Role
Sole designer
UX Research, Visual Design, Interaction Design
Timeline
August - September 2025
Team
1 Product Manager
1 Engineer
What is Pencil Spaces?
Pencil Spaces is an all-in-one platform for teaching that brings together a whiteboard, video calling, and built-in educational tools. The goal is to eliminate the need to juggle multiple tools like video calling and screen sharing across tabs by creating one unified workspace.
Whiteboarding in a Space
A digital whiteboard to place, share, and work with instructional content.
Video Calling
Built in video calling within the Space
Scheduling and Attendance
Users manage lesson schedules and track attendance
Problem
Pencil Spaces struggles with low adoption rate
Despite offering a richer feature set than many competitors, Pencil Spaces struggled with user onboarding and conversion, particularly among users accustomed to traditional video-calling tools like Zoom or Google Meet. Many users find it difficult to navigate the different controls and features within Pencil Spaces, especially when using Mobile and Tablet.
Solution
Redesigning the navigation, tools and apps inside a Space
1/ Simplified bottom bar
2/ Improved information architecture of video call controls
3/ Navigation bar on tablet and mobile to seamlessly access features
Impact
⭐️ Built a new design system paradigm
While parts of the work is still in development, we've received overwhelming positive feedback from current users with the updates.
Early releases received consistently positive feedback from existing users, validating the new interaction and system-level design direction.
Directly supported the closing of 3 major partnership deals with companies and institutions integrating Pencil Spaces into their platforms.
Enabled multiple product optimization workstreams that were previously blocked by legacy system constraints, accelerating future feature development.