When the problem isn't the product — it's the premise
product design
internship
befreed
BeFreed is an AI-powered learning platform that allows people to learn anything, personalized. Backed by Afore Capital & ElevenLabs.
We live in a world of constant information abundance, and having easy access to such knowledge is a blessing, but the sheer volume of content has emerged a new challenge: cognitive overload.
Long-form reading is increasingly competing with algorithmic feeds and AI summaries. While summarization tools make information faster to consume, they often flatten nuance and reduce comprehension.
This is exactly why BeFreed was created. BeFreed is an AI-powered reading platform designed to help users navigate complex ideas more efficiently.
01 CONTEXT
A startup preparing to raise, with retention it couldn't explain
BeFreed is an AI-powered reading platform. The idea is good: consume books and ideas faster, without the friction of reading front-to-back. But when I joined, users were coming in, trying it once, and leaving. The product worked. The problem was something else.
The founding team had correctly diagnosed symptoms — high early drop-off, low engagement, weak repeat use. But the brief I received was framed around those symptoms: make the reading experience better. Make onboarding clearer. Make the product detail page convert.
"The challenge was to improve the experience. What it actually needed was for someone to interrogate what the experience was trying to do."
That's not a critique of the team — it's a common thing in early-stage startups. When retention is bad and funding is close, the instinct is to fix surfaces. I wanted to make sure we were fixing the right ones.
02 WHAT I NOTICED
The drop-off wasn't boredom. It was confusion about what to expect.
The original analytics story was: users open the app, start a summary, don't finish it, and leave. The obvious fix is to make summaries more engaging.
But when I looked at where in the flow drop-off happened, it wasn't mid-summary. It was earlier, on the product detail page, or right at the start of reading. Users weren't losing interest. They were deciding, almost immediately, that this wasn't what they had signed up for.
That suggested a different problem: not engagement, but expectation mismatch. Users arrived with one mental model of what the product was, encountered something different, and left. Not because the product was bad, because they didn't know how to hold it.
This reframe shaped almost every decision I made after it.
03 FEATURES
PRODUCT DETAIL PAGE
The PDP wasn't a conversion problem, but a trust problem.
The original PDP showed a book cover, a title, a description, and a "Start Reading" button, but users weren't tapping that button.
The conventional fix would be to make the CTA more prominent, or add social proof, or tighten the copy. Those are conversion-rate optimization moves. I thought the problem was upstream of that.
A user looking at this page is asking three questions that the page wasn't answering:
What will I actually get? A summary, but what kind? How long? In what format?
Is this worth my time right now? There was no time estimate, no sense of scope.
Will I understand this topic if I haven't read the book? No signal of depth or accessibility.
Without answers, users were making conservative decisions. They'd hesitate, browse away, and not come back.
The redesigned PDP answered those three questions before asking anything of the user: a short "what you'll learn" section, a read time, a topic preview, and a visual peek at the card format. The goal wasn't to sell the book, it was to remove uncertainty.
SWIPE SUMMARY EXPERIENCE
The swipe pattern wasn't about novelty. It was about permission.
The original reading experience was a long scrollable page. Paragraphs, headers, a reading progress bar. It looked like reading, which was fine, but I wanted to offer another way for readers to choose how they wanted to learn.
BeFreed's value proposition is that you don't have to read the whole book, but even the shorted story looked like a lot of effort, like homework. It created cognitive overhead before a single word was absorbed.
"I wasn't designing a better reading experience. I was designing an experience that didn't feel like reading at all."
What I was worried about
The obvious pushback against notes is that they fragment knowledge. A book's ideas have relationships, and slicing them into atomic units risks making content feel shallow and not insight.
I thought deeply about this cony response was that the alternative — a wall of scrollable text nobody finished — wasn't creating depth either. A shallow experience someone completes is more valuable than a rich experience someone abandons.
The card content itself needed to be written carefully: each card had to stand alone but also create a pull toward the next one. That's a content design problem as much as a UX problem, and I worked with the team on how cards were structured editorially, not just visually.
MIND MAP FEATURE
Discovery was broken because the book categories didn't speak in ideas, it spoke in titles.
The home screen showed a library of book covers. That's how every reading app works. But BeFreed is not a reading app in the traditional sense, it's an idea-consumption app. Book titles are a terrible navigation metaphor for ideas.
Someone interested in understanding why habits are hard to change doesn't necessarily think "I want to read an Atomic Habits summary." They think about the underlying question. BeFreed's content was indexed wrong for the way users were actually thinking.
The mind map feature let users navigate by idea cluster rather than by title. Tap a topic node, like Behaviour Change, Decision Making, Financial Thinking and see what ideas live there, across multiple books. It reframes the library around concepts rather than objects.
This was also the feature with the most implementation risk. It required a taxonomy of ideas that didn't exist yet, and mapping books to that taxonomy manually. It also required lots of engineering power. I framed the first version as an editorial experiment, a fixed set of six clusters, rather than a dynamic generated graph to make it shippable within the short time frame.
04 WHAT WASN'T BUILT
05 IMPACT
What changed, and what it meant for the business
The redesign shipped across a 10-week sprint. The following were the headline movements in product metrics:
The more significant outcome was qualitative: the product had a clearer identity. Internally, the team could describe what BeFreed was with more confidence. That clarity, which is a design outcome, not just a metric one mattered at a stage where the company was preparing to raise.
"Investors don't just fund metrics. They fund conviction. The redesign gave the team a sharper story about what they were building."
06 REFLECTION
Thinking in systems
I learned to look beyond individual screens and consider how each decision fits into the larger product, including user expectations, existing flows, and overall mental models. Good design came from making the whole experience feel coherent, not just improving one part.
