🎓 Canva Design School
Canva’s learning hub for tutorials and courses, designed to help anyone build design skills.
📝 Context
At Canva, I explored ways to boost engagement in Design School through gamification, making learning feel playful, rewarding, and fun. I led research and prototyping to design a solution that helped learners stay curious and return.
🤝 Role
Product Design Intern
⌛️ Timeline
Dec 2024 – Feb 2025
🏆 Skills
Product Design, User Research, UX Writing, Prototyping, Workshop Facilitation
🔍 The Challenge
We knew users were dropping off before completing lessons. Some got distracted, others didn’t know where to start, and many lost motivation halfway through. I wondered:
What if learning felt like progress you could see, share, and be proud of?
🧠 The Goal
I set out to prototype a gamified learning experience that was:
✏️ My Role & Process
(aka... me obsessing over how Duolingo keeps people hooked)
As the sole Product Design Intern in the Design School team, I led the end-to-end design process (from early research through to motion design) shaping a learning experience that was playful, motivating, and emotionally thoughtful.
We followed a loose Double Diamond approach: exploring broadly, narrowing with intent, and iterating until things felt right.
Along the way, I:
• Led research, prototyping, and unmoderated testing
• Facilitated workshops with cross-functional teams
• Designed the end-to-end user journey, from sketch to polish
• Partnered with PMs and engineers to align on feasibility
🔍 Understand
I kicked things off with layered research to unpack how and why users engage with learning platforms.
📊 Secondary Research
Did you know... gamification doesn’t just make learning fun, it makes it work better?
Here’s what the research says:
89%
increase in student performance via challenge-based, gamified learning
(Hamari et al., 2014)
68%
of students feel more motivated and engaged when using gamified learning
(Zainuddin et al., 2020)
90%
of employees prefer to engage in gamified learning tasks.
(TalentLMS, 2019)
These insights confirmed something we all kind of feel:
People want to learn. But they want it to feel rewarding, not draining.
🧠 Comparator Audit
I analysed 11 apps across edtech, fitness, and creative tooling:
Think: Duolingo, Strava, UXcel, Skillshare, Brilliant…
What I looked for:
Comparator audit of learning platforms like Duolingo, Skillshare, and Coursera (and many more!)
📝 I kept a running table comparing:
Entry points to learning
Motivational feedback patterns
Progress visualisation methods
Emotional tone and visual language
📈 Insights from Product Data
With support from the Design School team, I also reviewed platform usage patterns to uncover behavioural friction points and areas of opportunity.
This helped us identify:
Key navigation pain points
Gaps in perceived progress
Missed opportunities for motivation and reward
📇 The Insights
From this research, four key insights consistently stood out. These became the emotional and strategic foundation for the entire experience:
01
Users are more likely to continue when they receive immediate feedback, such as points or badges, after completing small tasks. Instant rewards create a sense of achievement and reinforce learning behaviours.
02
When users see visible progress, like maintaining a streak or completing milestones, they feel motivated to stay consistent. Long-term engagement tools encourage users to return regularly and avoid dropping out.
03
Personalised learning paths that adapt to user needs make the experience feel tailored and manageable. This reduces frustration, keeps users engaged, and builds trust in the platform.
04
Friendly competition, like leaderboards or team-based challenges, motivates users to stay active. It creates a sense of belonging and shared progress, encouraging consistent participation.
💡 Ideate & Prioritise
To bring the research to life, I co-facilitated a 1.5-hour Gamification Ideation Workshop with the lead designer on the team for 5 Design Educators. It was fast-paced, slightly chaotic, and honestly… really fun!
We kicked things off with:
A quick crash course on what gamification actually means 🎮
Kicking off ideation with a team sketching session
A round of Crazy Eights to get wild ideas flowing 🎭
Early concept sketches from the team
Group sharebacks to spot patterns and build on each other’s thinking 🫂
Voting on our strongest ideas
And finally, effort vs impact mapping to figure out what was actually worth building 📍
Mapping ideas by effort and impact
Prioritising features with the MoSCoW method
Out of all the sticky notes and post-it chaos, our MVP started to take shape:
🏅
Achievements & badges
⛰️
Personalised learning paths
📊
Visualised progress
🧠
Embedded quizzes with real-time feedback
These weren’t just features, they were our anchor. Every decision after this looped back to them.
✨ Design & Prototype
This wasn’t just a visual design sprint, it was about shaping a learning experience that felt intuitive, encouraging, and deeply motivating.
🧠 From Sketches to Structure
I started by sketching rough concepts to get early ideas out, thinking about how we could blend motivational feedback with Canva’s brand tone. From there, I moved into more structured planning:
Early sketches to ideate on core emotional moments and layout ideas
Quick sketches for gamified moments
User flows outlining the complete journey, from onboarding to course completion
Flow for onboarding and personalisation
Information architecture to map out how learning paths, progress, and rewards would connect
Full user flow overview
Throughout this, I pulled in insights from product data (like drop-off points in Design School), secondary research on gamified learning, and a comparator audit across platforms like Duolingo, Strava, and UXcel.
