Ben Dansby, product designer

Benchmarks allow school districts to administer district-wide assessments in both grammar and writing skills. District admins can administer multiple Benchmarks and compare them to assess growth.

I worked with our Enterprise and district-facing Customer Success teams to understand the needs of districts in assessing and tracking student growth. I then led the design of the flows for creating Benchmarks, monitoring their progress, and viewing and comparing results.

In the resulting designs, we sought to balance flexibility and richness of data with usability. Based on both internal and external feedback, we iterated on multiple areas of the feature to be both more streamlined and more useful in order to improve both usage rates and outcomes.

The Assignment Library is where teachers go to find content on NoRedInk to assign to their students. I worked on multiple redesigns of this vital part of the site as shifting company priorities and the expanding content available necessitated new information architectures and layouts.

Some of the key areas I worked on were the design of the home page portal, the development of a new content grouping, the area where teachers can view content aligned to their state standards, the selections of writing prompts, and the search function.

Beyond accomodating all the content, I strove to make finding and assigning assigments as easy and frictionless as possible so as to ensure not only a good user experience but also high assignment creation conversion rates, the lifeblood of the product's success.

I was the founding designer of NoRedInk's very first AI feature, called Grading Assistant. This was a watershed release for the company, as it not only entried us into a highly dynamic, important space, it also proved instrumental in advancing the core mission of the company. I was a key participant in the feature's lifecyle, going from early ideation to shipping concern and follow-up iteration.

I also worked on a feature that allows teachers to view what text their students have pasted in writing submissions. I both proposed this feature as a response to plagiarism and AI abuse and designed it in a way to seamlessly incorporate into our existing pages. I incorporated this and other data into an updated dashboard that gives teachers a quick overview of where all their students stand on a writing submission.

These features both embraced the emerging possibilities of AI in the ELA market while acknowleding their downsides and helping teachers navigate the new world forming around them. Through thoughtful design and smart use of emerging technology, we increased both the amount of writing teachers assigned their students and the quality of feedback students received on that writing, metrics central to NoRedInk’s raison d'être.

NoRedInk has numerous internal tools to manage the content available on the site. These range from spreadsheets on one end to a fully developed application on the other. As our content offering expanded and the number of states and standards we supported increased, the massive spreadsheet our Curriculum team used to manage those standards reached its breaking point.

I worked with our Curriculum team to design an application that would allow them to easily view, edit, and reuse content in the form of "bundles," eliminating the need to track content individually at a massive scale. This enabled our team to support more customers with quicker, less error-prone turnaround.

Usage Reports allow district admins to view data about how and how much their schools and teachers are using NoRedInk. Working with our Enterprise and Customer Success teams to find out the kinds of data our customers were interested in (and that we could provide), I structured and designed a page that incorporates numerous tables, charts, and visualizations that give insights to admins on NoRedInk usage.

In designing the page, I sought to elevate the information most important to admins and provide both a density and clarity of information display. Color-coded symbols and convenient controls allow users to understand and manipulate data quickly. These reports are vital to district adoption and retention, and my work here in maintaining and updating them was crucial for customer renewals.

On NoRedInk, teachers can create and sync classes, add and edit students, manage student access, and control which co-teachers have access to which classes.In addition to originating the page and its function within the site, I designed its primary layout, and worked new features into it as customer and company needs arose.

Notable projects I worked on include the addition of new syncing services, improved student management, changing to a class-centric co-teaching model, and new password security requirements. These additions eased friction in our onboarding of teachers and opened up new customer bases, increasing usage of the product and leading to upsells.

I made major contributions to or designed from the ground up several pages that define the teacher experience and information architecture. On the teacher dashboard, I conceived and designed the "class activity" feature, allowing teachers to view key data about their classes and jump directly to relevant content all from a single page. The dashboard links directly to the My Assignments page, which houses all the assignments for a given class. Here, in addition to designing features that allow sharing of assignments and viewing answer keys, I made major improvements to the overall look and feel.

Other teacher pages that I designed from scratch include the Gradebook and Mastery, allowing teachers to view and filter data about their students, as well as the Training page, giving teachers access to training materials. All these changes and improvements drove user satisfaction with the product, increasing NPS scores, return rates, stickiness, and, ultimately, sales.

I made numerous contributions to pages that allow both normal users and districts to change settings and set preferences for their own accounts as well as for schools themselves.

I took the initiative to propose a new design for the Account Settings section of the site, as the original page had been stretched beyond its limit due to the addition of new functionality over the years. I worked with Product Management and Engineering to get this implemented and subsequently expanded it with additions as new feature needs arose. This made expanding the feature set of the site easier and more flexible as well allowing for more intuitive flows for users.

Working with our Enterprise team, I totally revamped our Admin Tools section, elevating it to a first class section of the site. Tools that allow admins to view data and make district-wide customizations live alongside our marquee Benchmark features. My work here increased the attractiveness of the offering to districts and increased stickiness.

As part of both an accessibility push as well as a move into the elementary school market, I was tasked with coming up with easier to use, more accessible pages in areas such as the student dashboard, the learning library, and the page where students select their interests.

For the designs, I strove to eliminate extraneous elements for maximum clarity, use bold colors for clear differentiation, and take special care to define the keyboard interaction and screen announcements. These changes not only made the site easier to use for both young students and those with disabiities, it also fulfilled criteria for schools and districts to use us in more markets, increasing NoRedInk's reach.