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Co-Creating Better Student Tools with Overgrad
Product teams working on student-facing tools know the tension: you can design a clean, well-intended experience, but without direct input from teens, you’re left making calls you hope are right.
Overgrad reached a familiar crossroads. They were reshaping their student dashboard and reorganizing college and career exploration flows, areas that directly influence whether students understand what to do, stay engaged, and ultimately achieve their goals.
Overgrad is a postsecondary planning platform built to help students navigate college and career decisions with clarity and confidence. Designed alongside educators and counselors, the platform brings key planning tools into one place, giving students a clearer view of milestones, options, and next steps as they move toward life after high school.
Rather than relying on indirect classroom feedback or internal assumptions, they partnered with In Tandem to get clarity before committing resources to a full build.
How In Tandem fits in
In Tandem is an all-in-one youth experience and insight platform that helps organizations recruit, engage, and learn from teens through research, testing, and innovation.
For Overgrad, partnering with In Tandem strengthens an already intentional product process by embedding direct student insight into key decision points. Instead of relying on indirect signals or delayed feedback, their team gains timely, experience-based input from students as they refine dashboards and exploration flows.
With In Tandem, Overgrad gets early, unfiltered clarity straight from teens, at the exact moment decisions are being made—not after the build, not after release, and not after issues surface.
How In Tandem fits in
In Tandem is an all-in-one youth experience and insight platform that helps organizations recruit, engage, and learn from teens through research, testing, and innovation.
Our platform makes it simple for teams to connect with young people, capture their honest feedback, and translate what they’re hearing into smarter, faster decisions.
Because teens know we’ve created a trusted environment for them, and because there’s always value exchange built in, they share openly. Not polite answers. Not guesses about what adults want to hear, but real experiences, real reactions, and the small details adults routinely miss.
What we’re testing, and what teams learn from it
Overgrad is testing two major shifts:
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A redesigned student dashboard with a more intuitive, AI-supported milestone flow
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A reorganized exploration experience that brings colleges, majors, careers, and programs into a single navigable path
Each has two versions. Students will move through Figma prototypes asynchronously, narrating their clicks and filling out short surveys tied to the tasks.
This gives Overgrad more than general feedback. It shows the moments that directly determine whether the redesign will help or hurt the business.
They’ll see where students get stuck, where motivation drops, where navigation breaks down, and where confidence builds. These are the inflection points that tell a product team whether they’re on the right path or about to ship something that slows students down, suppresses usage, or increases support load.
In other words, these are the signals you want before you commit a sprint cycle. Not after.
These insights don’t just inform UX decisions. They influence build planning, sprint scoping, support load, and customer-facing promises about how the product works in the hands of real students.
How the work happened
To support Overgrad’s redesign, In Tandem:
- Recruited 20 to 40 high school students reflecting Overgrad’s core user base, including underrepresented students and students from low-income communities
- Ran async walkthroughs with screen and audio capture
- Programmed survey prompts using Figma and Qualtrics
- Delivered raw data, easy-to-skim summaries, and video clips teams could drop directly into internal reviews
- Facilitated a small focus group to add context behind emerging patterns
All of this happened without Overgrad’s product designer needing to spend time on logistics, coordination, or analysis, freeing them to stay focused on design and roadmap execution.
Why this work matters
For teams building student-facing tools, the risk isn’t just shipping the “wrong” version. It is unknowingly creating new friction for the very students the product is meant to support.
When critical features like dashboards and exploration flows don’t match how teens actually think and move, a few things happen quickly:
- Students hesitate, lose confidence, or drop off before completing important tasks.
- Educators spend more time coaching students through the product instead of focusing on real guidance.
- Product teams end up revisiting decisions they thought were settled, burning cycles on fixes rather than forward progress.
These issues don’t only affect usage; they affect outcomes. If students can’t understand next steps, can’t navigate planning tools, or can’t complete key milestones, the broader ecosystem feels it—from teachers to counselors to families.
From testing to what’s next
Over the past few weeks, In Tandem Youth Partners tested four prototypes, shared candid reactions, and helped Overgrad identify which design decisions truly support students as they navigate postsecondary choices. A focused group conversation then explored the “why” behind emerging patterns, adding context that can’t be captured through clicks alone.
Those insights are now informing refinements to the dashboard and exploration experience. And this isn’t a one-time effort. Future testing rounds will continue building on what students surfaced, ensuring each iteration reflects how young people actually move through these decisions—not just how a design looks in a prototype.
We’re looking forward to what the next round reveals
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