Science Community Platform
Turned a near-silent academic mobile app into a discussion-ready researcher workflow — webinars, redesigned publication view, and a messaging roadmap grounded in interviews.
An academic networking platform (research posters, journal clubs, crowdsourced peer review) already had a public mobile app with a small feature set when I joined as part of an outside consulting team. Engagement was effectively at zero — publications had almost no comments or discussion activity, and there was no way to have direct conversations on the platform, despite user interviews showing researchers expected chat as a baseline feature.
Turn a read-only mobile experience into one that supported the full researcher workflow — not just reading papers on the go, but discussing them, submitting peer reviews, and engaging with other researchers directly from the app.
- Led the requirements and rollout of webinars as a new mobile feature, including integrating a major video-streaming service for seamless in-app viewing
- Worked directly with the designer to redesign the publication-viewing experience toward discussion and peer-review submission
- Ran user interviews that surfaced direct messaging as an expected, missing feature — informing the chat/messaging roadmap
- Mapped journeys for early-career researchers, where the engagement problem was most visible
- Coordinated a cross-functional team (2 full-stack engineers + 1 designer) on a biweekly release cadence
- 500+ downloads on Android following the mobile expansion
- Shipped webinars with integrated video streaming, and a redesigned publication view built to invite discussion
- Moved engagement from near-zero (no comments, no messaging) to a platform with the roadmap and core features in place to support active researcher discussion