintuitive with cluttered layouts and inconsistent visuals.

Leaguers needs a new platform that has a modern interface that feels current, trustworthy and causes no friction.

Essay Version Dashboard

Essay Feedback Panel

Solution

Redesigned experience with inline comments, revision tracking, and collaborative mentor-student interactions.

Introduced clearer contextual feedback and streamlined revision comparison to make the feedback process easier and less overwhelming.

Leaguers essay history and feedback timeline showing tracked revisions

Essay History & Feedback Timeline

In-Line Essay Feedback

User Interviews

Conducted interviews with 10 participants

Including existing users and individuals familiar with similar platforms to understand essay writing, feedback, and mentoring workflow challenges.

Findings From Interview

High school students

Need clearer guidance amid multiple essay versions and scattered feedback.

College mentors

Struggle to manage multiple students, essays, and unstructured feedback.

Both groups

Need structure for a personal and emotionally demanding writing process.

Affinity mapping board grouping interview quotes into themes: feedback clarity and personalization, version control and overwhelm, feedback management and time constraints, mentorship relationship and emotional labor, and tracking progress and motivation

User Persona

Based on interview findings, I developed personas for students and mentors to capture their different needs, behaviors, and expectations.

User persona for Ethan Miller, a 20-year-old college junior in Ann Arbor, Michigan who mentors students through Leaguers

Design Statement

How might we make essay feedback easier to give, clearer to receive, and smoother to manage for both students and mentors?

Solution 1

In-Line Feedback Interface

Mentors can leave inline feedback with comments organized by type, reducing context-switching while making suggestions clearer and easier for students to understand.

Process Overview

Before

Hidden interactions, vague previews, and disconnected feedback made it hard for students to quickly understand comments.

Annotated screenshot of the original comment interface highlighting usability problems: comments hard to scan in dropdown rows, low clarity since full comments only appear after selection, and too text-heavy for quick review

Iteration

Visibility and scanability was improved with card layout and showing full content. But users still struggled to identify which sentence feedback referred to and interaction felt one-sided.

Annotated screenshot of the improved card-based comment interface, showing resolved issues (better visibility, improved scannability) and remaining problems (hidden controls, comments still lacking clarity about which sentence they reference)

Clarify Intent

Final design added sentence highlights and threaded replies. This made feedback easier to understand, navigate, and respond to.

Annotated screenshot of the final comment interface showing sentence highlights anchoring comments to specific text, a visible Resolve action, and threaded replies, alongside team and user feedback quotes

Solution 2

Essay History & Feedback Timeline

Allows to track revisions and feedback over time, making progress easier to understand, improving mentorship, and keeping essay versions organized.

Leaguers essay history and feedback timeline showing tracked revisions over time

Process Overview

Before (Interface)

The revision history interface relied heavily on text labels, forcing users to click into each version without enough context. This made navigation inefficient and increased cognitive load during essay revisions.

Annotated screenshot of the original revision history dashboard showing text-only revision labels, with callouts noting users can't tell what changed without clicking into each revision

After (Interface)

The redesigned interface introduced side-by-side comparison and highlighted text changes, making revision tracking faster and easier to navigate.

Screenshot of the redesigned revision history interface showing a side-by-side comparison view with highlighted text changes

Before (Flow)

Users had to repeatedly open different revisions to identify changes, creating a slow and disruptive review process. The lack of preview visibility made it difficult to quickly compare versions.

Diagram of the original revision review flow, showing users repeatedly opening individual revisions to identify changes

After (Flow)

Users could quickly identify changes through visual previews and revision tags, reducing the need to open multiple versions

Diagram of the redesigned revision review flow, showing users identifying changes through visual previews and revision tags

Results & Impact

Redesigned essay feedback system served over 1,500 users and reduced mentor response time by 30%.

Team Feedback

Jason Yoon

Leaguers Tech Lead

“Lena brought the vision for Leaguers’ essay feedback system to life. Our original platform was difficult to scale and visually outdated, which made onboarding new users frustrating and time-consuming. Lena immediately understood the core pain points and reimagined the experience from both the student and mentor perspectives. Lena consistently collaborated with our engineering team to ensure designs were implementable and logically structured. She joined sprint standups, clarified edge cases, and proactively flagged usability concerns we hadn’t even considered. Thanks to her, we now have a modern system that feels intuitive, scalable, and actually enjoyable to use. Her attention to both form and function is rare, and we’re already seeing how it’s changing the way users interact with the platform.”

Reflection

Learnings

This was my first time designing an end-to-end essay feedback system, and it pushed me far beyond visual design into research, user interviews, usability testing, and cross-functional collaboration.

Bridging design and engineering

I made the mistake of handing off designs before syncing deeply with engineering. As a result, parts of the system had to be reworked for feasibility. I've since learned the value of bringing engineers into the design process early to spot constraints.

Balancing ideal and viable

There were many moments when I had to trade "perfect" for "possible." Whether it was adjusting the number of features at launch or simplifying complex flows, I learned how to prioritize what matters most for users.

Milestones

Email announcing Leaguers was selected for a government startup grant

Awarded a ₩50 million (≈$40K USD) government grant from South Korea's Ministry of SMEs and Startups.

Team member looking out the window of Leaguers' first office in Seoul

Leaguers' first headquarters in the heart of Seoul.

Team pitching Leaguers on stage at Secret IR Day in front of investors

Pitching Leaguers to investors and venture capital firms in Seoul as the founding product designer.

Cornell alumni visiting the Leaguers office to show support

Welcoming fellow Cornellians who stopped by our office to show their support.