Visual Design / UX / User Research

Providing K - 12 teachers with a full-year English curriculum solution.

Brought in as the company’s first ever UX & Product Designer, I established our process and used it to lead CommonLit through the launch of its first paid SaaS product.   This new product laid the groundwork for the company’s first major redesign and multiple subsequent iterations that would more than double the site’s revenue.

Background

CommonLit started as a haven for busy teachers. It was a treasure trove of individual English lessons, perfect for plugging a last-minute hole in the schedule or providing a sick-day activity. But as the platform boomed, so did the needs of educators. CommonLit became a cluttered library, lacking the structure to support a well-rounded curriculum.

Enter CommonLit 360 Curriculum. This wasn't just a new product; it was a complete overhaul designed to empower teachers, especially those new to the profession. We envisioned CommonLit 360 as a one-stop shop, offering a year-long English curriculum for grades 6-12

MY ROLE:

I led the design strategy, user research, visual and experience design for the end-to-end project to launch the 360 product.

Team

Product Managers (2)

Engineers (4)

Cross-company collaborators:

I collaborated with the Marketing Team for our rollout strategy, and with the Curriculum Team for Lesson & Unit structures.

Project Time:

4 months

My mission? To design the 360 experience. It wasn't just about creating a new product, it was about transforming CommonLit's image. We wanted teachers to see CommonLit not as a resource repository, but as the go-to platform for delivering engaging, research-backed lessons in their classrooms.

The Research

The problem wasn't a lack of content – it was a lack of flow. Teachers had no clear path to navigate the platform. Assigning a lesson often felt like a disjointed experience, with no easy transition to the student view.

These issues became my design challenge. Building CommonLit 360, I knew I had to create a solution that not only showcased the platform's richness but also guided teachers on a clear path to success. Thankfully, leadership recognized the need for change, and I had their buy-in to use 360 as the foundation for the next iteration of CommonLit.

The Library page was the focal point of the platform, leading teacher-users to think of CommonLit only as a supplemental lessons resource.

Our Approach

Armed with the intel from my teacher interviews and shadowing sessions, I returned to the team. It was time to chart a new course for 360. We embarked on a journey mapping exercise, piecing together the user experience. This collaborative effort solidified our understanding of the navigational roadblocks teachers were facing.

Updated information architecture (doesn't include subpages)

Explorations

Building on a familiar foundation: We began with a core element teachers knew well - the lesson assigning flow from our existing app. This familiar structure allowed users to navigate within lessons and locate the teaching materials they needed for the day.

Design Details

I tackled designs in 3 phases: Teacher workflow, units display dashboard, and assigning experience.

Teacher Workflow

We approached 360 as not only a new core product but also as an opportunity to fundamentally redefine the mental models our research indicated users held of us. To achieve this, we needed to shift users away from the Library as their initial point of entry after logging into CommonLit. Instead, we aimed to create a Hub that would serve as the central starting point for teachers' tasks while also prominently showcasing valuable resources like our expanding Professional Development library and potential future products.

A new teacher hub to showcase all that CommonLit has to offer, including 360

Improvements to the Library 

Part of the scope of our work was to cascade some of the new design system components and branding elements onto legacy parts of the platform, such as the Library. I wanted us to be cognizant of scope-creep, so the engineers and I had long conversations about what might or might not be reasonable for us to tackle on other pages, in terms of improvements we could make. Acknowledging that leaving the Library unchanged might be jarring, considering it would now be sandwiched between the new Hub page and new products such as 360. So we went for low-lift changes that we could include.

We pulled in some component updates to the Library page as part of the work's scope

Units Display 

Effective classroom time planning hinges on teachers understanding the scope of the lessons they'll deliver. To address this need, I designed a Units page. This page allows teachers to easily scan and manage the curriculum, with the thematic organization providing an additional layer of clarity.

The 360 Units page provides teachers with an overview of what they will be teaching across the year for a grade level

Content Hierarchy

Designing the lessons page and assigning learning experiences was a highlight of this project. Collaborating closely with the Curriculum Team, we tackled the challenge of structuring units within 360. Previously, teachers often got frustrated navigating lessons. We knew the interaction had to be intuitive and familiar. After multiple iterations, I landed on a clear, tabular structure. This not only achieved our goal of easy navigation but also established a new design pattern for the system. This pattern can be leveraged to update other parts of the platform in the future.

Paper vs Digital

Despite the surge in educational technology, our research found that a significant 50% of our teacher users still print out lesson copies. This preference likely stems from various factors, including catering to the needs of students with diverse learning styles.

User Testing & Learning

I led testing for our new 360 experience with 12 educators ranging across different tiered school districts across the country.   We had the teachers complete a series of tasks as part of the testing.   Through this process, we were able to identify and quickly address usability issues and blockers.   It also led to a backlog of feature improvements that we could continue to work through.   

Insights from testing

We learned from our users that the solution for differentiating digital versus paper resources was not perfect.   Many users also wanted improvements to the assigning experience.   Although this wasn't part of the scope of the project, we felt it was relevant enough to make some low-lift improvements, that would address some of the more significant pain points.

Final Designs

KPIs & Outcomes

360 had a significant impact of moving CommonLit from being a nonprofit reliant on donations to becoming one self-sustained by revenue from its products.   The new product help CommonLit exceed its revenue targets each quarter.   And additionally, usability of the platform also increased with all the improvements my team and I had made.

NEXT UP