How Hotburo designed Zmist, an ed-tech platform for high schools — navigation, UX logic and two interfaces for teachers and students, built from scratch.
Its goal is to make teachers' work easier and give students quality subject content. It covers several educational fields and holds lessons, presentations and extra materials — with two separate interfaces, one for the teacher and one for the student.
We designed it from scratch. That meant building not just a visual shell, but a full navigation system and the user logic underneath it.
The challenge
The platform holds a lot of material, and two different people use it for different things. The brief came down to four points: keep the interface clear and easy without overloading anyone, structure a large volume of content so it reads intuitively, hold logical links between fields, courses and lessons, and make it feel modern and warm — in the spirit of Ukrainian educational culture.
The approach
We dropped decoration in favour of air, cleanliness and logic. (The branding itself was done by the Zmist team; we built the product design on top of it.) We paired the Ukrainian typeface Almaz with the neutral grotesque Inter, and drew our own set of simple hand-drawn illustrations that add friendliness without clutter. A system of colour accents marks the course levels — core, specialised and free-choice — so the structure is readable at a glance.
UX like a route map
We built the structure so the user always knows where they are and can get back easily. From any section you can jump straight to lessons, materials or presentations. The logic works like a route map: you see your path and don't get lost, even in a large volume of content.
The process
We spent around 100 hours working through every user flow — from first login to downloading materials — and tested each step against real usage scenarios to keep the navigation transparent.
The result
Zmist got a coherent product design and a clear system of user scenarios. It reads as academic and modern at once: it builds trust and stays out of the way of the one thing that matters — the knowledge. The platform is in test mode now, getting ready to become a public hub for schools across Ukraine.
Building an ed-tech or content-heavy platform?
We design product UX and UI for platforms with a lot of content and more than one type of user — clear navigation, sensible structure and an interface people actually enjoy using. If that's your product, let's talk.
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