Altissia
Reinventing language course
creation for linguists
Picture this: stressed-out linguists juggling tabs all day long, praying they accidentally don’t upload English sentences into Spanish Level C1. That was Altissia’s reality: 7 clunky tools, 0 joy, hours & hours wasted doing what should take 30 minutes.
My Role
Lead designer
UX Designer
Researcher
Team
Worked cross-functionally with Product Owners, CTO, CPO, Analysts & Uxers.
Objectives and goals
• Turbocharge course build workflow with one tool
• Empower teachers to build without dev hand-holding
• Modular, scalable editor
• As friendly as your favorite CMS
• Support all exercise types, not just the “easy-peasy” ones
• Integration of A.I tools (sound generation, pre-translations)
• Creation of a Design System
Context & Challenge
Mission
Reimagine content editing from hopeless and scattered to streamlined and empowering, for every linguist or teacher on any language, at any scale.
Structural Challenges
• Frankenstein toolchain: 7 tools, none talking to each other, old tech
• Human bottleneck: Devs and Product team visions were not aligned leading to internal conflicts and way too much meetings
• Legacy & unstable tech powering core applications
• “If you break it, you really break it” kind of workflows
A preview of the unbelievable workflow the linguistic team had to deal with
Research & Insights
Discovery
• Interviews: 2 Linguists and 2 teachers were interviewed to gather all pain points and create a user journey map
• Surveys: Documented frustration and actual time spent per course
• Field Observations: Yes, we watched them suffer, empathy begins with pain
• Top shocker: Teachers were sending excel files to preview and verify their courses, because they didn't any working preview. Yikes.
Problem Statement
How might we let any teacher build a rich, multi-language course as easily as writing a blog post without them wanting to toss their laptop out the window?
Strategy & Approach
Design sprint: We organized a design sprint to gather feedback from the whole team so we could align tech and product vision. This workshop led to a commonly validated approach.
Incremental delivery: Basic flows first to validate each type of exercice needed in a course. We validated each exercice with the linguistic team so they could validate our approach fast. This method helped me to avoid multiple traps.
All-in-one modular editor (Build, edit, preview, manage, publish, repeat)
Drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG core UX (Zero coding or weird flows)
Real-time error validation & saving
Roles and permissions: Teachers do their own thing, admins oversee
Tech and product team finally working together to propose solutions, we did it !
Our kiosk helping Decathlon teams
Design & Prototyping
Low-fi > High-fi in Figma, with real teacher workflows as walkthroughs
Interactive prototypes dumped on teachers’ laps bi-weekly (“Just try to break it!”. Spoiler alert : They did, but that’s how we improved)
CMS-inspired navigation, bulk edit, and reusable templates
Benchmark of competitors
How to recognize waste with AI by snapping a picture with Looping
Impact
Workflow time slashed by ~65% (from 1 days/course to a long lunch break)
Teachers encoding their own exercises; developer intervention → -90%
Satisfaction went from “I’d rather teach calculus” → “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
Company now able to launch more courses, faster, in more languages 💸
Reflection & Learnings
Biggest surprise: The hardest part was not the technology. It was navigating human frustration on both sides. Tech wanted clarity. Product wanted speed. Getting everyone aligned was way trickier than any workflow.
Hard lesson: In a complex product, repetition is your lifeline. Say it again and again. People get lost faster than you think if you are not relentless about clarity.
What matters: Technology evolves rapidly, but you cannot let your stack hold your core business hostage. If you do, you risk crossing a point of no return.