Product Designer
Supports learning experiences for teachers and students.
Advocates for accessible experiences.
Builds strong relationships that produce results.
Streamlined lesson planning
Challenge
Three separate teacher guides and a confusing network of resources. Users needed a more clear path for implementation.
Strategy
Combine the teacher guides into one book and update the hierarchy of information. Create an Implementation Guide that walks teachers through the stages of complexity in the program.
Results
Early feedback from the sales field revealed an increase in comprehension and ease of use.
Role: Product Experience Design, Production
Team: 3 PXDs, 5 LXDs (Learning Experience Designer), 1 PM, 1 PO
Time: 2024–2025
Support in one place
Challenge
Increase usage of Structured Literacy resources.
Strategy
Create an eBook with links and downloads of all the resources for the program in one place.
Results
Increased educator confidence, reduced planning time
Role: Product Experience Design, Production
Team: 2 PXDs, 1 Engineer, 2 LXDs (Learning Experience Designer)
Time: 2023–2025
Gamified vocabulary practice
Challenge
Create a gamified experience for students to learn and practice vocabulary.
Strategy
Work within existing interaction patterns framework.
Results
Delivered three grade ranges, each grade containing 150 lessons and each lesson containing 3–4 pages of interactions.
Role: Product Experience Design, Production
Team: 4 PXDs, 5 LXDs (Learning Experience Designer), 1 PM, Engineering vendor
Time: 6 months to ship; 2019–2020
Presenting to the whole class
Challenge
Whole-class portions of lessons are anchored with a presentation or interaction activity. How could we deliver useful content in our program so users didn’t have to create their own?
Strategy
Deliver presentations in file formats that teachers have access to and are familiar with. Use accessibility guidelines to ensure everyone can experience the lesson. Consider the age of the audience when using artwork and activity types.
Results
Three styles of presentations for different lesson needs. PDF-text only, Powerpoint with drag-and-drop style activities, and integrating a data-driven immersive learning product into the platform.
Role: Product Design, Production Design
Time: 2017–2025
Ask me what didn’t get made!
There are many projects that didn’t get past the research or prototype phase. This is (usually) Design Thinking at work! Sometimes it’s a global crisis.
Interactive cross-curricular addition to HMH Into Reading (v2, 2022). Elementary teachers often don’t have time to teach reading and math and social studies/science/arts and culture. Cross-curricular content somewhat solves this problem by using reading lessons to teach other subjects.
The project was cancelled due to lack of engineering support and prioritizing improving current offerings.
Grocery store experience improvement. A personal research project via an online UX course. In late 2019/early 2020 I went on site visits to learn shoppers behaviors and pain points. In this case, a site visit means tagging along with people on their regular grocery trips.
This project was paused when grocery store behaviors abruptly changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In-house logo contest, honorable mention. In 2019 the design department offered a challenge to design the logo for the new research initiative. HMH Learning Lab was a program that got employees into partner classrooms to build understanding of schools as complex systems and move testing and observation from programs to people. Partner schools were on board to start in Fall 2019.
This initiative was paused when schools shut down and went remote starting in March 2020. My logo was in the top options being considered and garnered an honorable mention.
Remember to take your medication!
Challenge
Increase medication compliance for short and long-term prescriptions. Learn about the UX Design process.
Strategy
Own the entire project from user interviews to clickable prototype.
Results
Earned a UX Design Certificate from General Assembly. Received valuable feedback on how to improve the product and my process.
Team: 1 designer, 2 teachers, 20 classmates
Time: 16 week class; 2018
“Do I own this already?”
Challenge
Embroiderers lose track of what thread colors they own, resulting in an overwhelming collection of unused materials and unnecessary trips to stores or online purchases.
Strategy
My collaborator and I wanted to test our skills during our pandemic down time. I conducted user interviews and familiarized myself with Figma. We addressed the biggest pain point for users by utilizing a barcode scanning feature to quickly add newly purchased thread.
Results
A speculative app that lists all DMC and Anchor brand colors. Easy to find colors add to/subtract from your list, and a quick-add scanner feature for bulk purchases of thread skeins. MVP included a 3D touch context menu, filter, search, light/dark mode, and iOS release.
