TripleTen
TripleTen is an AI-powered personalized learning service that takes you from gaining skills to employment. Named by Fortune as the best overall tech bootcamp in the US, it has over 20k monthly active learners across the US and Latin America. TripleTen is a part of Nebius, a $20B NASDAQ-listed AI cloud company. This is also the funniest place I’ve ever worked.
The product was born in the early 2020s—a time of economic uncertainty and low upward mobility, especially in the US. For many, moving into tech became a path to stability and better life. And for everyone, that journey starts with learning.
TripleTen is the best way to learn a new job for people with busy lives. Its mix of deep technical expertise, strong learning design, and full control over the student experience made it possible to build a truly high-quality, scalable, and personalized learning platform.
I joined TripleTen as part of the founding team and spent four years shaping the product design and adapting it to the needs of demanding US students. Over time, I took on broader design leadership across the organization—supporting other designers while keeping my sleeves firmly rolled up.
Dot 
, your AI buddy
One of the biggest challenges in online learning is the lack of real-time support. In a classroom or even on Zoom, it’s easy to ask a question and get help right away. But when you’re studying online, that instant feedback is missing. That’s why TripleTen made human support—tutors, learning coaches, and community—one of its main priorities.
The problem is that support is often either fast but shallow (like a quick reply from a support agent) or deep but slow (like a tutor’s detailed explanation). And keeping depth and quality consistent is especially hard at scale.
AI changed that. In 2025, with the rise of reasoning models and agent frameworks, smart and responsive AI tutors suddenly became possible. That’s when Dot was born.
Dot started as a quick experiment on our Discord server and stayed there for almost a year. That time showed us how much value students got from it, so we decided to turn it into a core part of the learning platform.
We began where students struggled the most—coding projects. It was also where we expected the most feedback. That’s why the first chat we built lived inside the VS Code extension.
From the start, we took a “ship to learn” approach—built the simplest possible chat, added many events and feedback loops, and started watching what students asked, when, and how. A huge part of this was powered by PostHog’s toolkit for surveys, analytics, session replays, and feature flags, which we used heavily.
After the launch, we saw heavy usage of the extension, confirming our hypothesis: this kind of help was genuinely valuable, and the entry point worked. Our next step was to identify other key moments where students needed support most and make Dot easy to access there.
Over the next six months, together with a small team of engineers and researchers, we integrated Dot into the platform and iterated on its conversational experience, tools, memory, voice mode, and various entry points across the learning journey.
We managed to make Dot more than just another AI bot—it became a real buddy on the platform that helps right when you need it. Our A/B test clearly showed the impact: Dot’s support increased project submissions by 34%. It quickly became the platform’s most-used feature, with 47% MAU and over 200k messages sent each month. Equally important, Dot’s lively personality and tone of voice brought widespread student love, tons of positive feedback, and a 91% satisfaction rate.
Projects on the platform
TripleTen’s learning approach is built around project-based learning — and projects are the biggest, most complex part of it. Most of a student’s time is spent working on projects, and that’s also where they need the most help.
In the past, these projects relied on a mix of external tools, while the platform itself was mostly a textbook with instructions. Once you started a project, you were on your own, setting up a complex coding environment locally.
That created a painful UX barrier for students—and a blind spot for the product team, since we had no visibility into the part where students spent most of their time.
So we decided to bring projects onto the platform itself. Today, most professional tools students use (VS Code, JupyterLab, Google Sheets, Figma, and more) are web-based, which made it finally possible.
It was a major UX challenge. I had to rethink the entire platform layout so students could easily work in a complex environment while still having quick access to all the usual platform tools. The goal was to make it feel like the same familiar place—but with the power of a full professional workspace.
It was also a big technical challenge. The first version for VS Code took three months to build, but the gradual rollout, iteration, and support for more tools took another year.
As a result, project work became a native part of the platform. Students can now work on projects while having access to all familiar tools, including chat with Dot. The team has full visibility into what happens during projects, making things like the A/B experiment with Dot support mentioned above possible. The entire learning process now happens within the platform, and students spend 31% of their time in the project workspace.
The content below is being updated. If you’re curious to see something more relevant, please write to hey@tonyfresher.com.
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Homepage redesign (2023)
TripleTen's homepage plays a major role in the student experience. It's where they start their learning, track their progress, revisit past material, check payment status, and more. In fact, 30% of all user sessions include the homepage.
