italki Community 1.0

A redesigned italki community website was released in February 2019, allowing italki users to connect with each other through language learning content and language exchange. I was the lead product manager responsible for the implementation of this website.

The website will be used by 2,450,000 unique visitors every month, generating hundreds of learning queries per day.

The italki community is essentially all of the interactions that do not pertain to taking a lesson with a teacher. On the italki community users can meet language partners, ask questions, start discussions, and ask for writing corrections.

italki needed to do a design and UX update on the community pages, with the purpose of modernizing the content and re-branding it to fit our new website. I was able to re-imagine many interactions and components with designers according to the standards of the new website, while porting over the original logic and APIs.

Well-Documented:

[Tech] An outspoken output from the redesign was a clear paper trail of logical specifications for the community pages. Previous product managers had not created inclusive documentation, which left many teams, most importantly QA, unsure about the desired functionality. I wrote an extensive functional specification document outlining all of the desired features of the community, and kept that document as a living spec, updating it daily to keep all teams on the same page.

Optimizing UX:

[UX] I worked closely with design throughout the spec-writing process to make sure that we did not simply copy the existing UX, but actively improved it.

Users on our site often reported not seeing or being aware of their pending friend requests, and the friend request feature was difficult to use on mobile.

We moved friend requests into the new messaging center and allowed them to accept or decline from inside the chat pane - a much more mobile friendly and natural experience.

Beautiful + Functional:

[UX] A major component of this project was managing updating designs of a very complicated feature set. I spent hours with design, helping balance design and logic to make sure that we would be able to produce a beautiful but useable product. Helping them decide what we can cut and what is important to user on the site was a primary role during the course of this project.