AltSchool
(Winter 2015 — Fall 2017)Lead Product Designer
AltSchool is building a software “platform” for K—8 teachers, students, and parents. It is comprised of everything from teacher planning, assignments & assessments, to a student “playlist”, student goals, as well as a parent portal. When I started at AltSchool I was the only full-time designer. Over the past (nearly) three years I have led the design of the majority of the platform, while helping grow & shape the design team.
(altschool.com)Student Playlist & Portfolio —
Assignments are at the core of the AltSchool platform — they are used to document & assess student work. I worked on the two main surfaces students use interact with assignments — their Playlist, and their Portfolio — as well as on the overall system architecture of assignments as they pass through various states: draft, assigned, submitted, assessed, complete.
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Tagging & Assessing Assignments —
The amount of learning objectives teachers deal with can be daunting. I redesigned our tagging and assessment flows to simplify the process of navigating through a large set of learning objectives & tagging the desired ones. It was important as well for the assessment experience to feel like an extension of the tagging experience.
(case study coming soon)
Classroom Capture —
An important aspect of the modern learning experience is documenting student work and behavior. Classroom Capture is an app for teachers to document (and share) learning moments without disrupting the classroom experience. All photos are immediately sync’d to the AltSchool platform so they can pickup the workflow later in the day either on their laptop or phone.
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Habit Cards —
Younger learners tend to interact with the world in a more concrete & tactile way. I worked with two Lower Elementary educators on a way to engage young learners with the AltSchool Social-Emotional Learning Habits. After prototyping some ideas our final output was Habit Cards, as well as educational practices to scaffold their use in the classroom. (illustrations: Natalie Fitzgerald)
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Global Navigation —
I worked on creating a global navigation system that we could apply across our Educator, Student, and Parent products. Educators had a unique need of being able to switch between individual students, as well as different group views, quite fluidly, which I solved with a student search/selector in the top level nav. I also worked on making all the sub-navigation/toolbars more consistent across the app.
(case study coming soon)
Pattern Library —
During my time at AltSchool I was responsibile for design infrastructure, and usually spent around 20% of each week working on it. My main effort within design infrastructure was the development and maintenance of our UI design pattern library. As the platform really started to grow around my second year at AltSchool I setup a weekly meeting with the frontend team to discuss everything from perceived performance, responsiveness, maintainability of UI patterns, and more.
