EdTech Publishing
Introduction
Discovery Education is the global leader in digital content for K-12, transforming teaching and learning with award-winning digital textbooks, interactive multimedia content and professional development.
I joined the editorial team to design a high-quality digital learning ecosystem for educators to engage in instruction that improves student engagement, motivation and curiosity. To create learning material, the outdated editorial platform needed be completely de-designed.
The Opportunity
Editorial Architecture
As the student and teacher UI was being redesigned, the editorial information architecture and lesson creation CMS would need to go through a similar UX process.
The Problems
The CMS was built on an outdated (10 year old) tech stack with a poor publishing user experience that recently forced editorial users to structure lessons manually to meet the new learning experience UI. The ability to preview a chapter, lesson, or assignment was now disabled until publishing.
Multiple teams needed to be involved over numerous days to publish a simple lesson due to the manual layout development needed and hard-coded information architecture.
Based on editorial research findings, we identified three primary goals for our work:
- Ensure that users can seamlessly design lessons, preview and publish in just a few minutes.
- Reduce confusion around the steps to insert a lesson into a specific subject chapter
- Enable a permissions-based platform where users can be held to view only and edit mode, with limited users to publishing access.
Impact
My contribution:
I spent the first three months immersed with the editorial team, understanding how they write lesson plans, current pain points and desired outcomes. During this time, I collaborated with the student-facing UX team to redefine the information architecture of a lesson, chapter and digital textbook.
I was challenged to re-define and design an internal publishing tool to replace a legacy CMS, migrating thousands of lessons, assignments and digital textbooks.
As the Product Designer for Discovery Educations Publishing Team:
- Lead the discovery and UX phases for developing a new platform to introduce a new lesson publishing experience.
- Partnered with engineers and editorial stakeholders to understand user needs and usability analysis to solve for technical constraints from a legacy internal CMS editorial platform.
- Developed user flows and information architecture to identify editorial user experience while addressing major pain points from the student-facing experience.
- Contextualized complex lessons into smaller, more management publishing components
- Designed clickable prototypes for curriculum stakeholders and led design-to-dev documentation.
- Conducted monthly design reviews and usability studies across the curriculum team.
Ideation
Desired Outcomes
Time to generate ideas through research insights, empathy and team inspiration, pushing past the obvious ones to come up with new ideas. Wild ideas were encouraged. Some of those ideas were ready for UI solutions but some of these ideas will help prepare for the next research study to gather the answers.
Each concept introduced had to go through a variety of teams from the content designers, student facing UX team, teacher UX team and curriculum directors.
I also used this time to bring non-designers and curriculum directors into Crazy 8 workshops. The team also felt passionate about the new tool as they felt their voice was finally being heard.
Design Showcase
Lo-Fidelity wireframes used during early prototypes
Student Facing Assignments
Old Version:
Re-design v1:
Empty State:
