Enhancing Lumity: A User-Centered Product Redesign for an Optimized Learning Experience
TEAM
Smridhi Gupta
Nandita Malhotra
Jiten Thakkar
WHAT I DID
Led the team in testing & redesigning 40+ screens with a new design system.
DURATION
September - December 2024 / 3 months
SKILLS
UX Design / Usability Testing / User Research / Systems Design
What is Lumity? 🤔
Lumity is a platform to learn and explore new content with a like minded, growth-oriented community 🌱
The challenge
Lumity lacks continued engagement, a consistent interface, and seamless usability, limiting community growth and user retention
The solution 🌟
Introducing Lumity's new look — your favorite learning companion with a fresh and refined interface
Lumity's redesign focuses on…
Improving the content tracking experience for with a high level of personalization
Increasing the scope of exploring new and diverse types of content
Creating a visually consistent, navigable, and usable interface
So how did I do it? Let’s start from the beginning!
What's the problem?
Lumity's core community is strong, but design inconsistencies hinder user retention and acquisition. Our guiding questions were:
01
How can we establish a clear and consistent design identity that strengthens the overall user experience?
02
How can we foster community building through thoughtfully integrated features that support connection, engagement, and shared learning?
03
How might we increase user retention by leveraging gamification features that motivate continued participation and engagement?
What's the problem?
We created an ecosystem map to understand Lumity’s stakeholders and discovered that users engage with the platform in progressive levels of involvement
Key insights 🗝️
So what were the most important takeaways from all of our research?
ECOSYSTEM MAP
Users exist in progressive levels, starting at the individual level, growing to explore the community, and then to actively contributing to the community. Lumity’s features should be scalable and encourage growth.
LITERATURE REVIEW
It is important for us to design Lumity's interface to optimize micro-learning and delivery for users, in the form of posting and viewing content.
TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Currently, Exploration is limited to user’s specific interests and people. WE shoudl improve interface to provide more options for diverse exploration.
INTERVIEWS & USABILITY TESTING
Simplifying the main and top navigation by clearer prioritization of key features and intuitive labeling would significantly enhance the experience of Lumity.
Moving forward, our new guiding question goes 📍:
How can we design an interface that inspires users to commit to growth and exploration in their learning journeys while ensuring a seamless, engaging, and visually appealing experience?
Let's visualize our ideas 🎨
Mapping user types to features using a product architecture diagram to align user needs with product functionality
Fun fact: The product architecture and ecosystem map diagrams were our client’s favorite part of the research, noting how effectively they captured both Lumity’s goals and user needs.
Lumity's CEO was excited to see our research and design progress, and looking forward to seeing high-fidelity prototypes
Our client was highly impressed by the depth of our research and how it laid a strong foundation for Lumity’s redesign. He especially appreciated the ecosystem map and product architecture diagram, noting how effectively they captured both Lumity’s goals and user needs. He expressed excitement about seeing how our research would translate into high-fidelity prototypes.
Testing and iterating our designs
After refining Lumity’s information architecture, streamlining product flows, and rapid wireframing, we were ready to put our ideas to the test!
We tested our mid-fi prototype with four users to gauge usability and adoption. While the response was positive, their feedback surfaced key usability insights that shaped these changes:
Before
After
Users struggled to distinguish between media types due to similar visuals and lack of clear differentiation.
We introduced distinct visual cues by using different shapes for articles, books, podcasts, and videos to help users quickly differentiate content types.
Before
After
Users often overlooked or misunderstood the Homepage and Explore tabs, causing confusion and low engagement.
We redesigned the tabs with clearer visuals and added brief descriptions to clarify each page’s purpose.
Before
After
Users found the Free Explore section rigid and less engaging, preferring a more flexible browsing experience.
We implemented a masonry layout and applied distinct visual cues for each media type, creating a dynamic and intuitive browsing experience.
Creating a UI Kit
Designed components using atomic design principles to align with Lumity's brand identity, ensuring visual consistency across the platform
We created a UI kit with our final elements and components to ensure consistency across Lumity's redesign.
And here they are... our final designs! 📣
Meet Lumity's new look — your favorite learning companion with a fresh and refined interface 🌱💫
Let's start the journey! 🎬
After onboarding, users land on a personalized homepage where they can view posts by their interests or people they follow, and filter, save, or explore content by media type or tags.
It's time to explore 🔦
The Explore page helps users discover and save diverse content through two tabs: Free Explore for media-based browsing and Community for posts from the broader Lumity network. Users can explore via media types, people, or search, supporting flexible, intuitive discovery.
💪🏽 Our redesign lets users explore their interests and community while engaging with diverse perspectives through improved categorization, curation, and browsing.
Want to post about something you learned? 📝
Our redesign streamlines Lumity’s post creation workflow, allowing users to save drafts, exit flexibly, and add posts directly to their personal library for easier organization and tracking.
Your personalized library 📚
We added tabs for personal playlists and saved posts, introduced grid/list view toggles, and streamlined adding multiple posts to playlists, making content organization and personalization easier.
😎 The Library maximizes personalization, helping users track their learning, stay engaged, and support ongoing growth on Lumity.
Curating your digital identity & personal learning journey 👤
The design helps users curate their digital identity on Lumity and introduces a Streaks page to track progress, visualize achievements, and incorporate gamification.
⛳️ Encouraging users to curate their digital identity, set goals, and track achievements fosters ownership, motivation, and engagement on Lumity.
Client reaction and looking forward
There’s still so much more we want to do for Lumity!
Our client was impressed by our redesign, and has already started implementing many of our proposed design changes.
If given more time, we would:
Test our hi-fi designs with users to gather more feedback
Create a more comprehensive design system for Lumity in addition to the UI kit
Find ways to integrate more gamification and monetization strategies into Lumity's interface
Looking back...
Data fuels intentional design 📊
While focused on Lumity’s foundational redesign, we conducted research and usability testing to understand user needs, guide design decisions, and justify choices—ultimately impressing our client.
Learning to prioritize impactful design when working under time constraints ⏰
Time constraints pushed us to prioritize impactful changes and streamline our process, balancing speed with quality while integrating user research insights. This experience reinforced the value of efficiency in design.
Appendix
Presentation
We presented our findings at the end of the project! View our presentation below.
Figma Workspace
We detailed our process and findings in a Figma Workspace — check it out to learn more!