NoRedInk

NoRedInk is a web app designed to help students learn grammar and writing skills. It offers a variety of activities and curriculum, and is used by both teachers and students.

A big part of the teacher experience is creating assignments. Across several different projects, I designed ways for teacher to browse and create work for their students. As NoRedInk added features, we overhauled the site several times to accommodate them, balancing depth and complexity with immediacy and simplicity.

At NoRedInk, projects would arise both from company needs and initiatives, as well as feedback we heard from users. Once in the design phase, we always iterated on our work based on both internal discussions and interviews and usability testing with our users.

When a teacher signs up for NoRedInk, there are a few bits of information to collect and some tasks that we thought a first-time user should complete in order to get comfortable with the site. To that end, I designed a "set up" flow, taking teacher through the process of setting up their account, including finding their school and creating classes.

I also designed an onboarding checklist for teachers that introduces them to different areas and functions of the site. The specific items on this list were tested and changed as we saw how they contributed toward continued use of the site.

In addition to common teacher flows, I've worked on overhauls of several more standalone components of the teacher experience. I designed improved experiences for existing pages/features like the dashboard, gradebook, and student management, examining pain points with the existing experiences and devising more useful, intuitive replacements.

I also designed new pages that added functionality to the site, such as a page allowing access to training materials and a tool to make it easy to refer colleagues to the site.

In addition to common teacher flows, I've worked on overhauls of several more standalone components of the teacher experience. I designed improved experiences for existing pages/features like the dashboard, gradebook, and student management, examining pain points with the existing experiences and devising more useful, intuitive replacements.

I also designed new pages that added functionality to the site, such as a page allowing access to training materials and a tool to make it easy to refer colleagues to the site.

In addition to common teacher flows, I've worked on overhauls of several more standalone components of the teacher experience. I designed improved experiences for existing pages/features like the dashboard, gradebook, and student management, examining pain points with the existing experiences and devising more useful, intuitive replacements.

I also designed new pages that added functionality to the site, such as a page allowing access to training materials and a tool to make it easy to refer colleagues to the site.

While I've been at NoRedInk, I've helped enhance our existing assignment type for students (practice), and designed three new assignments: quick writes, guided drafts, and self reviews. Practice was redesigned to be less frustrating and more fun. Quick writes allow teachers to easily assign a prompt for students to write on. Guided drafts are a more intensive assignment that provide students with lessons, tutorials, and tips as they write. Self review leads students through a series of questions about their essay, and then ask them to make revisions based on their answers.

All my work on the student side was based on extensive interviewing, prototyping, and testing with both students and teachers to ensure an educational yet intuitive and rewarding experience.

In addition to my primary duties as a UX designer at LOYAL3, I took it upon myself to improve our marketing web site and help center.

After mocking up a few ideas to show the benefits of a new home page design, I secured the interest of my product manager and CEO of. In partnership with them, I redesigned our home page and sales page to better portray the company's mission and benefits, and provide a consistent and attractive visual theme. I then independently extended the design update to the rest of our marketing pages, implementing them myself in HTML and responsive CSS.

The messy and unorganized state of our help center also caught my eye, so in collaboration with our support team, I undertook a reorganization and redesign, placing help articles into categories to make them easier to find and applying a visual theme consistent with the rest of the site.

Working with another designer, I developed a style guide that included both components and interaction patterns. We then implemented the style guide throughout the site by working with our engineers and through my own frontend development efforts.

My frontend work extended to making much of the site responsive, including the student experience, so that students could easily do their work on a phone.

Working with another designer, I developed a style guide that included both components and interaction patterns. We then implemented the style guide throughout the site by working with our engineers and through my own frontend development efforts.

My frontend work extended to making much of the site responsive, including the student experience, so that students could easily do their work on a phone.

When students on NoRedInk need help, they can consult a lesson on whatever skill they're working on. For many years, these lessons were created by the Curriculum team in Omnigraffle and exported as images. This made them unattractive, inconsistent, and inaccessible. I realized that there might be a better way and began developing HTML templates for the team to use instead.

I developed a CSS stylesheet and used it to recreate several existing lessons. I introduced the team to the idea, making it more palatable by finding them an HTML IDE with real-time updating, and they were immediately enthusiastic and took to HTML like fish to water. They began producing attractive, consistent lessons in no time.

Eventually, some of the engineers began to take notice and we were able to work together to get the new lessons implemented throughout the site as actual HTML. I have since continued to work with Curriculum to expand the repertoire of lesson styles as needs arise.

As part of my work at NoRedInk, I sometimes helped craft interfaces for employees to manage and edit certain things on the site. These projects ranged from items of necessity, to experiments by the engineering team, to speculative projects designed by me but not developed. Always unpolished and often incomplete, these interfaces were nevertheless a lot of fun to work on for both their complexity and the fact that they often made my coworkers' lives easier.