Overview
The opportunity
Educators needed an easier way to discover relevant learning resources, track professional growth, and access personalized content aligned with their goals and instructional needs.
My contribution
Led experience strategy and product design for a professional learning ecosystem. Partnered with product and engineering teams to improve content discovery, learning pathways, and engagement across the platform.
Business impact
- Improved access to professional learning resources and instructional support.
- Increased discoverability of relevant content through better organization and learning pathways.
- Supported educator growth through personalized professional development experiences.
- Strengthened engagement with professional learning content across the platform.
Competitive Analysis
Collaborated with the product, sales, and instruction specialists to identify key competitors, evaluate their offerings, and pinpoint opportunities for Ellevation to disrupt the current English Language Learner (ELL) professional development space.
Research and Discovery
Led a week-long design sprint to explore opportunities for the existing Instructional Strategies product. This included ideation, rapid prototyping, and creating a user testing script. Conducted internal and external interviews to identify user needs and pain points, performed a comprehensive audit of user management tasks and workflows.
Personas
Defining personas and their roles in districts
During design sprint and with subsequent user interviews we defined three key personas who would engage with the portal - Learners (Teachers), Coaches (Specialists, Coaches, Directors), Accountability Managers (District Admins, Principals).
Learners' needs
- Require a quick, guided experience to apply Instructional Strategies resources in their classrooms due to limited time and overwhelming responsibilities.
- Need incentives to engage in learning new skills, as many districts offer professional learning programs that provide credit hours and small rewards.
Coaches' responsibilities
- Selecting and recommending courses to learners.
- Monitoring and promoting learners' progress.
- Reviewing results and engaging with learners in discussions.
- Approving or recommending rewards.
Accountability Managers' responsibilities
- Approving professional development (PD) courses for their districts.
- Reviewing results through reports.
Based on user interviews, stakeholder discussions, and company business requirements, our team decided to prioritize improving the Learner's experience first. Subsequently, we will integrate workflows for Coaches and Accountability Managers, potentially utilizing other areas of the application such as the User Management page.
Design Strategy
Design strategy and project management
Contributed to finalizing project goals while championing user experience. I led continuous UX and product onboarding for new team members, and collaborated closely with the tech lead and product manager to understand technical and business constraints. Additionally, I worked with the sales and product support teams to create a fully functional prototype, successfully recruiting over 20 districts for the pilot phase.
Technical and product constraints
- New Professional Learning pages were built from scratch while introducing a new framework to the Ellevation product suite.
- Requirement to use and contribute to a brand new and fairly incomplete design system.
Educational Solutions Department needs
At the project's outset, we lacked readily available content. However, through close collaboration with the Educational Solutions Department and the Engineering lead, we developed a list of requirements to construct a flexible, modular course template. This template encompassed:
- Unlimited amount of steps, to enable content creators add and remove sections from the learning modules.
UX and Product Design
Ideated and sketched long-term solutions, defined task flows based on different personas' needs, and broke down designs into phases to support rapid development cycles. I created both high and low fidelity prototypes, conducted usability tests, and promoted the new Ellevation design system.
