A deep-dive into redesigning Bhavishyayaan: rebranding, rethinking onboarding, and rebuilding the emotional experience for students.

Role: Product Designer Client: Bhavishyayaan Focus: UX Research, Brand Design, UI Redesign

The Problem

When I first connected with Saadgi Malhotra, founder of Bhavishyayaan, the numbers told a painful story. Nearly 70% of users were abandoning the app during sign-up and onboarding, before they ever got to see what the product could actually do for them. That kind of drop-off does not just hurt the user experience. It directly hits revenue, growth, and the credibility of the entire product.

But a number on a dashboard does not tell you why people are leaving. To find that out, I had to go deeper.

Research and Discovery

My first step was sitting down with Saadgi to understand where the product started, what it was trying to be, and where the gap had opened up between that vision and the reality students were experiencing. From there, I moved directly to the users, conducting one-on-one interviews with students who were actively using the app.

What came out of those conversations was honest, direct, and at times difficult to hear. Students were not just confused by the app. They were emotionally disengaged from it. One recurring theme stood out more than anything else: students described feeling low and unmotivated while going through the login and sign-up process. For a product built to inspire and support students in shaping their future, that was a fundamental mismatch.

Alongside this emotional finding, four clear problem areas emerged from the research. The app's information architecture was not structured in a way that matched how students naturally think or navigate. The interface had multiple glitches that added friction at exactly the wrong moment, the very first time a user tried to engage. The onboarding flow lacked any sense of excitement or momentum, giving users no reason to push through. And the brand's colour palette and visual tone were so dull and misaligned that they actively worked against the spirit of what Bhavishyayaan stood for.

The Design Process

With research done, I moved into a structured design process that tackled the problem on two levels: the brand and the product.

On the brand side, I ran a competitive analysis to understand how similar products were presenting themselves visually. Most competitors were playing it safe with muted, conservative palettes. But safe was not what Bhavishyayaan needed. Its audience was students, people who respond to energy, colour, and a sense of possibility. I proposed a bold, playful, and joyful colour system that genuinely reflected the product's purpose and gave the brand a visual identity students could actually feel connected to.

On the product side, I rebuilt the information architecture from scratch. Navigation was restructured so that the most important actions were easy to find and the overall flow made intuitive sense. The onboarding experience was redesigned to feel welcoming from the very first screen, with graphical moments and visual feedback that gave users a sense of momentum and excitement as they got started. Every UI glitch that had been identified during research was addressed and resolved in collaboration with the tech team, led by Sanskar, who ensured that what was designed was implemented cleanly and precisely.

Once the redesign was complete, we ran usability testing sessions with real students to validate our decisions and catch anything we had missed before launch.

The Outcome

The results after launch were immediate and significant. The drop-off rate during sign-up and onboarding fell from 70% down to just 10 to 20%. That is not a small improvement. That is a near-complete turnaround in how users were responding to their very first interaction with the product.

Students who had previously bounced without completing sign-up were now moving through the onboarding flow and staying engaged with the app. The qualitative shift was just as clear as the quantitative one. Users were not just completing the process. They were doing so with enthusiasm. The emotional experience of the product had changed, and that change translated directly into better retention, higher engagement, and a stronger foundation for Bhavishyayaan's growth.