Projects
In senior leadership roles spanning User Experience & Visual Design, Product Management, and Engineering, I’ve led diverse initiatives that shaped products and elevated user engagement. The work has ranged from redesigning core user journeys across platforms, to guiding new products from concept through launch, to establishing design standards and features that set a higher bar for usability. At every stage, I’ve driven innovation while ensuring strong pedagogical principles are seamlessly woven into exceptional user experiences.​
Foundations A-Z
VP Product Management & UX
Foundations A–Z represents a flagship, enterprise-scale initiative that I played a central in guiding from concept through build and ultimately to launch. I led cross-functional teams across User Experience, Visual Design, and Product Management, coordinating efforts to ensure both the instructional goals and the digital experience were fully realized.
The platform supports early literacy by providing a research-based curriculum that helps students build reading, writing, and grammar skills while giving teachers the insights they need to guide instruction.
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We also introduced immersive student experiences, including a set of mascots that accompany learners throughout their journey. These characters act as teachers in instructional videos, host digital practice activities, and motivate students as they complete missions and earn rewards through the student portal. The mascots create a playful, engaging environment that reinforces learning while encouraging student ownership of their progress.
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The impact of Foundations A–Z has been recognized across the edtech industry. It was awarded a 2024 CODiE Award from SIIA, the only peer-reviewed program that highlights the best in business and education technology. Additionally, it received an ‘all green’ rating from EdReports, an independent nonprofit that rigorously evaluates K-12 curricula, underscoring its effectiveness and quality.
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This project illustrates how thoughtful product leadership, user-centered design, and a focus on pedagogy can combine to create meaningful learning experiences that effectively support both teachers and students.
The Student Portal
VP of Product Experience
Kids A-Z is one of the longest-running and most influential experiences in our product suite. As the owner of the user experience and visual design, I led the teams that concepted, tested, and built joyful, intuitive student experiences while also making teacher management simple and efficient. I also oversaw the engineering teams that built our first native iOS and Android apps for Kids A-Z, which quickly became a core part of our ecosystem and have maintained an even split between mobile and desktop usage for roughly a decade.
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The platform brings all Learning A-Z products into one cohesive space where students access their learning materials and teachers roster, assign, review, and track progress. Our UX team conducted extensive classroom observations and student testing, leading to major improvements across the interface. One of the most challenging and rewarding achievements was designing a login flow simple enough for pre-readers, enabling more than 10 million early learners worldwide to access the platform independently.
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The student experience is anchored by the Kids A-Z mascot, which we refined over several iterations to make it engaging, inclusive, and highly communicative for emergent readers. The newest version features a responsive face mask that uses emojis and icons to support comprehension for pre-readers and keep the experience fun for learners across grade levels.
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Kids A-Z also fosters real-world impact through the annual Star Donation campaign, which lets students donate the stars they earn by reading and completing activities. Students who participate read three times as many books and complete twice as many activities, accelerating their literacy growth while helping communities in need.​
UX for the Win!
VP Product Experience
Recent examples of impactful user experience improvements:
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1. Redesign of the login and shopping cart experience, addressing significant user confusion and drop-off at both points. Through collaboration with Marketing, user interviews, and analytics, my UX team identified barriers including a confusing login flow, unfamiliar design patterns, and a cluttered shopping cart with poor visual hierarchy. We redesigned the login to follow familiar e-commerce patterns, improved brand recognition, and simplified the process for returning and new users. The shopping cart was updated to align with common mental models, emphasizing checkout first, then product add-ons, while de-emphasizing distractions like discount codes and disabled items. These changes increased the conversion rate by 17%, exceeding the 15% goal, and generated an additional $292,048 in revenue for the quarter, while also reducing duplicate account calls and consolidations.
