Founding Designer · 2018–2024
I design platforms that keep learners coming back
Life Lessons is an online education platform for therapists and counselors. It produces expert-led video courses and bundles — accredited for Continuing Medical Education (CME) — for professionals.
When I joined in 2018 as the first designer, the company relied on a fragmented set of third-party vendors handling its shopfront, checkout, and media player. In collaboration with an engineer, we rebuilt all three from scratch and integrated them into a single platform and learning experience. When the growth metrics pointed beyond design, I transitioned into data analysis to inform product strategy for what came next.
What I was working with
Starting from scratch sounds like freedom. In practice, it means every decision is load-bearing. I had no design system, no established patterns, little research budget — just close collaboration with the founders and an engineer, and a product that needed to earn trust from professional healthcare educators who were not, for the most part, digital natives.
6.5× more customers acquired in the years after the platform relaunch
Customers nearly 3× more likely to return within their first year — repeat rate up from ~9% to ~27%
Revenue from returning customers grew from 3% to 40% — the business shifted from almost entirely acquisition-driven to nearly half its revenue coming from repeat purchases
What I built
Shopfront & Checkout
Starting from sparse course pages and a rough third-party checkout, I built a full purchase experience from scratch: video teasers, testimonials, structured course content, and trust signals calibrated for therapists and counselors. Moving checkout in-house unlocked bundle mechanics and upselling that weren't structurally possible before — and that packaging shift turned out to drive the repeat purchase numbers more than any individual design decision.
Course Player & Learning Platform
The most consequential rebuild. Our assumption was linear: therapists would move chapter by chapter. Usage data showed something different — they hopped between topics, cross-referencing rather than progressing. The solution was tabbed chapter navigation with nested video lists: spatial orientation in a non-linear journey, without a wall of content up front. Around this we built the full learning environment: bookmarks, progress tracking, and a CME accreditation journey including an online quiz meeting the requirements of the relevant regulatory body. The learning experience became a retention argument in itself — frequently cited by returning customers as a reason to buy again, the kind of signal that doesn't show up in numbers but quietly shapes them.
How I brought data into it
Six years in, design was no longer the most pressing bottleneck. The platform was solid. What the business needed was clarity on what was actually driving growth — and what wasn't.
I developed KPIs from sales data and platform telemetry, and built a dashboard that gave the founders visibility for both day-to-day and strategic decisions: which products retained customers, which didn't, where the drop-offs were. The findings shaped the strategy that followed.
6.5× more customers acquired. Repeat rate nearly tripling. Returning customers going from 3% to 40% of revenue. Design had built the conditions. Data analysis was how we figured out what to do next.