Case Study
A product design project exploring how an academic writing platform could help students plan, draft, cite, and submit in one focused workspace.
My Role
Product Design, UX Strategy, Content Design
Focus
Academic writing, citations, formatting, workflow simplification
Problem Statement
Students should spend their time developing ideas, not fighting formatting.
Academic writing is already mentally demanding, but students also have to manage citations, formatting rules, and submission requirements through disconnected tools and manual work. This creates wasted time, unnecessary stress, and low confidence at the final stage of submission. WriteForm aimed to solve that by simplifying the workflow into one guided, trustworthy experience.
Importance
Why this Matters
Formatting errors don’t just waste time, they create stress, lost points, and lower confidence at the moment students are trying to submit their best work. WriteForm matters because it helps move academic effort away from manual corrections and toward writing, thinking, and learning, while also reducing repetitive review work for professors, advisors, and writing centers.
Students
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Save time
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Reduce Stress
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Submit with Confidence
Professors & Advisors
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Have fewer formatting corrections
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More focus on content
Writing Centers
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Get more scalable support
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Less repetitive citation checking
Product Vision
A calmer, more reliable workspace for academic writing from draft to submission.
The vision for WriteForm was to become a reliable academic writing workspace, not just a citation helper. By automating formatting and citation rules, the product could help users write faster, reduce stress, and submit work with greater confidence, all within one guided portal experience.
User Persona
Primary Target Audience
The primary user is a student working on academically structured writing such as papers, reports, theses, or dissertations. They are often balancing deadlines, research, and multiple responsibilities, and they need their writing process to feel clear, efficient, and reliable.
Maya
24
Grad Student
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​Balances coursework, part-time work, and frequent research-based writing assignments
“I can handle the writing part. It’s the formatting, citations, and final checks that drain my time and confidence.”
Goals
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Finish papers faster
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Feel confident that formatting is correct
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Spend more time on content than technical details
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Submit work without second-guessing
Frustrations
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Wastes hours fixing citations and references
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Gets confused by APA and institutional rules
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Uses too many separate tools to finish one paper
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Feels stressed that small formatting mistakes will affect her grade
Secondary User Block
While students are the main audience, WriteForm also creates value for professors, advisors, and writing centers by reducing repetitive formatting corrections and making academic review more efficient.
Pain Points
User Survey
To validate the problem, I conducted a survey with 64 respondents about paper formatting, editing behavior, and willingness to pay for support. These responses helped surface the most common pain points students face and clarified what kind of solution would feel valuable, trustworthy, and accessible.
40% people said, the most frustrating part of writing a paper was formatting
29% said, they did not know where to find help while formatting a paper
63% said, they were willing to pay for a tool to help them format and cite their paper
Design Challenge
How might we
Based on the pain points from the survey and the product opportunity, I framed the design challenge through three key questions:
Reduce the time students spend on formatting and citation tasks?
Make academic writing feel more guided and less overwhelming from draft to submission?
Build trust in the output so students feel confident submitting their work?
Features
MVP Scope
To keep the experience focused, I mapped the MVP around the features that directly reduce formatting stress during the writing process.
01.
APA-formatted writing workspace
The editor is built around academic writing needs, helping users work inside an APA-ready structure rather than formatting everything manually later. This shifts formatting from a last-minute task to an integrated part of the writing workflow.
03.
Citation and source library
The source library allows users to add and manage citations directly inside the workspace instead of switching between multiple external tools. This keeps the citation workflow connected to the writing process.
02.
Section-wise document navigation
A structured left-side index allows users to move between front matter, core body, and back matter sections. This makes long-form academic writing easier to navigate, edit, and manage, especially for theses or multi-section papers.
04.
Live citation preview
When adding a source, users can preview how the formatted citation will appear before inserting it. This improves trust, reduces guesswork, and makes citation handling feel more transparent.
User Flow
Primary Flow
