Problem: “We need help… We know we’re not as awesome as we could be.” This giant in online education (a billion-dollar company) is made up of a complex ecosystem of different business units. The resulting product was fragmented and had some design inconsistencies.
Goal: Help us improve our overall user experience.
Contribution: ABCmouse needed help, so I came on board and moved into a role as an “inside-outsider”, with the political freedom of a consultant, but the product knowledge of an insider. For a span of almost two years, I had the privilege of working with many inspiring thought-leaders who had committed themselves to education and this incredibly ambitious company, focused on early education. During that span, I worked across their entire product ecosystem. My work focused on helping to redesign their current experiences, and later on concepting, designing, and testing many of their new products.
Here are a few project examples:
Teacher Research & Personas: When I arrived at ABCmouse, I was assigned to work on the newly created Teacher Experience product. I asked for research to get up to speed on the digital experience, but there was very little at the time. In response, I initiated and conducted 1-on-1 research interviews with a number of teachers to create a presentation about who we were designing for, as well as identifying and creating our two primary personas. This was shared across the organization, creating alignment and giving us a foundational understanding of these users. The deck has subsequently become a key piece of onboarding material for employees.
Parent App: It’s no surprise that kids learn more when their parents are involved in their learning. Wanting to encourage this, ABCmouse set out to create an app for parents. After conducting research interviews with parents, I learned parents want three things: 1) To understand what their kids are doing; 2) To learn how they can support their learning; 3) To justify the cost of the product they are paying for (their subscription). Based on these findings, I was given one week to design and prototype a testable version of the app. It’s primarily a feed, supported by notifications and a growing evergreen reference area.
Prototype: https://marvelapp.com/31348a8/screen/30112443
Teaching Pronunciation: It is always fun to design for new technology. (I remember designing the first iPad app for Reuters. The iPad had not come out yet and our test iPad was kept in a windowless room with a solid steel door – ha….) When ABCmouse decided to start utilizing “speech” inputs, it was very exciting. The flagship project would be aimed at teaching users to correctly pronounce English words.
But the initial designers were having a tough time figuring out the interaction model, flow, and design. After a number of false starts, I was asked to take the project and produce a prototype we could align on and take into testing in a weeks time. After doing some initial observational discovery research, watching how pre-literate kids used touch devices, and speaking with engineering leads to understand speech inputs and processing better, I created this very simple prototype to share with our internal stakeholders. They greenlighted this and then a more functional version was built and put into user testing. This has since gone on to become a very heavily used product in the ABCmouse ecosystem, benefitting ESL students and also many speech therapy patients as well!
Results: During my time at ABCmouse, we scaled tremendously, achieving a 1B dollar market valuation and growing from 180 to 600+ employees. I’m very proud to have been part of this growth, helping the various products and the Design practice take form and mature. Process improved. Output improved. Documentation improved. And, most significantly, the organization now embraces, and regularly conducts user research on an ongoing basis… which is rare!
(I love this business space! The work above is really just a teaser, appropriate here since it’s not difficult to grasp. I’ve done a ton of projects, but many of those require a lot more contexts – ex. Teacher Tools, Assessments, Live Tutoring, Etc… tons of interesting things going on over at ABCmouse, and in Digital Educational, in general!)