A student management and learning platform for Foundation Public School, now offered to other schools as SimpliEd. Strategy and product design, 2020 to 2022.
The short version
FPS set out to fix its own school's software, and came out with a product other schools could buy.
Foundation Public School has run O and A Level campuses in Karachi and Hyderabad since 1981. Its student records, fees, attendance and timetables sat in separate systems that didn't talk to each other. The plan was one platform for administration, teachers, students and parents, built so FPS could later sell it to other schools as SaaS. That product is SimpliEd.
I ran the design through Grocode, my studio at the time, as strategist and product designer. Discovery, interviews, wireframes for every module, the design system and the Figma handoff were ours. FPS's in-house developers built it.
A student's profile, fee vouchers and attendance lived in different databases. The same details were typed in more than once, and nobody had a single view of a child, a class or a campus.
The bigger brief came on top of that. Whatever we designed for FPS had to work for a school FPS had never seen.
Records, fees and timetables were split up, with nothing moving between them.
Admin, teachers, students, parents and the curriculum team each needed their own view of the same school.
Eight periods a day or six. Terms or semesters. A shorter Friday. A product for other schools had to handle all of it.
We worked from FPS's office when we could, and over video calls through COVID. Nothing went to UI until its structure was agreed.
The whole platform mapped in Miro, then roles and workflows agreed with FPS.
Interviews with the staff who would use each module, plus a look at the best tools in its category.
300+ low-fidelity screens across 18+ modules, approved by FPS.
The core system, built once the wireframes were signed off.
Every wireframe turned into a final screen and handed off in Figma.
The first call ended with a Miro mind map of the whole school: every role, every module and how they connect. That map became the information architecture, and every later screen traced back to it.
Each module then got its own research. Interviews came first, most of all with the admissions and billing teams. Alongside them, a competitive review of the best tools for that job, like Google Classroom and Blackboard for the LMS, showed what schools already expect before we decided what FPS needed.
Design decisions
A school platform is many products sharing one database. These calls kept them feeling like one.
Structure
The admin sees everything, so its screens set the structure for the whole platform. Teacher, student and parent views were then cut from the same parts, each showing only what that role needs. FPS asked that nothing sit more than two clicks away, so every module opens on its own dashboard and the record behind any number is one click further.
Setup
A new school is added in four steps: its details, the customer account, the features it gets and payment. Each module can be switched on with only the parts that school needs. After that, setup follows the school year: terms, grade levels, sections and capacity, then the timetable. Students, parents and staff come in through Excel imports, because no school starts with an empty roster.
Admissions
The admissions team asked for this one in interviews. Applicants sit in stages, from inquiry to interview, test and offer, with counts at the top. Every action opens in a side panel over the list: schedule the interview, record the evaluation, send the offer with its fee voucher, put on hold or reject. The list stays in view, so the next applicant is a click away.
Billing
The fee office bills a whole grade or campus at once, with concessions and late fees on top. So fees are generated as a batch, checked student by student against the summary, approved, and only then posted to parents. A mistake gets caught in the batch before any parent sees a voucher.
Module by module, from the admin's morning register to the parent checking in.
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Design system
With 300+ wireframes approved, we built the core design system before designing a single final screen.
Foundations and parts
Lato on a 1.25 type scale, an 8px grid, and colours for critical, warning, success and info. Then the parts: cards, tables, tabs, side panels, status pills, toasts, and icons in filled and outlined sets. A flagged student, an overdue fee and a pending incident look the same in every module, and a card designed once shows up on the admin, student and parent screens alike.
To sell beyond FPS, the product needed its own identity. While we designed it, it went by SimpliSchool. The name and brand came once the platform was finished. I hired a brand designer and directed the work: the logo, palette, type and stationery, then a one-page website to introduce the product. The mark is two linked strokes that form an S. Indigo leads the palette, and Lato carries over from the product, so the brand and the platform read as one.
Live
Built by FPS, offered to other schools as SimpliEd
FPS's own admissions run through it today, and the platform is offered to other schools under its own name.
What I learned
The admissions desk, the fee office and the class teacher needed separate conversations, and each had a best-in-class tool to learn from. That's why each module got its own discovery.
Three hundred screens were argued over and approved as wireframes. By the time colour arrived, the UI phase was about polish.
FPS was the first school. Turning its habits into settings is what made a product other schools could use.
A school platform puts a principal, a fee clerk, a teacher and a parent in the same product. Most of discovery was learning how differently they see the same student. The design had to make sense to all of them.
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