- B2B SAAS
- DESIGN SYSTEM
- CRM
StudyMarket AI
Product design for an education marketplace mid-pivot to a full agent CRM.
Role
Product designer, working with the founder and one frontend developer
Result
Built a documented primitives layer from 218 design tokens and shipped the connections pattern the CRM is built on.
Context
StudyMarket connects students with education agents and course providers. Partway through, the product pivoted from marketplace to CRM — same users, opposite mental model. A marketplace optimises for browsing and discovery; a CRM optimises for managing a pipeline you already have.
Contribution
Designed the dashboard, proposal and prospect screens, the Agent and Provider connections views, and documented the design system across a six-month engagement.
Constraints
- One frontend developer building everything, so design had to be unambiguous on handoff
- An existing marketplace interface that couldn't be rebuilt wholesale mid-pivot
Key decisions
- Used a side panel rather than inline expansion, so inspecting a connection doesn't push every row below it down the page and lose the user's scroll position.
- Made the whole row the click target instead of a chevron, because hunting for a small control is friction in a list users scan quickly.
- Kept tier labels manual with mismatch flagging, so bad data gets surfaced rather than silently auto-assigned.
- Documented 218 tokens as primitives, so spacing and colour decisions get referenced rather than re-negotiated screen by screen.
Outcomes
- The side panel became the standard detail pattern across the product
- A documented primitives layer the developer could build from without a translation step