Crimson Global Academy (CGA), part of the Crimson Education ecosystem, aimed to deliver a world-class educational experience that generic tools like Zoom could not provide. Working within Crimson's product team, I contributed to creating their new digital campus platform, starting with a bespoke virtual classroom. The unified platform provided a superior and more reliable experience for both students and teachers. It also solved a critical data integrity issue by integrating a frictionless attendance system, which resulted in a 90% improvement in marking completion.

As a Product Designer within Crimson's growing team, I was responsible for key aspects of the CGA platform's user experience. I worked closely with product managers, developers, and educators to create design solutions that addressed both student and teacher needs within the broader Crimson ecosystem.

The primary goal was to create a proprietary platform that offered a distinct competitive advantage. The challenges were two-fold:

1. Designing a Superior Experience. To justify the investment in a custom platform, our virtual classroom had to be demonstrably better than off-the-shelf options. We needed to identify the unique pain points of online educators and students and build features that directly addressed them.
2. Solving Foundational Inefficiencies. The existing ecosystem of disconnected tools was not just inconvenient; it was causing a critical business failure. The most significant issue was the unreliable attendance data, caused by a cumbersome, manual workflow for teachers. This data gap prevented the school from effectively tracking student engagement and scaling its operations. My design had to solve this foundational problem as part of the broader platform build.

My solution was to design a fully integrated platform where every feature was built to support a seamless educational experience, starting with the classroom itself.

To create a superior experience, I focused on solving common pain points for both students and teachers.

• For Students: The Preview Screen. To reduce technical disruptions, I designed a mandatory "Preview Screen" as a pre-flight check before class. Here, students could verify their camera, microphone, and network quality in a low-stakes environment, empowering them to solve issues themselves and enter class ready to learn.

• For Teachers: Team Room Monitoring. To give teachers the ambient awareness they have in a physical classroom, I designed "Team Room Monitoring." This unique feature provided a dashboard with a live audio feed from every breakout room, allowing teachers to sense the activity level in each group and offer help where it was needed most.

To solve the critical attendance issue, the solution had to be effortless for teachers. I designed a simple, non-intrusive notification that appeared within the teacher's main control panel during class.

The workflow was designed for speed:

1. A discreet notification appears: "Ready to take attendance?"
2. The teacher clicks it, opening an overlay directly on top of the classroom interface (no new tabs or windows).
3. The roster is pre-populated, defaulting to "all present."
4. The teacher can mark any exceptions in seconds, click "Submit," and the overlay disappears.

This "just-in-time" design was seamlessly integrated into their primary workflow, removing the friction that caused the old system to fail.

The unified platform I designed achieved the company's strategic goals and solved critical operational problems.

• Competitive Advantage: Unique features like Team Room Monitoring provided a superior teaching experience that generic tools could not match, becoming a key selling point.
• Data Integrity: The integrated attendance feature led to a 90% improvement in marking completion, providing the business with reliable engagement data for the first time.
• Improved Engagement: The new, accurate data revealed a 40% increase in recorded student attendance and punctuality compared to the incomplete historical records.
• Reduced Disruptions: The Preview Screen empowered students to solve their own tech issues, leading to smoother class starts and fewer support requests.

This project demonstrated how to build a product with a true competitive edge by focusing on the unique workflows of your core users. We achieved the high-level vision of a superior platform by solving the small, frustrating, and often invisible problems—like attendance tracking—that were preventing the organization from scaling effectively.