Managing 75,000+ students across multiple colleges required a system that could handle scale, clarity, and coordination.

One platform • Six roles • Thousands of students.

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TNSDC, the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation, runs one of India's largest engineering education programs at the state level in partnership with IBM. With hundreds of colleges, thousands of students, and a complex web of mentors, evaluators, and administrators, managing everything manually through Excel sheets and disconnected tools was simply not sustainable.

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I was brought in as the UI/UX designer to design an entirely new multi-role dashboard platform. Phase 2 of the TNSDC initiative, integrated with IBM's SkillUp Online (SKO) delivery platform and the government's Naan Mudhalvan (NM) portal. The platform needed to serve six distinct user roles, each with an entirely different set of needs, workflows, and data views.

The project was a government-scale product with real constraints, SSO integration via JWT, API-driven data flows, and a user base ranging from tech-savvy IBM admins to college principals who may rarely use digital tools. Designing for that range of users, within that technical complexity, was the core design challenge.

✨ Project Overview

Title TNSDC Platform
My role UX Designer
Team 1 PM, 1 BA, 3-4 Developer, 1 UI/UX Designer
Project Type Client
Tools Used Figma · Figjam • MSForms • Excel • more..

6 User Roles designed for Admin to student

3 Core User Roles Admins, trainers, and Students with distinct journeys

75,000+ Students on platform Across 234 colleges

3 Dashboard Views Admin, Mentor, SPOC

User Roles

We were designing for six different people/profiles.

The most complex part of this project was not the volume of screens; it was the fact that six entirely different types of users needed to use the same platform, each with a fundamentally different set of tasks, permissions, and mental models.

Before designing a single screen, I mapped out every role, their responsibilities, and the specific data and actions each one needed. This mapping became the backbone of the entire dashboard architecture, determining what each user saw when they logged in and what actions were available for them.

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Super Admin / IBM Admin

Full platform visibility. Monitors all colleges, all students, all courses, and all submissions across Tamil Nadu. Views aggregated reporting across every dimension of the program.

Full Data Access • All Colleges • Program Reports

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SPOC

Single Point of Contact for each college. Registers mentors and evaluators, monitors student registration gaps, and receives weekly email reminders until all students are on the platform.

Mentor Registration • Student Gap Tracking • Email Reminders

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Evaluator

Reviews and grades phase-wise project submissions. Can only evaluate students from the same college and the same branch/technology. Grades are reflected on the reporting dashboard in real time.

Phase Evaluation • Grading • College Scope

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College Admin / Principal

College-level visibility. They can see student registrations, team formations, SPOC and mentor lists, and phase-wise project submission progress for their specific college.

College View • Student Lists • Submission Tracking

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Mentor / Faculty

Assigns courses, creates teams, and manages up to 6 students per team. Sees only students from their own college who are registered via SSO in the NM portal.

Course Assignment • Team Creation • Student Management

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Student

Arrives via SSO from the NM portal. Waits for courses and team assignments from the mentor. Submits projects across 5 phases: individually for phases 1 to 4 and as a team for phase 5.

SSO Login • Course Access • Project Submission

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🎯 Problem Statement

A government program running on Excel.

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Before this platform existed, the entire TNSDC program was managed through manual processes. Colleges were sharing student data in Excel files. Those files were often incorrect, incomplete, or out of date by the time they arrived. Mentors were allocating teams manually. Project submissions were tracked outside of any system. The reporting was done by hand.

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"Data is shared manually using Excel by colleges. Data shared is incorrect or has missing details. Manual intervention is required for course allocation, team upload, and dashboard reporting."

👤 Pain Points