That's why TripleTen's homepage has become a place for regular experiments, new feature updates, and other types of changes that require a scalable design. When I joined the company, our homepage was neither user-friendly nor flexible. It took almost two years to fix this, resulting in the complete rebuilding of the homepage.
How it started
TripleTen inherited its homepage from Yandex Practicum, along with the rest of the platform. Initially, the homepage was dead simple: a large card displaying the current lesson, and a few more blocks to monitor overall progress and navigate between the program's modules.
There were many issues with this page. For example, a quarter of the space was occupied by a black column listing enrolled programs. This was completely unnecessary, as most of our students only enroll in one program at a time, so switching between them is rarely required.
Spin-off: the (wishful) redesign
At Yandex Practicum, we have always wanted to build advanced learning productivity tools, such as a study calendar, planner, streaks, favorites, etc. However, implementing these features was challenging due to a high amount of technical and design debt. In addition, our focus on growth at that time meant that these features were always deprioritized.
In response to this, the Homepage 2.0 project was born. This was a radical re-imagining of the entire homepage, which was mostly initiated by the design team. It was quite conceptual and included many features that didn't exist at the time.
You can already guess that this project never made it to the production stage. Despite this, I never regretted the amount of work I put in, as it taught me two invaluable lessons:
- It's usually best to introduce big changes to a product incrementally. This makes it easier for users to adapt and simpler for developers to implement.
- Having a deep understanding of the product is essential to make disruptive changes. If I were to look at this project now, I'd quickly realize that many of the designed features can't be implemented without investing a lot of time to eliminate legacy from the information architecture and unify the learning process across different programs.
More than that, for me, as a newbie, redesigning a large part of the product was the perfect chance to learn about the product, its information architecture, and its limitations.
Increasing complexity of navigation with the number of tools
When our team realized that the Homepage 2.0 project was not feasible, our team changed their approach to make such changes incrementally. For example, we quickly hid the black panel with all enrolled programs — a relatively minor change, yet it improved the overall hierarchy.
After that, we began to enhance our platform by introducing various learning productivity tools. We added a search, which had been the top-requested feature for years, as well as a study calendar and a skillset progress widget. The goal of these features was to improve the student experience and increase retention. However, due to the simple structure of the homepage — a plain feed of sequential blocks — it quickly became a total mess. Now, the overall navigation needed to be redesigned.
Coming up with a new homepage prototype
The idea of a new redesign again came from designers. To me, it was clear that the product had reached a critical point: adding more features to the homepage would complicate navigation and do more harm than good. This is exactly what happened. In late 2022, we released the skillset progress widget, but a few months later, our researcher discovered that many of our students had never really noticed it.
Working on the new homepage, I collaborated with our UX researcher to make it as user-informed as we could. At the start, we spoke to our students to gather data on how they use certain features and what is most important to them.
In the new prototype, I proposed splitting all blocks of the current homepage into multiple sub-pages. The new main “Home” page would become a dashboard with main actions, important information about progress, and urgent notifications. The huge calendar block would become a separate page, as would the skillset.
This change has made navigation clear again and has added some space for new updates: onboarding and progress-related features can be added to the main page, planning mechanics would appear on the calendar page, all about career can be combined with the skillset, and any other can be added to the sidebar.
When the prototype was ready, we conducted usability testing, which helped to identify small issues with the new “Return to learning” block, though most students had no trouble completing our tasks.
Shaping TripleTen’s visual design language
However, creating the first prototype was just the first step in taking the new homepage to production. This process took months, and during that time the design team started to work on a new visual design language.
Different parts of our product were designed by different teams and designers over a long period, in a rapidly growing company without a systematic design approach. As a result, our interface at the time was a perfect example of Conway's law.
When TripleTen became an independent startup, we could finally afford to systematize the look of our product across different parts. We already had a strong communication style, so our team used it as a starting point to create a unified visual foundation for communication and product design.
We updated the product font and colors and applied them to the main blocks of the old homepage. It only took a short time to develop, but it greatly refreshed the look and feel of the homepage (and fixed some inconsistencies in progress representation, btw). This allowed users to transition to the new homepage with minimal disturbance.
Happy end
Not long after, we started to work with student activation and our onboarding mechanics. The new homepage redesign turned out to be essential for this. And, after a month of close collaboration with the development team, we shipped the new homepage.
The new homepage was designed with scalability in mind, allowing for new features and updates. After release, we added a start date widget, an onboarding checklist, Discord integration, and a settings page.
