Rebuilding an onboarding flow to earn trust from underrepresented graduates
The motivation gap was the real design brief.
TipStart connected underrepresented graduates with experienced mentors across government and policy. The three sides of the onboarding — employer, mentor, mentee — each carried a fundamentally different level of motivation, and the design had to honour that honestly. HR managers are time-poor; graduates are high-stakes and hungry. That asymmetry was the brief.
I lost the argument when the company was alive. This redesign wins it.
When TipStart was live, I pushed to remove a twenty-question personality quiz from the graduate journey. I lost. The signing-up process ran to twenty minutes. This case study is what I'd have built with full authority. Every screen that survives has an argument behind it. The redesign exists because some decisions are worth making twice.
The pledge comes last because it should feel like a signature, not a filter.
Placing the SES data collection at the end of the graduate flow was a deliberate choice. After nine screens of disclosure, the honesty pledge becomes a moment of commitment: a small piece of theatre that marks entry into the programme, not an interrogation at the door. The criteria were deliberately broad, and in practice, very few applicants failed. The sequencing reflects that reality.
The token system is the contract between me and the LLM.
The typography tokens weren't just about visual consistency; they were infrastructure for the way this was built. By defining atoms and semantic variables early, I gave the LLM something to adjudicate against, a system it had to conform to rather than invent around. When a new component needed a new token, that conversation happened explicitly. The design system became the negotiation.
