BIL Digital Experience (UNDER NDA)
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, support sales with wireframes, 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 at a textbook-first publisher.
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 two years instead of four.
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
Allow teachers to assess students and meet them where they are.
Create highly efficient workflows.
Enable teachers to quickly and easily customize their online classes.
Data visualization is crucial
The Results
Launched a lovable MVP in two years, booking 100M+ in sales.
Increased sign on and retention: NPS up 83%, key feature adoption up 100%.
Understanding: reduced UX copy length by 60%, brought support tickets down 20%.
Co-built and managed a component design system in Figma.
Building a customer research program from scratch: new analytics platform, card sorts, interviews, and quarterly NPS surveys. Junior UX designer > customer research lead.
Led hybrid internal/external design team in Figma.
Sold proposal to transition from Xd to Figma, led to company-wide Figma adoption.
Becoming company accessibility consultant.
Takeaways
Make it fast or don’t make it at all. Modern teachers (and all users) juggle multiple prescribed platforms and will find alternatives like paper if it’s faster.
UX copy matters- consider intention instead of trying to communicate every single technical detail for “transparency.” Understanding builds trust.
Validate or perish: pre-release testing of student experience could have prevented costly redesign, documented loss of sales.
Ongoing analysis of user analytics and paths through an app is cheap, effective research. Keeping Design in contact with Sales and Support via meetings and ticket boards is like doing customer research for free.