Ben
Dansby.

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 internal and external feedback, we iterated on multiple areas of the feature to be 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 accommodating all the content, I strove to make finding and assigning assignments 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: it not only entered us into a highly dynamic, important space, it also proved instrumental in advancing the core mission of the company.

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

Through thoughtful design and smart use of emerging technology, we increased both the amount of writing teachers assigned and the quality of feedback students received, both metrics central to NoRedInk's mission.

NoRedInk has numerous internal tools to manage the content available on the site. One project focused on a content bundling tool for our Curricuum team. 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. Curriculum team members reported a doubling of efficiency with this tool.

Other internal tools I worked on included a template builder for grammar questions, a collaborative editor for curricular content, and a tool for understanding question distribution.

I built this financial planning tool as a vibe-coding exercise: a fast, self-directed prototype that combines product design, front-end development, and lightweight financial modeling in one interactive experience. The app lets users explore retirement scenarios through live controls for taxes, Social Security, spending, investment returns, healthcare, rent, and life expectancy, with instant visual feedback through charts and scenario calculators.

What began as an experiment in building quickly became a lesson in shaping complexity into something clear and usable. I focused on making the interface feel polished, responsive, and approachable, proving that even a compact prototype can deliver real depth, strong UX decisions, and a clear product point of view.

C'est is a native macOS app for working with CSS stylesheets visually. Instead of reading raw text, every ruleset becomes a draggable node on a canvas, making it easy to scan structure, spot relationships, and edit properties without losing context.

I built the entire app in Swift and SwiftUI as a vibe-coding exercise, solving real engineering challenges along the way: a custom CSS parser, live resolution of CSS custom properties, an undo/redo stack, and a property editor with color pickers, autocomplete, and inline controls for typography and spacing.

The result is a tool that makes CSS feel spatial and editable, somewhere between a design tool and a code editor.

NEXTLAW is Dentons' global law firm referral network, connecting member firms across jurisdictions so attorneys can find the right local counsel and refer matters with confidence. I designed the product from scratch, establishing the visual language, interaction patterns, and information architecture starting from a blank canvas.

The product spans a faceted firm directory, rich firm profiles with referral history and contact management, a guided multi-step onboarding wizard for new member firms, a membership application flow, and administrative tooling for both firm-level admins and network operators.

I built a shared HTML/CSS design system as the foundation, standardizing color, typography, and spacing across every surface, and delivered every screen as a high-fidelity coded prototype the engineering team could reference directly.

Cicare is a hospital operations platform centered on the human side of care delivery: helping staff run consistent rounds, document service recovery moments, and reinforce communication standards across departments.

I framed the experience around speed, clarity, and accountability. Templates give teams a reusable starting point, the rounding calendar makes participation easy to understand at a glance, and structured observation screens turn soft skills into something teams can coach and improve together.

The result is a system that feels orderly without feeling cold, giving managers and frontline staff a shared tool for keeping patient-facing interactions thoughtful, trackable, and repeatable.

On LOYAL3, everyday investors could occasionally invest in IPOs at the same price and time as Wall Street. Across web and mobile, I designed the end-to-end IPO experience, including enrollment and management of IPO reservations. Working closely with the legal and compliance team, I made an effort to satisfy every requirement of this highly regulated space while keeping the process as streamlined as possible for users.

I also designed the internal admin tool for setting up and deploying IPO offers. Based on observation of the pains of offer setup without a dedicated GUI and through discussions with product managers, I designed a simple, step-by-step application for offer administration.