Merry Shirvani
/ UX Designer
Redesigning a Live Career Prep Platform To Expand Beyond One-Off Bookings
TechMockInterview began as a passion project by a software engineer who had faced that pressure firsthand. The idea was simple: connect candidates anonymously with people who conduct such interviews, so they can practise before the real thing.
TechMockInterview had a great interviewer network, but as similar services gained traction, it couldn’t rely on the quality of its service alone. Complicated flows, heavy manual support, and weak trust signals revealed the limits of its early service model. That’s when I joined as a part-time UI/UX Designer during my first master’s degree to bring the product experience up to the quality of the service and support the team’s growth ambitions.
Improve the live candidate and expert experience with minimal disruption, building trust, reducing drop-off, and creating a scalable foundation for feature expansion.
The initial brief was to refresh an outdated UI and improve the overall experience that was contributing to user dissatisfaction and high demand for manual support as users turned to email for individual support.
Changes had to happen within a live product, while engineering stayed focused on technical improvements. Meanwhile, the team was planning to expand into a broader career preparation service, but the product lacked the necessary foundation as it was still shaped around urgent, one-off bookings. I focused on high-impact improvements across UI and flow, while creating reusable patterns for future scalability and smoother design-to-development handoff.
The expert network was central to the platform’s value, so most features had been built around keeping experts engaged. But compared with newer competitors, the product did not give new candidates enough clarity, confidence, or reason to start.
Unclear flows and edge-case booking scenarios led some users to either abandon the process or email the team for individual support.
Missed sessions showed that both candidates and experts needed a clearer place to track bookings, reminders, and next steps.
I split the work into three focus areas, balancing what could improve the live product now with what would support the platform later:
Refresh key UI patterns and clarify existing flows without disrupting active users, aligning the product with the quality of its service.
Help new users understand the value, navigate the website, and move into booking with less support.
Create a working space to manage sessions and future career-prep services so the product could grow beyond one-off bookings.
I approached this stage as an iterative cycle of exploration, validation, and alignment. Working through short design cycles with PMs, designers, and engineers, I used flow mapping, wireframes, prototypes, critiques, and feasibility reviews to test interaction logic, surface edge cases, and align on what was worth building next.
Along the way, I improved design-to-development handoff through Zeplin, more organized design files, and a refined design system—making implementation smoother and reducing ambiguity across the team.
The final designs spanned three layers:
With limited technical capacity, I designed multiple staged solutions within the existing codebase and page structure, balancing UI improvements and new features with lower engineering effort and minimal disruption to current users.
Sections of the refined design system used across the product to ensure consistency.
Helped support a major growth period → During my time on the team, drop-off decreased noticeably across key entry points and remained limited to edge cases, while the platform grew from ~1K to 10K users.
Reduced manual support demand and team effort → New onboarding, booking, and session-management flows let the product handle needs that had previously required manual support, significantly reducing recurring email requests.
Improved user satisfaction and team alignment → Stakeholders and expert users responded positively to the redesigned platform that better reflected the quality of the service. Internally, clearer design direction reduced ambiguity and improved collaboration.
Live product design changed how I think about “better.” A cleaner experience on paper can still be confusing to users who already rely on the current flow, so I learned to think more carefully about sequencing, rollout risk, and the cost of change. Sometimes new UI is not better; it is just… new.
A design is only as strong as the case you can make for it. (To my great disappointment,) my designs could not defend themselves in meetings! I learned to involve engineers earlier, use rapid prototypes to communicate ideas and make trade-offs visible, and better explain decisions through user value, technical effort, and business impact.
Prioritization becomes part of the craft. Working directly with multiple teams gave me a (much needed!) more realistic understanding of the actual cost of my design decisions. I learned to empathize with engineers and product teams the same way I empathize with users, then make peace with leaving good ideas behind so the team could ship what mattered most.
Good outcomes deserve better tracking. If I were doing this project again, I would define success metrics earlier and track changes more deliberately. At the time, the improvements felt obvious through user behaviour, stakeholder feedback, and reduced support requests. Unfortunately, “we could feel it working” isn’t the strongest impact metric.
