OverView
Background
The Goal
Timeline: May 2025 – Present
Role: 0-1 Product Designer · UX Research · Design Strategy
In summer 2025, I led the product design for Liaizon—a cross-campus platform helping student entrepreneurs find teammates. Originally launched between Northeastern and Babson, the platform soon expanded to Olin, Wellesley, and MIT. I was responsible for designing the full matchmaking experience, from user onboarding and team invitations to auto-generated team assignments, with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and scalability.
The core goal was to accelerate team formation for early-stage student projects. Beyond just helping individuals connect, we wanted to build a system that empowered users to showcase their strengths, clarify expectations, and reduce friction during the early stages of collaboration.
Research
In our early research, we discovered that students involved in cross-university entrepreneurship programs frequently struggled to form effective teams. Many relied on informal methods like Discord channels, cold DMs, or spreadsheets—resulting in fragmented outreach and mismatched expectations. Over 60% of survey respondents admitted they had abandoned projects due to poor team fit or lack of support.
Interviews with dozens of students and faculty uncovered two consistent themes:
1. Limited access to diverse teammates.
Most students relied on chat groups or friends to form teams, making it hard to reach beyond their existing network.
2. Mismatches in work style and expectations.
Many abandoned projects due to unclear communication, mismatched commitment, or misaligned skill sets.ork.
Design
Designing Liaizon’s matchmaking experience wasn’t simply about arranging UI components—it required us to first untangle the complexity of how students search for collaborators, what information builds trust, and how to reduce friction in team formation. We explored dozens of flows, constantly revisiting what would feel approachable to first-time users while still offering depth for those with specific teammate criteria.
One of our earliest challenges was defining what a “match” meant in our context. Was it based on shared interests, complementary skill sets, or mutual availability? We also debated how much user detail to surface up front: Should profiles prioritize skills, current projects, or academic background? Was it more valuable to label people as “founders,” “contributors,” or simply “students”?
To ensure that our onboarding experience truly reflected students’ needs and preferences, I initiated the design process by creating a targeted survey. The goal was to gather feedback on potential features—such as AI-based matching, calendar syncing, and layout preferences—so that students could directly shape the experience. By allowing users to indicate how they preferred to sign up, what features mattered most, and what UI style felt most trustworthy, I was able to ground my design decisions in real user input and prioritize what would feel both intuitive and engaging.
Validating our ideas
Designing a matching system for student founders meant balancing familiarity, engagement, and utility. We began with a competitive analysis of existing matchmaking models—from LinkedIn-style filters to community-based platforms like Y Combinator’s co-founder tool. While those platforms emphasized structured profile search or longform inputs, we noticed a critical misalignment: most of our users were first-time founders with limited time, who felt overwhelmed by overly formal processes.
Since our stakeholders were all students, we intentionally leaned toward a more lightweight, mobile-native interaction style.
We came up with a simple solution: Inspired by familiar social interfaces like Tinder and Bumble for Friends, we introduced a swipe-based matching flow to reduce friction and make browsing potential teammates feel more intuitive and less transactional.Sometimes all that’s needed to improve usability is We found that a more casual, swipeable interface lowered barriers and encouraged exploration—especially for students new to startup collaboration.
To add clarity and trust, each profile included a skill compatibility score, visually showing the percentage of complementary strengths between the viewer and the suggested teammate. This allowed users to quickly understand not just who someone is, but how well they’d work together—without needing to dig into resumes or long bios.
As we refined this experience, I also began exploring ways to help the algorithm better recognize each user’s strengths. Rather than relying on plain checkboxes or dropdowns, I experimented with interactive skill sliders and visual diagrams that let users indicate not only what skills they had, but how confident they felt in each. This not only made the data more nuanced for the system, but also gave students a sense of ownership and self-reflection during onboarding.
demo under constructions
Team Formation
After implementing skill-based matching, the next design challenge was forming teams in a way that balanced user preferences with institutional requirements. Since Liaizon was initially deployed in a multi-campus hackathon setting, we had to follow a strict constraint: each team needed to include one student from Babson, Olin, Wellesley, EVOLVE, and Northeastern’s graduate program.
To support this structure, I worked closely with stakeholders to define two parallel team formation pathways: manual matching through mutual invitations, and automatic team generation for unmatched users. This hybrid model gave students more control when desired, while still ensuring that all participants were fairly placed into balanced, diverse teams.
From a UX perspective, I created a clear flow for each outcome—pending invites, matched teams, and auto-generated placements—to help students understand where they were in the process and reduce anxiety about “being left out.”
Turning Short-Term Hackathon Participants into Long-Term Users
While the initial goal of our platform was to support short-term team formation for hackathons, I began thinking about how we could retain users after the event ended. To encourage long-term engagement, I introduced a simple switch toggle in the user dashboard. This button allows users to transition from “Hackathon Mode” to “Startup Mode” — enabling them to continue using the platform to find co-founders, explore new ideas, or join longer-term projects.
This subtle shift in interface empowers users to evolve their goals without needing to re-register or rebuild their profile, keeping the experience continuous, personalized, and growth-oriented.
Next Step
Our Figma prototype is fully built and currently being developed by our frontend and backend engineers. We’re aiming to launch a fully functional MVP by July 31st — stay tuned! I’ll continue to share updates as we progress.
If you're interested in our project or want to see it in action, feel free to explore our website and follow along.