🎮 Wireframing & Testing Early Concepts
Once the foundation was in place, I built low-fidelity wireframes in Figma to test key flows:
🛤️ Starting the journey
Onboarding quiz
Personalised path selection
First reward moments
💪 Staying motivated
Streak tracking and badge unlocks
Course discovery with visual progress indicators
Friendly, emotionally resonant microcopy
💗 Reflecting and growing
Quiz feedback and retry loops
Progress dashboards
Recaps of completed lessons and unlocked milestones
Rather than wait until the end, I started shaping emotional micro-interactions early:
Celebration popups (“You’re in the top 5%!”)
First badge animations
Copy that encouraged progress, not perfection
Screens mapped to key user goals
🧑💻 Feasibility Workshop
Before going hi-fi, I presented the prototype in a cross-functional check-in with PMs and Engineers to assess what was viable and what needed adjustment.
Together, we explored:
Potential integration challenges with existing learning experiences
Technical constraints around interaction design and layout behaviour
Feasibility of lightweight motivation systems (like streaks and badges)
How to scope animations and feedback within current design systems
Brainstorming what might block implementation across tech, time, and adoption.
This helped shape what stayed in scope, and ensured we were designing something the team could realistically bring to life.
🧪 Validate & Refine
To make sure our ideas resonated beyond the Figma frame, I ran unmoderated user testing with 8 real Canva learners using UserTesting.com. My focus?
Clarity, motivation, and emotional engagement.
💬 What we asked
Each test was structured with guiding prompts and observational tasks. I watched for facial cues, hesitation, click paths, and verbatim reactions, then used affinity mapping to group pain points and patterns.
Mapping early ideas and themes from our ideation sessions.
After synthesising the findings, I built a recommendations table to clearly map what users were struggling with, why it mattered, and how we could address it.
Turning research into action with clear insights and priorities.
✅ What worked
Streaks triggered emotional investment (“I don’t want to lose my streak!”)
Progress bars and dashboards gave users a satisfying sense of momentum
Instant quiz feedback increased confidence and reduced frustration
Personalised learning paths helped learners feel less lost and more supported
⚠️ What needed work
Navigation friction → users struggled to find their way back, so I improved “Back to Path” visibility
Unclear feedback after wrong answers → added “View Theory” buttons and contextual hints
Visual overwhelm → toned down noisy elements, clarified layout hierarchy
Streak anxiety → introduced “repair tokens” to make the system feel forgiving, not punishing
🎨 Final Polish
With strong validation behind the MVP, I moved into high-fidelity design, where the experience truly came to life.
Here’s where I focused:
🔁
Reusable components for consistency and scalability across pages
🎞️
Motion design that made feedback feel fun, rewarding, and emotionally sticky
💬
Supportive, friendly copy that encouraged users without pressure (“You’re in the top 5%!” instead of “Try again”)
🧠
Insight-driven UI enhancements like:
Progress summaries
Badge previews
Subtle milestone moments that gave learners reasons to celebrate
Every detail, from the hover state on a progress card to the wording on an error message, was a chance to make the product feel just a little more human.
🎉 Introducing: Paths & Quizzes
This is where everything came together: motion, copy, structure, and systems, to create a learning experience that felt personal, rewarding, and (dare I say?) kind of fun.
🚀 What’s Next
If this MVP were to ship, I already had ideas brewing for how to take it even further:
🪙
“Ducks” as a light-hearted reward currency → something playful and low-stakes to collect
🫂
Leaderboards and team challenges → to drive social motivation and community vibes
🧠
AI-powered learning recommendations → to make the path smarter, not just prettier
🔁
Real-time dashboards → so the team could monitor engagement and retention meaningfully
Every idea here stemmed from patterns we saw in testing, and the potential we hadn’t tapped yet.
🎮 Side Quests
Beyond the core project, I also got to dip into the wider design team and community at Canva, contributing in ways that pushed me as a communicator and collaborator.
Here’s what I got up to:
🖥️ Presented my research + insights at a Design Critique with designers across specialties (and led one too!)
🧑🏫 Ran a Gamification Workshop for the Design Educators team
📣 Delivered a specialty-wide talk on how design education has shifted in the digital age to 50+ Canvanauts
🤝 Collaborated with PMs and engineers to explore feasibility and implementation strategy
💬 Shared weekly standups + async updates across teams, learning how to communicate design progress clearly (and led a few as well)
🎥 Surprise cameo in a Canva team video
These moments helped me grow beyond the Figma file, into a designer who can present, pitch, and problem-solve across disciplines.
🧡 Final Thoughts
This wasn’t just a project about points and badges.
It was about designing something that feels good to use, because it understands how people feel while using it.
Designing for motivation means designing for emotion.
Not just what users click but why they care.
I left this internship with more confidence in my process, my ability to work cross-functionally, and my instinct for designing with empathy.
Some fun with the #club-padel peeps 🏓
Unwinding with the design team over dinner.
Catching up with the best mentors over lunch!!
Duck-sized memories made with the interns :D
💌 Thanks for scrolling
That’s a wrap on my Design School adventure!
Thanks for taking the time to read ~ I Canva express how much it means. 🥲