TAP: Bringing UX Thinking to a Vibe-Coded Product

At a glance

• -Brought in to make screens look better, conducted a full UX audit instead and expanded the scope with team agreement after presenting the findings.
• -Identified critical problems across information architecture, navigation anti-patterns, missing progress tracking, and unexplained data visualisation.
• -Redesigned the evaluation overview, results view, school review page, and school information structure around the actual job trust users come to do.
• -Moved persistent school information from a cluttered sidebar into a clean on-demand modal, reducing visual noise across the entire product.

Overview

TAP was built by people who understood the problem deeply but had never designed a product before. Using AI-assisted tools, the team had moved fast and produced something functional, but the information architecture was unclear, user flows were broken in places, and when tested with trust users, they could not always figure out how to do the specific job they had come to do. My role was not to start over. It was to bring UX thinking to what already existed and redesign it into something users could actually navigate confidently.

Context

TAP is a new product being built as a collaboration between Edurio and a large multi-academy trust. It allows trusts to manage school self-evaluations at scale: trust users review submissions from individual schools, raise queries, provide support ratings, and submit their overall review. Managing evaluations across 35 or more schools in a single round is a complex task, and the product needed to make that complexity manageable.