Origin
When I sat the Life in the UK test as part of pursuing dual British/Canadian citizenship, the quality of available preparation resources surprised me. Fragmented, dry, and largely unchanged for years, none of them reflected how people actually learn. None attempted to serve the genuinely global audience navigating citizenship tests around the world.
Citizenshipped is my attempt to fix that: a platform built from scratch, covering design, development, content, and branding, to make citizenship test preparation more effective, more engaging, and genuinely accessible regardless of which country you are applying to.
The Problem
No single resource existed to serve someone preparing for a citizenship test regardless of their country. Existing tools were siloed by nation, frequently outdated, and built around rote memorisation, which is both an ineffective learning strategy and a poor preparation method for tests that vary in how questions are phrased.
Regional complexity compounded the problem. Several countries, Canada in particular, vary their citizenship test questions by province or territory. A platform that failed to account for that offered, at best, incomplete preparation. Beyond content, studying for a citizenship test carries real stakes and real anxiety. Gamification and progress visibility were not cosmetic choices; they were functional responses to a user who needed to feel in control of their preparation.
What I Built
Platform and Stack
The platform runs on Astro with TypeScript throughout, Drizzle ORM against a Supabase database, and deploys on Cloudflare Workers. Authentication is handled via JWTs. The architecture prioritises SSR and SSG to ensure content is indexable and performance does not depend on client-side JavaScript hydration. Core Web Vitals are near-perfect across the board.
Content and Question System
The question bank currently holds over 1,700 items across the UK, Canada, and the USA, with additional countries in development. Each question has been written in multiple phrasings by hand. This anti-rote learning approach shuffles question variants so users encounter the same underlying knowledge expressed differently, preparing them for however the real exam chooses to ask it. Authenticated users can select their country, region, province, or state to receive question sets specific to their jurisdiction, which is a genuine requirement for countries like Canada where test content varies sub-nationally.
Learning System and Readiness Algorithm
The platform includes mock exams, practice modes, and a study guide for each country. Progress is tracked as a percentage of the study guide completed, alongside an exam countdown based on the user's self-reported test date. A readiness score algorithm analyses recent exam performance to give users a concrete signal of whether they are prepared to sit the real test.
Branding and Design
The visual identity, including the logo, brand system, component library, and UI, was designed entirely from scratch. It had to function across a gamified learning context and more formal study materials without tonal inconsistency, and had to feel credible to an audience making a significant legal and personal commitment.
SEO and Growth
SEO was treated as infrastructure, not an afterthought. Structured data, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, and robots.txt were implemented from launch. Content was refined iteratively using Google Search Console, informed by search performance data. The combination of SSG for static content and SSR for authenticated journeys ensures every indexable page is served as rendered HTML. The platform now receives over 7,000 monthly visitors, with that figure growing consistently month over month.
What I Learned
Building a product solo from zero, covering identity, architecture, content, and growth, is a different discipline from client work. Every decision is yours, which is clarifying and exposing in equal measure.
The most instructive constraint was content. Writing 1,700+ questions across three jurisdictions, each in multiple phrasings, while maintaining accuracy and pedagogical quality is not a design problem or a development problem. It is an editorial one. A background in research and academic writing made that tractable in a way it might not have been otherwise, and it reinforced how much the quality of a learning product lives in its content rather than its interface.
The SEO work confirmed something worth stating plainly: performance and indexability are not optimisations to layer on after launch. On Citizenshipped, they were design constraints from day one, and the organic growth reflects that.