Overview
GlowStep was my first UI/UX competition, DIESCO/ISC UI/UX Design 2026 at UPN Veteran Surabaya, and it went straight to finals. My team, The Bloodline, was three people: me as project manager, Emmaynuela as UX researcher, and Marza as UI designer. The brief's theme was education, so we built a gamified learning app for Indonesian high schoolers, basically Duolingo but for SMA students, with an AI that explains its reasoning step by step instead of just handing over the answer, and no paywall on the core material.
The Build
The Full Deck
Open the full deck on CanvaWhat I Built
We ran the full design thinking process. For research, we sent a questionnaire to 23 students and interviewed three of them directly, on top of a competitor analysis against apps like Ruang Guru, Duolingo, Zenius, and Pahamify. The clearest finding was that 56.5 percent of respondents wanted step-by-step explanations, paired with wanting AI help framed the same way, so that became the core differentiator: an AI Step-by-Step Help feature instead of a plain answer generator. From there we built a persona, wrote POV statements and How Might We questions, mapped the user journey, then prioritized features with a Value Proposition Canvas and a Churchill Matrix before moving into wireframes and a hi-fi prototype in Figma. I ran the project day to day and pitched in on both research and UI, but Emmaynuela owned the user research and Marza owned the interface design.
What I Learned
This was the first time I ran a full design thinking cycle instead of just reading about it. Usability testing ended up mattering more than I expected. We tested the hi-fi prototype with real participants and caught things a group chat opinion never would have surfaced, like which parts of the flow actually felt like a game and which parts still felt like homework. Leading a three-person team through all five stages on a competition deadline also meant learning to hand off pieces I couldn't personally verify, trusting the research Emmaynuela ran and the screens Marza designed instead of redoing everything myself.
Outcome
GlowStep made the finals in our first UI/UX competition, straight out of the gate. The core insight held up through testing too: usability sessions on the hi-fi prototype confirmed the AI Step-by-Step Help feature was the part participants actually noticed and liked, not just something we assumed would land based on the survey. It's also the project that told me I genuinely enjoy the research side of UI/UX, not just the interface part.
Tools & Stack