PrepaTutor

I started with how a prépa actually runs, because that is where the product would live or die. Following how information moved through a normal week kept surfacing the same picture: the course in one tool, the timetable on a printout, grades in spreadsheets, announcements in a group chat, and the real conversation in a student back-channel the school never sees. Nobody had the whole picture, least of all the staff.

Mapping who needed what exposed the harder problem. Six kinds of people would live in this product, and their days barely overlap: a student thinks in subjects and deadlines, a teacher in classes, a supervisor in attendance, administration in accounts, structure and report cards. Tuned to one of them, the platform would fail the other five.

The map pointed at a shape. Not one product stretched across six roles, but three products behind one shell: a social network where the promo lives, a learning space where the course happens, and a back office where the school is run. The shell, navigation, search and notifications, is identical for everyone; what it holds is assembled per role.

Three principles came out of framing and survived every review after it. Meet students inside patterns they already know. Make the subject, the matière, the unit everything hangs from. And let the role shape the surface, so nobody carries interface that is not theirs.

The highest-stakes screen was the first one after login, because it silently decides what the platform is. I explored it in three directions: a dashboard that summarises your status, a portal that routes you to your tools, and a network feed that shows the life of the promo.

Paper walkthroughs killed the first two fast. The dashboard answers a question, what is my status, that nobody asks daily; it is the screen you open when something is due, exactly the usage pattern the school wanted to escape. The portal was honest but hollow, a corridor of doors with no reason to linger. The feed was the only direction where a student has a reason to come back between deadlines.

The social layer took the most iteration, because its failure mode was obvious from the start: one school-wide stream where a physics question drowns between announcements. The structure that worked splits conversation by scope. The whole-school feed carries life and announcements; each subject has a wall of its own where the class talks in context.

Messaging was the other fork in the road. A standalone chat would compete head-on with the group chat students already have, and lose. Placed inside the platform, one click from anywhere, it wins on the one thing a back-channel can never offer: a direct, in-context line to a teacher.

The first structure for a subject nested everything under a course tree, and it failed the simplest question a student asks: where is my homework? The shipped version flattens each subject into colour-coded tabs, wall, courses, conferences, homework, materials, assessments, so location is always one glance away.

A lesson plays as video with its quiz on the same page, and progress is tracked so a course resumes exactly where it stopped. The bet is pedagogical: checking understanding right after watching beats discovering the gap at the next colle.

The back office got the same design attention as the student surfaces, on one argument: if staff cannot run the school from it, they fall back to spreadsheets and the platform dies from the inside. So administration is a real product: accounts and roles, a visual builder for the academic structure, timetables, and report cards run as a workflow.

The report-card pipeline is the clearest case of designing a process rather than a screen. Grades used to travel as files, with every risk that implies. Here a bulletin moves through four states, draft, submitted, validated, published, and a student can only ever see the last one. The state is visible at every step, so responsibility is never ambiguous.

The identity question was how to make a serious school product feel owned by eighteen-year-olds without dressing it as a toy. The safe route, generic edtech illustration, would have aged in a season. The direction that stuck came from the desk itself: a notebook. A warm paper ground, a faint rule, a red margin line. School, said structurally, without a single illustration.

Colour is a system with jobs. One electric blue carries every action and nothing else; each role and each subject holds a fixed colour, so the interface stays legible as it fills up. Both themes come from a single token set, designed together from day one, so dark is a native mode rather than an inverted afterthought.

PrepaTutor shipped as one platform carrying three products, six roles and two themes, across region-isolated sites. The measure I care most about is quieter than a launch: the school’s official life and the promo’s daily life now happen in the same place, which is the one thing the scattered tools could never do.

The lasting lesson is about order. The access map and the home exploration, both made before any polished screen, did more for the final quality than any amount of visual iteration afterwards. On a product like this, process is not overhead; it is where the product is actually decided.