Designing for ambiguity
Working in an early product meant many things were undefined. I learned that interface design alone isn’t enough, clarity often depends just as much on content, structure, and information hierarchy. Content design and UI design need to be solved together.
Balance solving user needs with business needs
Design decisions were closely tied to product goals like engagement and retention. This experience strengthened my ability to balance usability with business constraints, and to make choices that supported both the user experience and the product’s growth.
01 CONTEXT
A startup preparing to raise, with retention it couldn't explain
BeFreed is an AI-powered reading platform. The idea is good: consume books and ideas faster, without the friction of reading front-to-back. But when I joined, users were coming in, trying it once, and leaving. The product worked. The problem was something else.
The founding team had correctly diagnosed symptoms — high early drop-off, low engagement, weak repeat use. But the brief I received was framed around those symptoms: make the reading experience better. Make onboarding clearer. Make the product detail page convert.
"The challenge was to improve the experience. What it actually needed was for someone to interrogate what the experience was trying to do."
That's not a critique of the team — it's a common thing in early-stage startups. When retention is bad and funding is close, the instinct is to fix surfaces. I wanted to make sure we were fixing the right ones.
02 WHAT I NOTICED
The drop-off wasn't boredom. It was confusion about what to expect.
The original analytics story was: users open the app, start a summary, don't finish it, and leave. The obvious fix is to make summaries more engaging.
But when I looked at where in the flow drop-off happened, it wasn't mid-summary. It was earlier, on the product detail page, or right at the start of reading. Users weren't losing interest. They were deciding, almost immediately, that this wasn't what they had signed up for.
That suggested a different problem: not engagement, but expectation mismatch. Users arrived with one mental model of what the product was, encountered something different, and left. Not because the product was bad, because they didn't know how to hold it.
This reframe shaped almost every decision I made after it.
03 FEATURES
PRODUCT DETAIL PAGE
The PDP wasn't a conversion problem, but a trust problem.
The original PDP showed a book cover, a title, a description, and a "Start Reading" button, but users weren't tapping that button.
The conventional fix would be to make the CTA more prominent, or add social proof, or tighten the copy. Those are conversion-rate optimization moves. I thought the problem was upstream of that.
A user looking at this page is asking three questions that the page wasn't answering:
What will I actually get? A summary, but what kind? How long? In what format?
Is this worth my time right now? There was no time estimate, no sense of scope.
Will I understand this topic if I haven't read the book? No signal of depth or accessibility.
Without answers, users were making conservative decisions. They'd hesitate, browse away, and not come back.
The redesigned PDP answered those three questions before asking anything of the user: a short "what you'll learn" section, a read time, a topic preview, and a visual peek at the card format. The goal wasn't to sell the book, it was to remove uncertainty.
SWIPE SUMMARY EXPERIENCE
The swipe pattern wasn't about novelty. It was about permission.
The original reading experience was a long scrollable page. Paragraphs, headers, a reading progress bar. It looked like reading, which was fine, but I wanted to offer another way for readers to choose how they wanted to learn.
BeFreed's value proposition is that you don't have to read the whole book, but even the shorted story looked like a lot of effort, like homework. It created cognitive overhead before a single word was absorbed.
"I wasn't designing a better reading experience. I was designing an experience that didn't feel like reading at all."
What I was worried about
The obvious pushback against notes is that they fragment knowledge. A book's ideas have relationships, and slicing them into atomic units risks making content feel shallow and not insight.
I thought deeply about this cony response was that the alternative — a wall of scrollable text nobody finished — wasn't creating depth either. A shallow experience someone completes is more valuable than a rich experience someone abandons.
The card content itself needed to be written carefully: each card had to stand alone but also create a pull toward the next one. That's a content design problem as much as a UX problem, and I worked with the team on how cards were structured editorially, not just visually.
MIND MAP FEATURE
Discovery was broken because the book categories didn't speak in ideas, it spoke in titles.
The home screen showed a library of book covers. That's how every reading app works. But BeFreed is not a reading app in the traditional sense, it's an idea-consumption app. Book titles are a terrible navigation metaphor for ideas.
Someone interested in understanding why habits are hard to change doesn't necessarily think "I want to read an Atomic Habits summary." They think about the underlying question. BeFreed's content was indexed wrong for the way users were actually thinking.
The mind map feature let users navigate by idea cluster rather than by title. Tap a topic node, like Behaviour Change, Decision Making, Financial Thinking and see what ideas live there, across multiple books. It reframes the library around concepts rather than objects.
This was also the feature with the most implementation risk. It required a taxonomy of ideas that didn't exist yet, and mapping books to that taxonomy manually. It also required lots of engineering power. I framed the first version as an editorial experiment, a fixed set of six clusters, rather than a dynamic generated graph to make it shippable within the short time frame.
04 WHAT WASN'T BUILT
05 IMPACT
What changed, and what it meant for the business
The redesign shipped across a 10-week sprint. The following were the headline movements in product metrics:
The more significant outcome was qualitative: the product had a clearer identity. Internally, the team could describe what BeFreed was with more confidence. That clarity, which is a design outcome, not just a metric one mattered at a stage where the company was preparing to raise.
"Investors don't just fund metrics. They fund conviction. The redesign gave the team a sharper story about what they were building."
06 REFLECTION
Thinking in systems
I learned to look beyond individual screens and consider how each decision fits into the larger product, including user expectations, existing flows, and overall mental models. Good design came from making the whole experience feel coherent, not just improving one part.
Designing for ambiguity
Working in an early product meant many things were undefined. I learned that interface design alone isn’t enough, clarity often depends just as much on content, structure, and information hierarchy. Content design and UI design need to be solved together.
Balance solving user needs with business needs
Design decisions were closely tied to product goals like engagement and retention. This experience strengthened my ability to balance usability with business constraints, and to make choices that supported both the user experience and the product’s growth.