TL;DR

What: Designed Ashoka Companion, a mobile app that onboards freshmen to campus life by solving the things they can't figure out on their own: who to talk to, what's happening when, and who to ask.

| Why: Google Classroom treats all assignments as same, one deadline, one submission, zero visibility in between. What looks like student procrastination is actually a planning and feedback problem.

Why: Ashoka University runs a one-week orientation for incoming students. But one week can't compress an entire campus's social, spatial, and institutional knowledge into a new student's head.

| What: A 0→1 feature concept that breaks complex assignments into steps with AI grading at each one, so students know if they're on track before it's too late, and teachers see work while it can still be changed.

Outcome: 1,247+ downloads. 800+ MAU. Shipped on both App Store and Play Store within 6 weeks.

| Outcome: Shipped a live prototype and pitch deck. The feature earns its place in Google's paid Workspace tiers by reducing instructor effort without changing how Classroom already works.

My Role: Product Design Lead. Owned user research, information architecture, interaction design, and UI across the full product.

| My Role: Owned product design, hypothesis framing, prioritisation, and roadmapping.

THE PROBLEM

University orientation ends on Day 7. The confusion doesn't.

Ashoka's orientation week is dense, talks, tours, mixers, resource fairs. The problem isn't effort. It's compression. You can't absorb a campus in a week.

We surveyed incoming freshmen and found the same three gaps surfacing everywhere:

The university had answers to all of these. Students just had no reliable way to access them in the moment they needed them.

THE DESIGN CHALLENGE

How do you make an entire campus's knowledge accessible to someone who arrived 48 hours ago?

The constraint wasn’t information, it was discoverability. Resources were scattered across PDFs, websites, notice boards, and seniors, and none were accessible at the moment of need.

The app had to act as a just-in-time layer over campus.

SOLUTION

A single surface for everything a freshman doesn't know yet.

Five entry points, profile, Find My Pal, Ashoka Assist, campus map, and support contacts, each mapped to a specific moment a freshman gets stuck.

The schedule view pulls in the full O-week timeline so students stop asking "what's next" and start just showing up.

Setting up to connect

Before using Find My Pal, students create a lightweight profile, name, batch, interests, and an optional Instagram.

Interest tags power matching, but also act as conversation starters by showing up before the chat begins.

Find My Pal: A 1-minute window to meet someone new.

50% of freshmen felt isolated. Traditional icebreakers fail, too performative, high-pressure, and biased toward extroverts.

Find My Pal flips it: you’re matched on shared interests, see common ground upfront, then get 60 seconds to chat, short enough to avoid awkwardness, focused enough to spark something real, and designed to move offline.

The questions that don't need a person, just a faster path to the answer.

Schedule — A day-by-day O-week timeline with times and locations. The current day is highlighted, events are chronological, and location pins replace confusing room codes. No more “what’s next?” or “where is it?”

Ashoka Assist — An AI chatbot trained on university data and manually indexed info — from mess menus to club schedules. Built for real freshman questions, not assumed ones.

Support Contacts — A searchable directory of all campus resources — academic, health, administrative. One search, one answer. No buried links.

IMPACT

1,247 downloads in the first week. 800+ kept using it monthly.

Shipped on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 6 weeks. Find My Pal became the most-used feature, the primary way students met beyond orientation groups.

The app outlasted O-week: 800+ monthly active users into the semester.

Making Campus Feel Navigable from Day one