One Garden is a community for the curious.
One Garden is a platform for live & recorded online talks. It allows anyone, anywhere, to learn and ask their questions on Art to Astronomy to passionate top academics. As a founding member and its Head of Design, I led the brand creation, built the design system, and the entire web platform. I managed our Design team of three people across product, content and marketing design.
I am pleased to share that One Garden was acquired by Saga, UK's leading insurance company and is now offering our platform to millions of users in the UK.
20,000
early subscribers from 135 countries
550
paying subscribers in 3 months
140
high-quality talks produced in a year
4,800
votes on over 2,000 questions asked by the audience
700,000
minutes of videos watched by members
4.6/5
overall average content rating
Our challenges
The education space is tricky, because people tend to find educative content boring or too energy-consuming. At the end of a long day of work, one may be more tempted to binge some trashy TV rather than learning about dark matter.
One Garden's goal is to champion passionate academics, and to open up conversations with the public on various topics: Art, Literature, History, Politics, Biology, Science, Psychology... and more. We wanted to change people's perception of learning altogether, as an endless journey without a destination.
My contributions
From leading the brand creation, down to the details of our platform's features, I prioritised emotional safety and playfulness. Laura Howard (Head of Product) and I were keenly aware of our target audience's pain points, and most of them revolved around the anxiety of being wrong, ignorant or stupid. Together, and working very closely to the engineering team, we built One Garden as a safe space to ask any questions, be wrong, and have fun. We encouraged our fellows to say openly when they didn't have an answer, and rewarded audience members for being open-minded, rather than being right. We received overwhelming positive responses from our members on the sensitivity and the playfulness of the brand and experience throughout.
View the design system I built from scratch for One Garden here
Case studies
I have written in-depth case studies of some of the work I led with my team whilst working at One Garden. To find out more about how I like to work on a business problem, have a read!
Making waiting around for a talk fun
Our live talks led a lot of people into a "waiting room", where we experienced high levels of drop-offs right before the talk started. We saw the opportunity, and decided to completely transform the waiting room experience for our users into a lobby where people could connect and wave at each other.