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​2. Overhaul of the rostering experience for school and district administrators, addressing a major source of frustration as our platform scaled. Rostering was complex, error-prone, and time-consuming, taking admins an average of 17 days to complete, due to cumbersome workflows, unclear visibility into staff and student assignments, and limited flexibility for edits. My team conducted user interviews, usability testing, and workflow audits to identify pain points and collaborated closely with product, engineering, and subject matter experts to design a solution that balanced admin needs, technical feasibility, and business objectives. Key improvements included smart error handling for bulk imports, visual conflict indicators on the dashboard, and manual editing capabilities for individual or multiple students. These changes reduced rostering time by 82%, cut editing effort, and significantly decreased Customer Success and Implementation support calls, enabling admins to manage their districts more efficiently and accurately.
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​3. Restructured the logged-in homepage to increase user engagement and trial-to-subscription conversions. The previous page was crowded, confusing, and looked similar to the logged-out marketing-focused homepage, leaving users unsure where to begin. My team analyzed search behavior and user feedback to identify the most sought-after resources, and used this data to inform a streamlined, personalized layout. We decluttered the interface, highlighted relevant resources, included grade-level book sections, and introduced a seasonal “Plan Ahead” section. Collaboration with product, marketing, and content teams, along with usability testing, ensured alignment between user needs and business goals. The redesign drove a 25% lift in trial conversions, increased engagement with key resources, and demonstrated the impact of using data-driven insights to guide the user experience.
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Design Systems & Personas
VP Product Experience
I led the UX team that created our company’s first comprehensive UX and UI design system, establishing a consistent, user-centered framework that unified experiences across all products and improved quality, speed, and accessibility. The system provided a single source of truth for patterns, components, design standards, and guidelines, formalizing our methodology and ensuring every experience aligned with our brand values.
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The design system included pattern libraries, reusable components, a detailed style guide, accessibility standards, and functional guidance, making our products easier to build and use. It ensured experiences were intuitive for teachers, engaging for students, and supportive of the people-centric values that define our brand.
As part of this initiative, the UX team also developed research-based personas for teachers, students, and administrators. Through user interviews, analytics, and collaboration with internal experts, we created authoritative profiles that guided product decisions, ensuring our patterns, components, and design choices consistently met the needs of more than 10 million students and hundreds of thousands of educators worldwide.
Typography is more than a detail
VP Product Experience
Teaching children to read is as much a design challenge as an instructional one. Early readers rely on clear visual cues like distinct letterforms, open shapes, and consistent spacing to decode text, so our standards for legibility and readability were high. No imposter or mirror characters, easily distinguishable shapes, and letterforms that support how young learners scan words were essential.
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No existing children’s typefaces met all these needs. Some conflicted with best practices, others raised accessibility concerns, and many imposed licensing restrictions. Even the most promising options fell short of our instructional criteria.
We selected a strong open-source typeface and rebuilt it from the inside out, working with international typography experts and our Learning Design and Content teams to modify every character. The result is a custom font that is larger, more open, and more approachable, improving clarity for all learners, including those with low vision or dyslexia, while giving us full ownership and long-term flexibility.
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While not a large-scale enterprise initiative, this project shows how small design decisions and careful attention to detail can make a meaningful difference for diverse user needs.
Writing A-Z
VP Product Management & UX
Helping young learners become confident writers is essential to literacy success. Students need explicit instruction, clear models, and meaningful practice to communicate effectively. Writing A-Z provides teachers with the tools to build these skills, whether following the full scope and sequence or supplementing their core curriculum.
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I played a central leadership role in guiding Writing A-Z from concept to launch, leading the user experience, visual design, and product management teams. Our work made rigorous, evidence-based writing instruction approachable for teachers while offering engaging practice opportunities for students to develop essential writing and grammar skills.
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A key innovation is WaLT, our patented digital writing notebook, which allows students in grades 2–5 to complete the full writing process digitally. Teachers can model writing in the same interface students use, creating a shared, authentic learning experience. WaLT was designed through extensive market research and teacher interviews to meet real classroom needs.
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The solution includes explicit lesson plans, standards-aligned materials, genre-based units, interactive practice, and embedded professional development, enabling teachers to instruct with confidence. Writing A-Z has earned consecutive CODiE Awards for Best English Language Arts Instructional Solution for Grades PK–8.
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Writing A-Z demonstrates how purposeful design, strong pedagogy, and clear product vision can elevate teaching and learning, empowering educators and inspiring young writers.​
