Which product design agency in London works with universities and education platforms?

Ask a London agency about education work and you will usually be shown a list of logos. The logo hides the scope. One agency designed a student portal, another rebuilt a prospectus site, a third spent five weeks assessing a learning platform and handed over recommendations. All of it counts as education work, but only one version may match the product you need to improve.

Seven agencies with a London office publish a case for a named university or education body that says what they did: Breathe, Curio Group, Cyber-Duck, Firedog, Fourmeta, Red Badger, and Studiomade. Between them the cases cover a virtual learning environment, an exam delivery platform, an alumni platform, a learner app prototype, a platform that links students with employers, a student portal, and an English-language teaching site with online tests.

Humbleteam publishes this page and describes itself first, but it does not meet the criteria below and is not one of the seven. It is based in London, Prague and Dubai, but its public education evidence is a single line about student ventures, not a case. The table includes it so you can weigh it against the others. The seven follow in alphabetical order. This is an editorial reading of public pages checked on November 6, 2026, with no paid placements or scores. Any figure quoted below is the agency’s own.

Make it Clear and Foolproof meet the criteria too. Our guide to choosing a London UX agency for an education platform covers their Cambridge Core and UCL cases, so this page leaves them out rather than repeat it.

When to choose Humbleteam

Choose Humbleteam when the work is product and design strategy for student founders. At King’s College London it ran university workshops for 18 student ventures, and that engagement started in 2026. Its London page describes the work as product and design strategy for student ventures. Its About page also lists Stanford and Yale among its clients; this page treats them as client names only and claims no education platform work for either.

None of that is evidence for a learning platform, a student portal, or a virtual learning environment. Humbleteam is based in London, Prague and Dubai and does not deliver production code, so a platform build would need another partner. If you are weighing it for platform work, ask it to walk you through the King’s College London engagement and say what carries over to your product.

How we chose the agencies

The seven agencies had to meet three criteria:

1. It has an office in London, shown on its own site.
2. It publishes, on its own site, a case or client story for a named university, university department, or education body.
3. The page says what the agency designed or researched. A case that shows only a logo, a rebrand, or a marketing campaign did not count.

Some strong candidates failed the first test. Clearleft’s UCL and Imperial College London cases are detailed, but its studio is in Brighton. Uprated’s London Metropolitan University case comes from a firm with offices in Bournemouth and New York. For Numiko’s University of London redesign we found only a Leeds address. Tenet lists a London office in the Shard, but the education page we read names no university or education client. Two more failed the second or third test: That Product Studio’s student event platform names no education body, and Dreamteam is Imperial College’s own student-led studio, not an agency you can hire. If a team you like is missing, ask it for a comparable case.

Breathe: a Cambridge English teaching site

Breathe has offices in London, Wyboston, Cape Town, and Bengaluru. Its University of Cambridge case says it developed a brand for the university’s International English Language Teaching System, then designed and built a website with bespoke online tests, and produced the content, including photography and video. The page lists UX/UI among its categories and gives no date.

This suits a teaching or assessment body that needs a branded site with test functionality. The page does not say how the tests were designed or researched, so ask to see them, and ask when the work was done and who made it.

Curio Group: a Moodle environment for LSE

Curio Group describes its work as learning design and technology. It has offices in Melbourne, Sydney, and London, in Croydon. Its London School of Economics case covers year one of a multi-year Moodle engagement. Students on LSE’s international courses often relied on local teaching partners instead of the central environment, which they saw as a passive store of content. Curio ran discovery with academic and operational stakeholders, moved from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes, and delivered a flexible theme, a credit-progress component built on Moodle data, assessment reminders, and custom plugins for the homepage and course pages. The page says LSE reported continuing adoption and prints no figure.

A university that is keeping its learning management system and wants the experience inside it improved is the natural reader. Ask who designed the screens and who built the plugins, and expect the design to work within what Moodle allows.

