InterestID

Overview

InterestID is a swipe-based tool where students rate topics so teachers can build educational content around what their class actually cares about. The product had to feel playful enough that students would engage honestly, while still surfacing useful, structured data back to teachers.

Team: Product Manager, Engineer
Role: Visual Design, Illustration
Timeline: 6 months

InterestID — in-browser view — InterestID — in-browser tool

InterestID — teacher report — Teacher-facing report view

Wireframes

Two parallel flows — one for teachers (whole-class view, suggested lessons), one for students (category browse, sorted icons, completed set). Mapping both early kept the dual-audience product from feeling like two unrelated apps.

Wireframe — teacher class view — Teacher — whole class

Wireframe — suggested lessons — Teacher — suggested lessons

Wireframe — student categories — Student — all icons

Wireframe — student interests — Student — icons sorted

Wireframe — student dashboard — Student — completed dashboard

Building the MVP

I built black-and-white placeholder icons in parallel with the engineering work — both to keep the team unblocked on layout decisions and to use the icons themselves as the input for a clickable prototype. Once the system was proven, the team replaced the placeholders with high-resolution vector versions.

Icon library — placeholder set used to drive layout and prototype decisions

Clickable Prototype

While engineering laid the code foundation, I prototyped in code to experiment with icon card sizing, responsive breakpoints, and icon detail at different scales. That let us lock down the rules before any production code went near them.

Prototype v1 — icon card behavior

Prototype v2 — front page layout exploration

Public Beta

Once the product hit public beta, the voting and filtering interactions were the things teachers and students actually noticed. Both are below.

Voting on interests

How filters worked

Retrospective

Appreciation for the design-tool ecosystem. Prototyping in code was fun, and it taught me a lot about how prototypes behave under real data — but it made me appreciate how much the current generation of design tools removes from a designer's plate. Things that take afternoons in code take minutes now.

First time building a product from inception to release. Sitting at the table from the earliest framing through public testing is a fundamentally different posture than designing marketing for a built product. More decisions, more ownership, more rooms to be in.