Context
As Senior UX Designer at Cultura Inglesa, one of Brazil's largest language school networks, I work on product end to end: from qualitative research with students to redesigning the teaching platform's experience, through to architecting new transactional systems. Two recent projects illustrate that scope: a full usability and engagement redesign of the academic platform, and the rebuild of the Cambridge exam enrollment store.
UX Redesign and Gamification System — Academic Platform
The Problem
The teaching platform had a combination that's usually fatal for retention: unclear activities, a poor mobile experience, and a high volume of support tickets caused by navigation confusion, with students and guardians opening tickets to resolve doubts that a clearer interface would have solved on its own. I ran recurring qualitative research with students to map the exact points of friction, instead of assuming design hypotheses.
The Solution: Three Integrated Fronts
Mobile responsiveness: the platform was adapted for comfortable use on phones, the predominant access device outside the classroom.
Activity clarity and overall usability: redesign of flows and information hierarchy guided directly by the qualitative research findings; the points where students reported not understanding what to do next became the UX backlog, prioritized by the frequency and impact reported in the sessions themselves.
Ethically designed gamification system: I designed the complete architecture of a badge system covering five groups of academic behavior: practice volume and consistency, completion of diagnostic exams (rewarding the courage to self-assess, not the score), weekly regularity via spaced learning, participation in cultural and immersion events, and autonomy in using the platform itself. The most important design decision isn't visible on the surface: the system follows explicit neuroeducation principles and complies with the ECA Digital (Brazil's Children and Adolescents Digital Statute), with no predatory mechanics, no "loot boxes," no reward for screen time or infinite scrolling. Every badge is triggered by a real pedagogical accomplishment, the student knows in advance exactly what they need to do to unlock it, and the communication is level-neutral (it works equally well for an A1 beginner and a C1 advanced student, without patronizing either one). On a platform used by minors, that ethical care was treated as a product requirement, not an extra.
Results
The three fronts, launched together, produced an approximately 23% increase in student retention on the platform. The most revealing side effect: support volume, which used to be inflated precisely by navigation confusion, dropped by about 65%. It's the kind of number that confirms the original diagnosis: much of what looked like "need for support" was, in fact, a symptom of poorly resolved UX.
Cambridge Exam Store — Rebuilding a Broken Journey
The Problem
Enrolling in Cambridge exams (FCE, CAE, YLE and others) required candidates to navigate three different systems: the institutional site, a form on the internal academic system, and an external payment gateway, with no decision information available before starting registration. That produced a poor mobile experience, confusion between the candidate's name and the paying guardian's, no reliable email confirmation, and hours of daily manual work for the team to sort internal and external students' enrollments by hand.
The Solution
I led the product design of a new store, unifying the journey in one place under an "information first, registration next, payment last" philosophy, validated against industry benchmarks. The architecture is decoupled into three layers: an Angular frontend consuming a REST API in NestJS, which integrates with a middleware system connected to the institution's academic ERP (Campus Solutions/PeopleSoft). I ran requirements gathering with the commercial, academic and technical areas, documented the full business domain (enrollment rules, exam formats, refund policies and LGPD (Brazil's data protection law)), and specified a 19-endpoint API contract, mapped screen by screen, as the working bridge between design and development.
Results
The project shipped and is now running. The new interface generated about 30% more exam enrollment leads, compared with the same period the previous year: direct validation that unifying the journey and surfacing decision information earlier reduces the drop-off the previous, fragmented experience caused.