BILD
Using Flexibility and Real-time Data to Improve Math Scores by a Full Grade
Role: UX Lead
Length: 4 years
Type: B2B SaaS
Scope: I led the UX team, serving as both lead UX researcher and lead UX designer. My product managers also relied on me to simplify workflows and write intuitive UX copy.
Education is a market where technology and customer satisfaction are well behind the curve. Much like the clichéd, chaotic, and often crummy carnival parks of the 1940’s that motivated Walt Disney to create Disneyland, we created Math and You as something firmly rooted in the modern web that serves the needs of modern teachers. We sought to bring innovation to the people in our quest to leave them touched, moved, and inspired by mathematics, just as Walt wanted to move, and inspire the people of the 1950’s.
This is the story of how I led a team of designers in the design of a moonshot called Math and You, one of the first learning platforms driven by real-time student progress data and fully customizable learning. Our goal was to build an accessibility-first experience that integrated the three phases of teaching- Plan, Teach, Assess- into one cohesive whole that facilitated learning rather than just enabling it across disparate tools.
Thus, Math and You was born. Combined with the Big Ideas Learning curriculum, Math and You has been shown to boost math scores by up to a full letter grade.
“You have to build the best technology that you’ve ever built in your life; and then you have to make it invisible.” - Jon Snoddy, Walt Disney Imagineering
The Challenges
Creating a digital first experience in an environment that was historically print first.
Building a design ops practice.
Building a UX research practice.
Adapting existing code into something cutting edge.
And one more thing: doing all of it in three years instead of five.
The Results
Launching a lovable MVP in three years.
Co-building and managing a component design system in Figma.
Continuing card sorts, interviews, and quarterly surveys.
Leading company adoption of Figma and FigJam.
Customer feedback stored centrally in Pendo.
App-wide analytics enablement in Pendo for agile UX data.
The Process
How might we help teachers assess student progress, adapt to student needs, and do so efficiently?
Problem Space
We gained an intimate view of the current teaching experience and learned that:
Teachers don’t have enough time to teach. Any inefficient UX is abandoned.
Teachers never follow one textbook exclusively.
Every teacher has a deeply unique style, but all leverage data-driven instruction.
Students often start the year lacking foundational math skills, especially after COVID.
Design Goals
To allow teachers to assess students and meet them where they are.
To create highly efficient workflows.
To allow teachers to quickly and easily customize their online classes.
UI and Features
Research
We started by putting users at the core of our design.
We learned their demographics and how each experienced museums, including their best and worst experiences.
Then we learned from their experience.
We interviewed 5 museum goers ranging from tourist to enthusiast. They told us what mattered to them during their visit and what makes a great museum.
Their insights became our design
They told us that they valued an individual, immersive experience that connected them to the pieces and engaged them intellectually. However, natural history museums were stale, boring, or for children.
Tour experiences were a key theme and audio and human guides were frequently clumsy, a hassle, and provided incomplete information.
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Design
1: Low Detail
We brainstormed how we’d address each feature.
As an Agile UX team, we collaborated and improved on each other’s ideas so that we committed ourselves to the best solution.
We picked the best idea for each feature, revised it, and made it part of our MVP.
Narration Text Design
Initial Off-Screen Callout Design
Initial UI Design
Revised UI Design
2: Medium Detail
We tested our prototype with users.
Users showed us that:
They wouldn’t want to hold their phone continuously, making audio narration a key feature.
The prominent size and color of the “AR Active” indicator made it look like a button.
Numbered fact callouts suggested that
users should tap them in order.
Mid-Detail Usability Results
3: High Detail MVP
High Detail Usability Results
We made changes and tested our final MVP with more users.
What changed:
FAQ copy that reflected how users verbalized tech issues.
Intuitive zoom added.
Removing numbers from fact callouts.
Adjustable knowledge level settings for children, adults, and enthusiasts.
Takeaways
Text labels are more accessible than icons. Users would rather be “insulted” than frustrated.
Natural mappings work. Of the two ways to adjust knowledge depth, all users intuitively swiped the dial.
What one user loves, another finds distracting. Keep it simple.
UX means authentic inclusion. Authentic inclusion means going beyond convention and never assuming. Syncing audio narration and text for accessibility was enjoyed by all users.
