Nat Geo Learning rocked the print game but needed digital experts to help carry their education interface into today. As the Sr. Product Designer, I collaborated with students and teachers at grade K-12, as well as internal stakeholders, to create a more useful, engaging, and age-appropriate e-learning platform through research, user feedback, ideation, illustration, design, and copywriting - despite severely limiting development constraints. Our findings allowed students to focus on learning the content, instead of struggling with how to use the interface. I was able to learn the language of our young users, which was incredibly fulfilling. I identified and integrated user-centered, digital design-thinking into the organization, in collaboration with other departments and design team members.
Senior Product Designer:
• UX Design
• UI Design & Illustration
• Copywriting
• User Testing
• UX Strategy
• Design & Functional QA
• Product Management
• Process Improvement
• The company had very little experience working with a design team that focused on a digital platform, so much was needed in the way of integrating design ops and digital design-thinking. This was a ripe opportunity to create everything from scratch and do it right.
• We started with very small amounts of qualitative or quantitative data, and gathering data was challenging given the age and access to our users. But we were scrappy and figured out a way!
• The original user experience was designed for Higher-Ed students.
K2 students have unique cognitive abilities, comprehension skills, and ergonomic needs compared to older learners; so it was an exciting challenge to optimize our site for children.
✓ Lead UI, UX, brainstorming, copywriting, mascot illustration, and design system creation for the major overhaul project of our Kindergarten through 2nd grade student and teacher e-learning interface, in an effort to create a more appropriate and useful experience. Used research of —and user testing with— young users to help guide my decisions and push for a better experience that helped shape minds and let students focus on understanding the content instead of how to use the interface.
✓ Created and wrote a visual story in website form, to help evangelize and communicate the K2 overhaul project to senior executives and colleagues.
✓ Aided in launching several profit-generating features for our high school e-learning platform.
✓ Created positive, successful, and engaging experience for users, per user tests, despite multiple development and architectural constraints. Results from usability tests indicate that usability of system was highly successful, often resulting in 100% success of task for children as young as five years old.
✓ Introduced the print-based team/company to digital UCD and UX principles and workflows, directing the company to the inclusion of these principles through example and UX evangelism.
✓ Introduced, created, and evangelized internal process streamlining through software such as Abstract (version and design file control), Airtable (for logging new ideas, product challenges/solutions, team retrospectives, personal task organization, and design debt), custom Heuristic and Competitive Evaluation templates with scoring mechanisms, and design-to-dev and design-creation workflow-improvement documentation in Sketch, JIRA, and Confluence.
✓ Created all wireframes, visual designs, prototypes, copy - and often lead our design workshops - for our e-learning products for users from grades K-12. I conducted functional and visual QA during development.
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