TutorNextDoor
My Role
Solo Product Designer
Skills
Competitive Analysis, Interface Design, Prototyping, Information Architecture
Tools
Figma, ChatGPT
Project Duration
Dec - March 2025
Context
Traditional education takes a one size fits all approach, teachers deliver the same lesson to 30 different students, making it difficult to engage everyone effectively. Digital learning platforms have largely inherited this problem, rarely accounting for individual students' learning preferences.
Problem
How might we design a platform that empowers students to learn according to their individual learning preferences?
Learning Platforms
While many platforms make learning accessible, few are designed around how students actually prefer to learn.
Today's learning platforms focus on delivering self learning tools or connecting students with a tutor, but they don't account for how students learn best. Most of the learning space do not acknowledge any type of learning preferences each student may have whether that’s visual, hands-on, listening, or note taking.
Students would have to adapt to how they're taught rather than learning in ways that suit them. This highlights an opportunity to design a more personalized learning experience.
Ideate
TutorNextDoor is designed for younger students. Learning at a young age is such an important time because young students can be super cunning, engaged and curious at one moment, but they also can be disengaged the next.
To make the experience more welcoming and engaging, I explored the idea of adding a mascot. I eventually landed on the idea of a monster character, a tutor buddy.
I wanted to reinforce the idea that the app was friendly, playful and encouraging for users of the app. As I brainstormed ways to design friendly looking monsters, I explored ideas from the game 'My Singing Monsters' and the movie 'Monsters Inc'. Using those characters as inspirations I was able to draw up concepts.
The sketches were rough, so I prompted AI to translate those ideas to a more finished digitalized version of what I was able to do with paint.
Designing
I introduced tutor buddies through onboarding through a short quiz that helps decides each student's learning preferences. Based on the results, the app will introduce a monster with exaggerated features that reflected on how students learn best.
For example - A student identified as a visual + hands-on learner, gets a monster has features emphasized on eyes and hands, it reinforces their learning style through character design.
When a visual learner sees their Tutor Buddy has giant eyes, they immediately recognize that the character is a reflection of the way they learn. The Buddy becomes a personified learning companion that reinforces the student's strengths. Students have a consistent character that validates their learning style and accompanies them through session reviews, lessons, and preparation for their next tutoring session.
AI Conversations
The AI is designed to form insights from tutoring sessions in order to help students, adding on to their gamification, personalization and motivational purposes.
Hi-Fi
Reflections
As school progresses, learning becomes more complex. Students can lose motivation once problems aren't as easy to solve. I designed this app to support different learning preferences and to meet students where they are, with the goal of preserving that early sense of curiosity and the confidence in young students as they learn.
Future
Back in elementary school, I used reading website called Raz-Kids that rewarded progress with a customizable little space ship as an incentive to keep reading. It made the platform playful and motivating.
In return for tutor sessions, being able to decorate a cozy room for each user's own monster and possibly accessories or the monster itself would be fun and encouraging.