UI / UX Design
PeerHub: A Student Collaboration Platform
Designing a Gen-Z community platform that helps professionals connect, discover opportunities, and collaborate
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
4 Months
Deliverables
Mobile App & Web Platform
Inductry
Product Manager, Engineers, Founders
Project Overview
Designing a community platform that helps students discover communities, connect with peers, and engage with campus activities
PeerHub is a community platform designed to help students connect with peers, discover communities, and participate in events happening across their campus.
The platform brings together communities, discussions, and campus activities in one place so students can easily explore opportunities and interact with people who share similar interests.
As the core product designer, I was responsible for shaping the platform experience from scratch across mobile, web, and admin interfaces, focusing on making discovery, interaction, and participation feel intuitive.
My Role & Responsibilities
As a core product designer, I was responsible for designing the core experience of the platform.
My work included:
• Conduct UX research and usability testing
• Define information architecture and user flows
• Design mobile and web interfaces
• Design admin dashboards for platform management
• Build reusable UI components and patterns
• Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams
The Problem
Students typically join campus platforms to discover communities and activities relevant to their interests.
However, early exploration of PeerHub revealed several usability challenges that made it difficult for users to navigate the platform and understand how to get started.
Key Challenges
• discovering relevant communities was difficult
• navigation between communities, posts, and events felt fragmented
• some screens presented too many options at once
• important features had low engagement because users couldn't easily find them
These issues created friction in the experience and reduced overall engagement with the platform.
Research & insights
To understand how students interact with the platform, I conducted usability testing and analyzed how users navigated through different sections of the product.
Research Methods
• usability testing with early users
• competitor analysis of community platforms
• observing how users explored communities and events
During testing sessions, users were asked to perform tasks such as discovering communities, browsing events, and interacting with posts.
What I Observed
• Students struggled to identify communities aligned with their interests.
• Navigation between communities, posts, and events felt disconnected.
• Too many options on some screens created decision fatigue.
• Students expected a simpler way to explore campus activity.
These insights helped guide the redesign of the platform experience.
Product Thinking
Instead of treating PeerHub as a collection of features, I reframed the platform around three core actions students naturally perform on community platforms.
Discover
Students should easily find communities and activities happening across campus.
Engage
Students should interact with posts, discussions, and conversations.
Participate
Students should join events and activities within communities.
This framework helped simplify the product experience and made navigation more intuitive.
Key Design Decisions
Simplifying Community Discovery
Students struggled to quickly identify communities that matched their interests.
To reduce friction, communities were organized into structured categories with clearer descriptions.
Connecting Platform Sections
Communities, posts, and events were designed as interconnected experiences instead of separate sections, helping users navigate the platform more naturally.
Reducing Cognitive Load
Screens were simplified by prioritizing the most important actions, allowing users to make faster decisions when exploring the platform.
Product Highlights
Community Discovery
Community discovery became a core focus of the redesign.
Improvements
• structured community categories
• clearer community descriptions
• simplified join actions
These changes helped students quickly find communities aligned with their interests.
Content Engagement
PeerHub allows students to interact with posts and discussions inside communities.
The feed experience was redesigned to improve readability and interaction.
Improvements
• improved visual hierarchy for posts
• simplified interaction patterns
• reduced clutter in the feed
This created a more engaging environment for students interacting with community content.
Events Experience
Campus events play a key role in student engagement.
The events experience was redesigned to make discovering and participating in events easier.
Improvements
• clearer event listings
• simplified event details
• easier event participation flow
Admin Dashboard
Along with the student-facing experience, I designed admin tools that help platform managers oversee activity across the platform.
Admin Capabilities
• managing communities
• moderating posts
• overseeing engagement
• creating and managing events
These dashboards helped administrators manage the platform efficiently and maintain a healthy community ecosystem.
Design System
To maintain consistency across mobile and web experiences, reusable UI components were created.
Design System Elements
• reusable UI components
• consistent typography and spacing
• scalable design patterns
• standardized interaction patterns
This ensured a cohesive product experience while improving collaboration with development teams.
Impact
The redesigned experience significantly improved how students interacted with the platform.
Results
30% increase in user engagement
25% improvement in feature adoption
40% improvement in task completion rate
These improvements showed that simplifying navigation and improving discoverability helped users interact with the platform more effectively.
What I Would Improve Next
If I continued working on PeerHub, I would explore:
• personalized community recommendations
• onboarding flows that match users with communities based on interests
• deeper analytics for community engagement
These improvements could further strengthen discovery and engagement across the platform.
Reflection
Designing PeerHub from scratch reinforced the importance of structuring products around real user behavior rather than feature lists.
Some key learnings from this project:
• clear information architecture significantly improves usability
• simplifying complex systems increases engagement
• scalable products require strong collaboration between design and engineering
Working on PeerHub helped me strengthen my approach to designing community-driven platforms and scalable digital products.
