Designing a retention-first gamified platform to practice JEE Main PYQs
Here’s the overview of the product JEE Study Buddy. It’s a retention-first gamified platform where students can practice JEE Main previous year questions and track their rank among thousands of aspirants.
Year
2025
Role
UX Design, visual design, interaction design
Branding
The overall branding has been kept a bit bold to capture the attention of the audience (16-18 year old preparing for competitive exams) since it’s new product in the market.
Landing page
We tried to keep the landing page very short and easy to understand. Just the product proposition with a form in hero section and “Why Choose JEE Study Buddy” section. The reason being, we want the user to understand what JEE Study Buddy is and sign up for the product as soon as possible.
Homepage
This is where the main user journey of solving previous year questions will start. Subjects are kep very upfront because that’s how users start solving in real life. Selecting subject first and then years they want to solve questions for.
Question of the day (QOTD)
Just to motivate user to go into the funnel of solving the questions, we tried to keep a random JEE Main previous year question (PYQs, thereafter) on the homepage which user can solve very easily and initiate the flow of solving more JEE Main PYQs.
Starting to solve questions
We made it very easy for the students to start solving JEE Main questions, just select the subject and year they want to solve questions for.
Giving XP to students
To keep the experience exactly similar to real JEE Main exam and to gamify it at the same time, every time the user solves a question correctly, +4 XP (points) will be given (as in real exam, +4 marks are given for correct question).
Rewarding students by badges
Because we had infinite stream of questions, to keep the momentum of students going we give them badges based on the number of questions solved correctly in a row and number of days they spend practicing. This was intentionally done to ensure good retention on the product.
Leaderboard
A dedicated leaderboard was created to help students to track where they stand among thousands of aspirants. They can even track their ranking on different subjects across physics, chemistry and maths.
Creating brand awareness
There is a separate page inside the product that helps in nurturing students about NST. Another way just saying similar question was asked in NSAT, creating awareness about our entrance test. We, very consciously created brand awareness of Newton School of Technology (NST) by showing achievements of NST students. The reason being, achievements are something that attracts students take admission in any college.
