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Digiicampus
Product Designer Intern
From students requesting exit letters to admins issuing certificates, the process was slow, confusing, and dependent on manual effort.
This project reimagines the experience by introducing a guided, self-serve system that helps university teams create, manage, and deliver certificates faster and with greater confidence.
My Role
Stakeholder Interviews
Conceptualization
Design
Usability testing
Dev handoff
Project Duration
2 months
Jan 2026 - March 2026
Teams
Design, Development,
Product Managers
+65% improvement in navigation efficiency
Task success rate improved from ~20% → ~90%
Significant reduction in developer dependency
No clear entry point :
Certificate workflows lacked a defined starting point, reducing discoverability and delaying task initiation.
Choice overload within workflows:
Multiple certificate actions were presented without clear hierarchy, increasing cognitive load and decision fatigue.
Lack of context for varied use cases:
The system did not support differentiated workflows for bulk, individual, or one-off certificate requests.
No tracking or transparency:
Admins had no visibility into the status or progress of certificate requests, leading to uncertainty and repeated manual checks.
INSIGHT 01
Awareness Gap
Only 2/10 admins were able to understand how to initiate certificate generation, indicating extremely low discoverability and unclear entry points.
INSIGHT 02
High Drop Offs
Lack of structure and clarity in the certificate workflow resulted in frequent drop-offs and incomplete task execution.
INSIGHT 03
No Visibility
Lack status updates made it difficult for admins to monitor certificate progress, resulting in repeated manual checks and dependency on support teams.
INSIGHT 03
Lost Efficiency
With all actions grouped into a single interface, admins spent more time navigating than executing tasks, leading to missed opportunities for faster bulk operations.
The solution evolved through multiple iterations to balance flexibility and structure, allowing admins to customise certificates while reducing complexity and cognitive load.
ITERATION 01
A Settings Page Pretending to Be a Builder
Configured to confuse the admin knew what to toggle, but never what they were building & gave admins controls without context.
WHAT DIDN'T WORK
Collapsed sections gave no summary
No helper text, no examples, no confirmation admins were left to configure something they couldn't visualize
WHAT WORKED
Accordion structure kept the page from feeling overwhelming
ITERATION 02
Self-Serve Certificate Builder
Creating a center of the experience by progressive disclosure to balance flexibility with usability and guide admins through certificate creation.
WHY THIS SOLUTION?
From abstract settings to visual canvas
Contributed to ~65% improvement in navigation efficiency
Reduce cognitive overload during certificate creation
Improved task completion rate from ~20% to ~90% during testing
Increase confidence in final output
Reduced errors and support queries related to certificate generation
Simplicity over features
Admins want to complete tasks quickly without learning complex configurations or technical terminology.
Visual feedback and confidence
Admins need to see what the certificate looks like before publishing — a live preview builds trust in the output.
Independence from IT support
Admins want to create and edit templates themselves without raising tickets or waiting for developer help.
Clear structure and guidance
Admins need a logical, step-by-step flow that tells them where to start and what to do next.
Onboarding flow
A guided first-time experience for new admins: tooltips, a setup checklist, and contextual help that reduces the learning curve from day one.
Bulk certificate issuance
Admins currently manage certificates one at a time. A bulk issuance flow would significantly reduce the time spent on high-volume operations like semester-end certificate runs.
Template versioning
The ability to maintain and switch between versions of a certificate template useful for institutions that issue the same certificate across multiple batches with minor variations.
Analytics for administrators
A simple dashboard showing issuance trends, pending requests, and turnaround times giving institutions better visibility into their certificate operations over time.
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