Designing for Growth: Rethinking the Freelance Learning Journey at Jobescape

At Nomad Venture Studio, I joined Jobescape, an early-stage AI edtech startup, at a pivotal time of rapid growth. The challenge was clear: scale the business while bringing order to a chaotic UI and mounting design debt. My role went beyond pixels I was a product shaper, growth hacker, and engineer, tasked with designing and shipping experiments that would drive user acquisition and improve the entire learning experience.

This case study breaks down three key areas where my work significantly impacted the product and business: a user acquisition funnel, an optimized unsubscribe flow, and a redesigned learning academy.

User Acquisition: The Quiz Funnel

We needed a scalable way to acquire users. The solution was a personalized quiz onboarding funnel, which users would see after clicking on a paid ad.

My Role: I designed the full user experience, from the initial quiz to the final paywall. The goal was to build trust and personalize the experience quickly, guiding users from a simple question about their goals to a custom "Freelancing Plan."

Impact: This funnel was a primary engine for new user acquisition. We focused on three core metrics:

• Sign-up Rate (SR): Optimizing the quiz flow to maximize the number of people who completed the funnel.
• Paywall Views: Ensuring a high percentage of users reached the paywall, indicating they were engaged and ready to convert.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Making sure the funnel's conversion rate was high enough to generate a positive return on our ad campaigns.

The result was a highly effective acquisition tool that captured user intent and delivered a personalized value proposition, setting the stage for a strong initial connection.

Retention & Churn: The Unsubscribe Flow

High growth often leads to churn. To combat this, I redesigned our unsubscribe flow, focusing on a more empathetic and data-driven approach.

My Role: Instead of a jarring "cancel now" button, I designed a multi-step process that first presented users with their current plan details and billing history. The goal was to avoid immediate negativity and give users a moment to pause and reflect.

Following this, I implemented growth experiments to re-engage users. These included:

• Discount Offers: A pop-up with a limited-time discount (e.g., "How about a special offer?") to incentivize users to stay.
• Value Proposition Dialogs: A final screen that reminded users of the benefits they would lose upon cancellation, such as access to AI assistants, a personalized learning path, and the AI Model Library.

Impact: This approach allowed us to identify user friction points and implement tests to improve retention. By not leading with a negative action, we gave ourselves the opportunity to win back users and gather valuable feedback on why they were considering leaving.

The Learning Academy: A Redesigned Reading Experience

The core of our product was the learning content. As the platform scaled, the academy’s UI became inconsistent and difficult to manage.

My Role: My main achievement here was overhauling the learning experience by focusing on typography and readability. I experimented with various Serif fonts to create a more classic, focused reading experience that evoked a sense of a high-quality "academy."

To streamline implementation, I created a standalone prose.css file. This was a single CSS file that developers could simply drop into the app. Anything with a .prose class would automatically inherit all of the refined styles we had first developed in Figma. This approach allowed us to redesign the entire academy faster, cutting dev time in half.

Also we used Editscape, about which you can read more here.

In addition, I:

• Improved the short-quiz experience, which was later reused in larger assessments.
• Brightened up the success pages to provide a more celebratory and rewarding user experience.

Impact: This work not only improved the aesthetic and readability of our content but also created a scalable design system for our developers. By building a simple, reusable CSS solution, I bridged the gap between design and engineering, helping the team ship new features and content at a much faster pace.

Final Thoughts

At Jobescape, my role was a blur of product, design, and engineering. From building interfaces that scale with shadcn/ui to shipping growth experiments and designing the brand identity, I thrived in the "early-stage chaos." This project taught me the value of moving fast, embracing design debt as a problem to be solved, and ultimately, that a designer can be the catalyst for growth at every stage of a startup's journey.