Product Story • 4 min
How We Tried to Make Revision a Weekly Habit — Designing the Revision Hub
You study hard for an exam, feel sure of every topic, and ten days later half of it is gone. Every student knows this feeling. Learning something once is easy. Remembering it a month later is the hard part.
On our learning portal we already had a fix for this: a weekly revision, a short set of questions timed so that each concept comes back just before the student would forget it. It worked for the few who found it. Hardly anyone did.
This is the story of what that first version taught us, and the Revision Hub we designed to fix it.
A Feature Students Used Once and Forgot
We first tried it with a small group in Academy in February 2025: 504 learners, two courses, 184 concepts, and two or three concepts in every revision. 493 of them opened it at least once. That looked great.
But opening something once is not a habit. At its peak in May, 234 learners were active on the portal for ten or more days. 169 started a revision and 82 completed one. About half finished what they started, and the feedback was good, four stars or more every time after June.
The habit was the problem. In June, 84 of the 162 learners who revised had also revised the month before. By September it was only 29 of 79. Students tried it in May, then came back in July, like a gym membership in January.
So We Asked Why, and the Answer Was Humbling
We sat down with students who had used it. Most of them could not remember that it existed.
A feature gets remembered for three reasons: you see it every time, it solves one of your biggest pains, and the experience feels great. Ours had none of the three. The banner was easy to miss. Students did not know what they were about to revise. Wrong answers came with no explanation. There was no view of which topics they remembered well. And leaving halfway never asked, “Are you sure?”
So students drifted away midway and did not come back. The algorithm was fine. The doorway was not.
Then We Saw the Same Wall at Scale
When we looked at the whole of Academy in February 2026, the picture was the same, only bigger. About 30,000 to 35,000 students were active, but only 6,000 to 8,000 tried a revision in three months, which is around 14 weekly cycles. Of those, 5,000 to 7,000 completed five revisions or fewer, and 4,000 to 6,000 completed three or fewer.
The reasons were easy to name. The banner showed up only when concepts were due and vanished after completion. Students with no practice history could not reach it at all. And in weeks with nothing due, the feature simply disappeared, so students thought it was broken.
A Permanent Home for Revision
The fix started with giving revision a place to live. A card on the home page is now always there for eligible students. Before the weekly set is done, it says “Your Personalized Weekly Revision” and lists the concepts as small chips, so students know what they will revise. After it is done, it changes to “Build Your Own Custom Revision”.
The card leads to the Revision Hub. The weekly revision sits on the left, with a clear status: Available, Completed with the date, or “No Revision This Week”. That last message matters. It tells students nothing is due because of how memory works, and not because something is broken.
Pick Three, and Stay in Control
On the right is the part students asked for: Custom Revision. Concepts that are due are grouped by course. Next to each one is a small tag like “Due since 3 days” or “Due today”, so students can see these concepts were picked by the forgetting curve and are not random.
They choose exactly three, and the Start button wakes up only then. They get three custom revisions a week, and a counter shows how many are left. Once they are used, the section greys out and says when it opens again. Repeat the same concepts and the same questions never come back.
The two systems share one source of truth. Revise a concept on your own and it leaves this week’s set. Small rules like these keep it a habit and not a marathon.
How We Will Know It Works
We will not launch this to everyone. The plan is an A/B test with the 12,000 most active students: 6,000 keep the old revision and 6,000 get the Hub. Of those 6,000, half also get a marketing push and half do not, so we can see what marketing adds on top of the design.
We will watch revisions started per student, how many outdated concepts each student carries, completion, time per revision, and feedback from a button on the Hub itself. The number I care about most is outdated concepts per student. If it falls, students are forgetting less.
We cannot stop students from forgetting. But we can stop making them hunt for the thing that helps them remember. A good habit needs a place to live, and that is what the Hub is for.
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