Learning Studio

Stukent’s Next-Generation Learning Platform

With modern markets and technology evolving at increasingly rapid speeds, Stukent, an EdTech company known for its digital textbooks and interactive Simternships (simulated internships), saw a critical need for a next-generation platform and product.

This new Simternship experience would need to not only support Stukent’s traditional user personas, high school and university students, but would now need to scale to new learning environments outside of academic institutions: Credit union members looking to improve financial literacy and prison systems preparing their inmates for rehabilitation and success in the outside world.

While this new product would ultimately need to support Stukent’s existing catalog of over 30 career disciplines, Personal Finance, one of Stukent’s biggest Sims, would need to be its flagship.

Stephanie Taylor-Thompson, Why Financial Literacy is a Game-Changer for Reintegration

“These courses don’t just teach about money, they teach people how to navigate life. They help returning citizens like myself gain the skills to make informed financial decisions, manage day to day expenses, and break the cycle of hardship. Programs like Stukent’s Financial Simulation courses are game changers.”

Read the full article on breaking the cycle of recidivism through Financial Education

The business problem

Stukent’s original Simternship platform was built on a product technology that internally referred to as Mimic App. Built quick-and-dirty during Stukent’s startup days by a handful of engineers, Stukent had built upon this foundation for the past 8 years, resulting in a complicated web of tech-debt, hastily designed interfaces, and increasingly slower implementation of new features.

In other words, the old Mimic App platform and user experience was causing Stukent to lose its competitive edge in the marketplace.

With new business opportunities and a chance to continue major community impacts, Personal Finance, one of Stukent’s largest Sims, would be Learning Studio’s first Simternship.

Identifying where to improve

Partnering with my Director of Product, Director of Instructional Design and Engineering Manager, we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the Mimic App platform.

By conducting user interviews, reviewing extensive customer support tickets, system data, heatmaps, and speaking with our Sales team, we narrowed down our focus, which included:

  • Increase student employability by making Simternships more realistic and authentic to real working environments, allowing for deeper experiential application of knowledge and skills. This would mean completely redesigning the Simternship interface to look, feel, and behave like a modern desktop experience.

  • Reinforce E3 learning (engage, enrich, encode) and scaffolding by moving away from Mimic App’s linear user experience and providing a self-paced, AI-powered flow through practice assignments.

  • Introduce just-in-time and personalized feedback that students could use during their practice, providing deliberate, practiced activities that allow for productive failure (resulting in stronger comprehension scoring at the end of the Sim).

  • A grid and design system, along with a complementary component library, that would dramatically decrease development time, streamline quality testing, increase modular updates, and allow for third-party white labelling.

The solution

Throughout a series of cross-functional design sprints together, my collaborative product team and I were able to produce a prototype concept that was tested (with professors, students, and internal Stukent staff) to fully identify our Learning Studio + Personal Finance product strategy:

  1. Design a new catalog of “desktop apps,” which would be built in the backend as their own, standalone mini-applications in Stukent’s software. These apps could be used across multiple Simternships, allowing for faster implementation and more consistent user experiences, along with better emulating real-world desktop experiences. For Personal Finance, this would include a Banking and Budgeting application.

  2. Implement Stukent’s emerging AI technology to allow for unique, non-linear and self-paced learning per student. This would ultimately power a few key engines of Learning Studio, such as the “mentor” character that students would engage with and the new feedback logic.

  3. Reinforce the new user experience with better user interface design, including structural hierarchy to clearly identify when the student was “in-world” and features they may need to engage with for system help by “breaking the fourth wall.”

New User Experiences

Featured Screens of Live Events

Featured Screens of the Banking App

  • Savings | Default View

  • Savings | New Account

  • Credit Card Management | Default View

  • Credit Card Management | Payment Error

  • Credit Score | Overview

  • Credit Score | Improvement Tips Modal

  • Net-worth Tracking

Budgeting App Happy Path

User Engagement

  • Myself and my lead designer partnered together in writing and conducting interviews with professors in multiple states to pinpoint where in the student journey Mimic App had failed.

    This information was also used by my Director of Product to inform us both in defining our product strategy, pinpointing where in our system students were getting stuck and making professors’ lives harder.

  • With professor partnerships at universities across the country, my team and I had access to user groups for pre-design interviews, design refinement during the iterative design phase, and near-final prototype testing.

  • Throughout our design process for each Personal Finance app and the overall Learning Studio workflow, my designers and I made sure to complement our moderated interviews and customer tests with unmoderated usability tests via UserTesting.com, screening for our specific demographics.

    Not only did this give us more qualitative and quantitative data to help inform product and design decisions, it also helped to challenge any biases internal to Stukent and/or our customer partners.

  • We tested our UX writing and Personal Finance specific instructions to ensure readability and usability. This included A/B testing and prototype testing.

Our designs were used by our Engineering team to build an initial prototype, which was met with resounding excitement from executive leadership and key customers.

Because of our close partnership with Product Management and Engineering, our Learning Studio concept was able to move quickly into feature writing and full software development across multiple scrum teams.

The prototype has also been used to win key contracts in new markets for Stukent, including Idaho State credit unions and several prison systems across the United States.

This means that more than just traditional students will be able to practice and grow their financial literacy into a career––adults from all walks of life will now be able to learn critical life skills that will unlock a lifetime of opportunity and better decision-making.

The first Learning Studio Personal Finance launch is set for the fall 2025 semester.

Results and Impact