# A home for campus projects

Collabnest, IIT Patna · Lead UI/UX Designer

2025

Collabnest is where students and faculty at IIT Patna share their work. It's open to 2,500+ students and professors, who can upload projects, find people to work with, talk in forums and run it all from admin tools.

I was the lead UI/UX designer. I designed the flows end to end, ran user research in rounds as the design changed, and piloted the launch.

## What changed

Projects on the platform became 85% more visible, and new students had an easier time getting started.

**How visible projects were, with before as 100**

| | |
|---|---|
| Before | 100 |
| After | 185 |

## A marketplace in disguise

A project hub has two sides. Projects need people, people need projects, and neither side shows up until the other is already there. Professors won't post if students don't look, and students stop looking once all they see is last year's projects.

**Two sides, and neither wants to go first**

So the design problem was really a cold-start problem. The first visit has to show something alive: a project that changed this week, a forum thread that got a reply, a professor looking for someone with your skills. New students getting started more easily came from a first screen built around three things: projects looking for someone with your skills, threads that got a reply this week, and professors with open roles.

## What "more visible" should mean

Visibility is a slippery word, so it needs a hard definition before anyone celebrates it. Here's the funnel I'd put under it.

**The funnel under "visible"**

The last step is the one that matters. A platform that gets students clicking on projects but never onto a team has made browsing nicer and changed nothing else. If I could keep one number, it would be accepted requests per week.

## Two users, one screen

Students and professors want different things from the same page. A student is browsing and needs to feel it's fine to ask. A professor is filtering, and wants to see quickly whether this person can do the work.

That tension should decide the layout. The student's side can lean on warmth: who's on the team and what they're stuck on. The professor's side needs evidence, like what this student has built before and how recently. The admin tools exist so faculty can run their projects without emailing a coordinator every time something changes.

## Piloting the launch

I didn't open it to the whole institute on day one. The pilot started with one department, because a pilot shows you the empty-state problem at a size you can still fix by hand. Before the first student signed in, we asked the professors we'd already interviewed to post one real project each, so nobody's first visit was an empty page.

The pilot also settled an argument. Half the team wanted direct messages. We shipped forum threads on each project instead, so questions about a project stayed on the project, where the next student could read the answer instead of asking again.

## Research in rounds

I ran research in rounds because being wrong in Figma is cheap and being wrong after launch isn't. Each round had one question it had to answer. The first asked whether students understood what the platform was for. The second asked whether they could find a project and ask to join it without help. The third asked whether professors could run a project from the admin tools without emailing anyone.

**What I'd measure**

Students who join a project through Collabnest each month

- **Fresh projects**posted or updated in the last two weeks

- **Requests sent**per student who opened a project

- **Replies**and how long professors take to answer

- **Still active**teams working together a month later

## Next bets

Match people to projects using what they've already built. A student's past projects, code and forum posts say more about their skills than a profile field they filled in once. The part that matters is showing the reason for each match, like "you've both worked on computer vision", because a match with no reason feels random and gets ignored.

I'd judge it with one comparison. Do matched requests get accepted more often than requests from plain browsing? If they don't, the matching is decoration.

Long forum threads could get a short summary at the top, so someone who joins late can catch up in a minute. A search that understands questions would let a first-year find out that a senior tried their idea two years ago, which might be the most useful thing the platform can do for them.

## How it's built

Collabnest is live at collabnest.iitp.ac.in, behind the institute's Microsoft sign-in, so every account is a real student or professor. It was built by a student team, and my part was the design: the flows, the component library, and reviewing each build against the Figma before it shipped.

[Live site](https://collabnest.iitp.ac.in) [Figma](https://www.figma.com/design/WMzGcDu8FSVYxlb4KKMJTi/CollabNest?node-id=0-1&t=OOAjTjB2N0KY3Ps7-1) [Demo video](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wz0hgNkq1TcDSj0y9ouWKGYvY9YIF2ah/view?usp=sharing)