InstaEdu: A Lesson in Immediate Gratification

InstaEdu's mission was to connect high-school students searching for a tutor to a qualified college student, and then a tutor builds a relationship with a student and repeat sessions.

That experience was heavily oriented towards the tutor profile, and chat.

The previous experience.

The first big lesson was that kids who were looking for a tutor were usually stuck on a homework problem right that moment, and looking for help from someone available immediately.

The big product change was to take students from search results directly to a lesson space to get help. After they had a great experience with that, they would come back again. When we added that immediate gratification, the metrics (in the form of weekly active users and overall lesson minutes) really took off.

The “available now” experience.

I also built out flows for submitting a question first (instead of picking a tutor) and created designs for other aspects of the shared lesson space (for working on a text or coding project with a tutor).