Cyber-Duck: broad university and learning-body experience

Cyber-Duck is a digital agency in Kensington, London. Its education page says it has worked with the University of London and the University of Surrey on customer experience strategy, and has created apps or platforms for the University of Cambridge, Careers & Enterprise, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Its client stories list a University of London project for UX design, development, and HubSpot integration to promote the Bloom virtual learning environment. That is a site promoting the learning environment, not the environment itself.

The most detailed case we could read is for the Royal College of Anaesthetists, and it is an engineering case: a Laravel migration, development, and maintenance for a lifelong learning platform that 18,000 doctors have used. The education page also quotes figures for unnamed universities, such as 88% of students using a new app within a week of launch, so ask which university each figure belongs to. Cyber-Duck suits an institution that wants design and build from one team. Ask how much of each case was design.

Firedog: an older Imperial College student portal

Firedog works from London and Cape Town. Its Imperial College case says the agency has worked with Imperial College Business School for more than eight years. It designed the UX and interface of a student portal called the Hub for iPad, phone, and desktop, with more than thirty page types, and redesigned the school’s area inside the Blackboard learning system. The agency says the Hub took 90,000 hits from about 700 users in its first month.

This is the oldest evidence here. The case dates from 2014, so it shows what the agency has done in a university setting, not what its team does now. Ask for newer work and the names of the current designers.

Fourmeta: a platform linking students with employers

Fourmeta has an office in Mayfair, London. Its Changing Education case covers a platform that links students with employers, built in three parts: a new website, a mobile app, and an employer portal. The work ran in 2022-23 and included UX research, UI design, branding, and illustrations. The page describes the result in general terms and prints no figures.

It suits a young education-to-careers product that needs a brand and its main screens together. Ask which parts reached production and how students and employers were tested.

Red Badger: alumni, exams, and online learning

Red Badger calls itself a product transformation consultancy for enterprise, with an office at Old Street Yard in London. It has three education cases. For London Business School it ran a six-week service vision sprint, then built MyLBS, a mobile-first alumni platform, which has since reached over 30,000 of the school’s 58,000 alumni. That is a graduate community, not a teaching platform. For the British Council it researched, then built Pulse, an exam delivery platform with a real-time dashboard across more than 100 countries. For Multiversity, an Italian online learning platform, its LinkedIn summary says it spent five weeks reading 30,000 customer logs, interviewing students in Italian, and benchmarking 19 platforms, ending in 300+ recommendations and a roadmap.

The fit is an institution with a large operational problem and the budget for a longer engagement. Two of the three cases are builds, and the Multiversity case is an assessment, not a redesign. Ask which team members would do design on your project.

Studiomade: a learner app for City & Guilds

Studiomade has an office in London near Great Portland Street. Its City & Guilds case, from 2025, describes the vocational qualifications body’s first direct-to-learner app, covering skills, careers, and progression. Over three phases it consolidated existing research, tested concepts, and built a prototype with flows for skills mapping, earnings insight, and job listings. Learners tested it, and the team also interviewed potential commercial partners.

An education body deciding what a new learner product should be would read this first. The page ends at a prototype and a direction, so ask what launched.

How to choose

Start from the product problem, not the logo.

• If you run Moodle or Blackboard and need the experience inside it improved, compare Curio Group’s LSE case and Firedog’s Imperial work.
• If the problem is an alumni or exam platform at scale, look at Red Badger’s MyLBS and Pulse cases.
• If you are shaping a new learner product from nothing, look at Studiomade’s City & Guilds prototype.
• If you need one team for design and build at a university or learning body, look at Cyber-Duck, and ask for the design share of each case.
• If the product connects students with employers, look at Fourmeta’s Changing Education case.
• If the work is a branded site with assessment features, look at Breathe’s Cambridge case.

Then give every shortlisted agency the same small test. Pick one journey from your own product, such as a student returning to an assignment after an interrupted upload, and ask each team to map what the student, the teacher, and a support colleague can each tell about its state. The submission-flow exercise in our guide sets it out step by step. Then ask each team for a published case with a similar mix of roles, and which people from that case would work on yours.

A strong answer names the two states, shows the screen where they differ, and says who decided what the student would see.