A Brown Product Management client engagement with Framer, the AI website building tool. We researched how students choose website builders, where Framer loses them, and what we would change.
OVERVIEW
Students build portfolio sites all the time, just rarely in Framer
Framer partnered with Brown Product Management to understand why Design and CS students rarely choose it. We ran a student survey, in-depth interviews, and a competitive benchmark, then turned the findings into recommendations for Framer's Product team.
THE BRIEF
Framer wanted to know why students kept choosing other tools
Most students who build a personal site do it in Wix, Squarespace, or Figma. Framer asked us to map how students choose a tool, where Framer shows up in that decision, and what blocks them once they try it. We scoped the research around onboarding clarity and how Framer compares to the tools students already know.
226
survey responses on how students choose website building tools
20
in-depth interviews across design experience levels
WHAT STUDENTS PRIORITIZE IN A WEBSITE TOOL
Students ranked ease of use and pricing first. AI assistance came last at 12%, the feature Framer leads with on its homepage.
OUR WORKFLOW
Twelve weeks with a real product team
We worked in weekly cycles: a weekly team meeting to keep us on the same page, then a sync with our Framer point of contact. Every claim had to hold up in front of the client a few days later, which held us accountable.
WEEKS 1-2
Kickoff with Framer, competitive analysis, and survey and interview prep
WEEKS 2-5
Survey in the field and rolling student interviews
WEEKS 5-6
Interview synthesis and journey mapping
WEEKS 7-9
Design recommendations, wireframes, and building the deck
WEEKS 10-12
Final revisions and presentation to Framer's product managers
RESEARCH & FINDINGS
Friction started before students ever touched the canvas
We ran the survey and interviews side by side, then pressure-tested what we heard against competitor onboarding flows. The pain clustered in four places: verifying as a student, learning the tool, navigating the workspace, and working with Framer's AI.
How Framer compares
We benchmarked Framer against Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Cursor, Figma Sites, and Google Sites on onboarding, pricing, and student offerings. The takeaway: competitors set student expectations. Most verify students by email or a third-party service, so Framer's ID upload feels unusual, and 74% of students we surveyed had never paid for a creation tool. Framer can't match every expectation, but it has to answer them.
THE BENCHMARK AT a glance
Where students got stuck
01
Verification doesn't build trust
"'We'll be in touch soon.' What does that mean? Usually, when we sign up for things, if we don't get the email within like thirty seconds to a minute, we start to panic. We're like, did we put in the wrong email?"
02
Learning lives in the wrong place
"I don't want to have to search through the Academy page to find out how to do it. I'd rather them just tell me how to do it without having to go anywhere else."
03
The workspace overwhelms users, both designers and non-designers
"I keep comparing Figma and Framer. Framer's workspace is too complicated. There's three different tabs, and I can't even figure out how to insert an image, so I'm like overwhelmed by this."
04
The AI erases manual edits instead of helping
"[Framer AI] kind of like overwrites your entire project so that it deletes everything that you already have instead of adding on to it."
"It would be very nice to have a tour of the UI so you know what to do on the platform, because otherwise I'm just gonna be poking around... and it's hard to see what the capabilities of the platform are."
— FROM OUR STUDENT INTERVIEWS
KEY INSIGHT
86% of students had never heard of Framer, so first impressions were crucial.
Fixing awareness is a marketing problem, and it sat outside our scope. It sharpened our focus instead: Framer was losing the students who did show up at verification and onboarding, before the product could show what it does well.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Where we told Framer to focus
THE DESIGN QUESTION
Every recommendation had to work for two users at once: the design student who wants the tool out of their way, and the first-timer who needs it to hold their hand.
What I owned
The team split the pain points, gathering the quotes and evidence behind each one. I owned the design; I turned all four into wireframes to present to Framer's PMs.
Rebuilding trust in verification
Students wished verification ran on email alone, but our client explained the ID upload has to stay, which makes the problem trust. The current flow ends with a vague confirmation, so we recommended stating the review window and sending an instant confirmation.
The changes are deliberately small; nothing about the mechanism changes, only what students know while they wait.
Onboarding & learning
Framer's learning lives in the Academy, outside the product, and students didn't want to leave the canvas to learn the canvas. We recommended a skippable in-product tour and multi-format help, so a few written steps can replace a video.
The tour opens with a skippable welcome, then walks the interface one tool at a time through GIFs, anchored to the real controls: nine short steps instead of an Academy video.
The canvas & AI
Framer's workspace overwhelmed first-time users, and students who knew Figma struggled with a similar but different UI. As one put it: "Vector is in the top left, so it's out of reach. What is in reach is settings and dark mode. I don't know if I need that here."
The wireframe consolidates everything into the bottom toolbar: core tools moved down within reach, dark mode stripped out into Preferences, one place to look instead of three.
The AI had its own trust problem: students couldn't tell the bots apart, and edits replaced their work instead of building on it. We recommended hover descriptions explaining what each bot does, a ghost preview of proposed changes with accept and reject, and pointing to the manual tools whenever the AI can't finish a task. These stayed as interaction recommendations rather than wireframes.
THE PRESENTATION
We presented to Framer's product managers in week 12. The reception was positive, and our point of contact said she would bring the work to the broader team! Presenting to people who know the product better than we do forced us to be precise about what our evidence actually said. I've since seen some of these changes reflected in Framer; our team can't take credit, as these ideas might have already been in production, but it definitely validated the directions we chose.
REFLECTIONS
What I learned
Working with a real client showed me how to defend a decision. Every recommendation had to hold up against people who knew the product better than we did, so just saying "this feels cleaner" or any other of our assumptions stopped being an argument and was instead replaced with concrete evidence from our transcripts. We never put the wireframes back in front of students, but next time, I would A/B test the verification flow and the guided tour against the current versions before presenting, so we could hand Framer even more evidence that our recommendations would work.
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