You were handed a solution. You wanted the problem.
Design gets judged on the artifact and briefed on the answer — somebody else already decided what the problem was. Here the problem comes first and it comes cited: the actual complaints, the workarounds people built for themselves, how often the job recurs. That is the input for arguing a different solution, and the evidence a case study needs to be about judgement rather than screens.
Pain severity, job frequency and workaround cost are scored from real complaints you can open and read in the user's own words.
A self-directed concept becomes a portfolio piece with a sourced problem behind it, instead of another redesign of a famous app.
Submit your own concept and get it scored — same sixteen dimensions, same evidence rules, applied to your thinking.
The boards product designers watch
Live free-tier snapshots from consumer-facing domains where experience is the differentiator.
Creator Economy
Live boardMedia & Entertainment
Live boardEducation
Live board- 2540Grade Integrity & Inflation Analytics for Higher Ed
- 2640Collaborative Project Matchmaker for Personalized Learning
- 2736CrosswordCraft: AI Educational Puzzle Maker
- 2835Federated Student Success Early-Warning Network for Multi-Campus Colleges
- 2934IEP Goal Coach for Special Education Progress Monitoring
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Frequently asked questions
I'm not a founder. What do I do with a leaderboard?
Use it as a problem library. Each opportunity carries the raw pain-point evidence behind it — complaints, workarounds, recurring jobs — which is exactly the discovery material designers are usually handed second-hand, if at all.
Can I read the actual user language, not just a score?
Yes. Evidence items are links to the source threads, reviews and issues, and links are liveness-checked so dead pages stop counting. Reading the complaint in the person's own words is often more useful to a designer than the dimension score derived from it.
How does this help my portfolio?
A self-directed project chosen from cited evidence answers the question interviewers actually ask — why this problem — with sources rather than a premise you invented. Submitting your own concept for scoring also gives you an independent read on the market case you're making in the case study.
Does the scoring say anything about the experience itself?
Not directly, and it deliberately does not pretend to. Differentiation and counter-positioning score how much room there is to be different, which is where design leverage lives, but the quality of the experience you'd build is your contribution, not the formula's.
Which domains suit design-led opportunities?
Consumer-facing and creator boards tend to reward experience differentiation most, but all 44 domains carry the same pain-point evidence — a workflow tool for accountants has just as much documented user frustration as a consumer app, and usually far less design attention.
More general questions are answered on the FAQ page.
Evidence first. Then conviction.
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