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.

I made major contributions to or designed from the ground up the teacher experience on NoRedInk, including its 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, where I launched features for sharing assignments and viewing answer keys, among other improvements.

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, and Manage Classes, facilitatting the adding, deleting, editng, and syncing of classes and students. All these changes drove user satisfaction with the product, increasing NPS scores, return rates, stickiness, and ultimately sales.

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.

At NoRedInk, I partnered with engineering to build and evolve our design system from the ground up. Starting from a small set of shared components and a basic visual theme, I expanded the system to support a broad range of product surfaces — introducing a more vibrant, accessible theme and formalizing core elementals such as typography, color, spacing, elevation, and iconography. I standardized measurements across the product and maintained a custom, consistently weighted icon set.

I played a central role in defining how the system scaled and was adopted. I worked with engineering to plan and execute the migration from bespoke components to standardized equivalents, established a versioning and release strategy to avoid breaking changes, and defined criteria for when an interface element warranted inclusion as a reusable component or pattern. I also maintained a strict 1:1 relationship between Figma libraries and production code, ensuring component APIs, variants, and customizable parameters stayed in sync. The result became the default foundation for all new product work.

This is a touch interface for remotely controlling underwater ROVs, submarines used to work on underwater oil equipment and explore the deep sea. Dissatisfied with their existing app, the client came to my team for a comprehensive redesign.

I worked with another designer and had many meetings with the client, including several onsite, to understand what the application did and the specific needs of this uncommon use case. We produced the information architecture for the entire interface, then created wireframes for all primary functions. Because of the application's unique purpose and the client's need for modularity, we had to invent or adapt a number of interaction patterns rather than assembling off-the-shelf components. After wireframes, a visual design was created, which I helped refine and extend.

Cicare is a concept for 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.