QuantHub Learner Experience
QuantHub is a B2C and B2B2C provider of online learning materials, activities, tests, and accreditations, specializing in teaching AI and technology tools to K-12, higher education, and corporate training audiences.
I wholly redesigned the navigation UI and component styling for their learning application, working intensively with our product team and the team making the learning materials to make sure the content was presented as well as it could be. That was a big ask. The new designs had to accommodate a wide variety of learning materials featuring all different kinds of media, and they had to scale from a lower-education audience all the way to industry professionals without feeling like two different products. The new design also needed to look good and promote the application from a sales and demo perspective.
The new design needed compatibility with all major LMS systems, mobile devices, and the wide variety of hardware and managed devices you see in education and industry. It also needed to be instrumented for analytics and to gather user sentiment, so we could keep a finger on how learners were actually experiencing the product. That sentiment put the interface at 70–80% favorability, which is very high, especially for K-12.
Simplifying LTI
I redesigned and completely reflowed the LTI integration workflow that teachers use to set up their classes and connect QuantHub to Blackboard and other LMS platforms. The existing process brought together several different systems and required teachers to navigate a fairly complicated series of steps just to get their classes set up and start using our learning materials. I worked to bring those systems together into a single, much clearer experience, while greatly improving the interface and reducing the number of clicks required to complete mandatory actions.
This was an especially important part of the QuantHub experience because it was often the first real interaction teachers had with the platform. If setting up a class, rostering students, or adding QuantHub activities was difficult, there was a very real chance teachers simply wouldn't use the platform. That could ultimately affect whether a school continued to purchase our offerings. The redesign was therefore about more than making the workflow look better; it was about removing one of the biggest barriers to getting teachers and schools successfully onto the platform.
Meazure Learning's Responsivity and Accessibility Redesign
Meazure Learning is an end-to-end online proctoring and testing platform provider that helps academic students and career professionals take exams and assessments from their homes. With today's heavy emphasis on accessibility and interoperability, the front end of the platform needed to become responsive and accessible. In addition, the platform needed a significant overhaul to many of its functions and components to declutter and provide an intuitive interface for a wide variety of users.
This was no small task; the platform had existed for over a decade as a continuously iterated-upon product with legacy requirements and quite a few skeletons in its closet. To that end, we embarked on a lengthy journey to assess user pain points, scope the full need for accessibility (full WCAG 2.2 compliance), and fulfill users' needs regardless of the device they had access to. Along the way we rebased and refactored the front end of the platform, adopted a new design standard, and implemented a newly improved component library.
By the end of the research, design, development, and testing process, the platform was WCAG certified, wholly responsive, and rebranded to fit within the modern company identity (it performed better too!).
Examity’s Test Taker Flow Overhaul
Examity provided an extension-based testing security solution that connected users to their own test providers' platform while monitoring device and real-life security issues to help maintain academic integrity. It gave users the ability to schedule, purchase, and launch exams from within its authenticated web app.
The platform had grown significantly over the preceding years and had incorporated quite a few new technologies and features, but needed a significant overhaul to incorporate those features organically in a way that delighted users and provided positive results for Examity’s clients.
With those core needs in mind, a notable portion of my time spent at Examity was spent researching, designing, and guiding the iterative upgrade process that would allow the platform to shine.
One of the key elements of the overhaul was the need to introduce vibrancy, boldness, and fun to the UX of Examity. Academic and professional testing is a stressful process. No one likes taking exams! A core finding of our research was that a good testing experience is a stress-free experience, and creating a set of interfaces that provide maximum visual clarity while also being charming helps reduce the friction users feel while they navigate through the test-taking process.
My designs reduced the mono-color and text-heavy nature of the original platform while introducing a consistent brand-driven color theory and a defined set of standards for the use of imagery, animations, and iconography. Clients and users alike responded strongly to the redesign, and we followed it up with similar visual and thematic overhauls to other Examity products.
Sequoia Redesign
The Sequoia system is a large SaaS platform that allows real estate brokerages of any size to have and maintain a performant, reliable, and good-looking web presence that not only surfaces their inventory but also has deep marketing integrations and personnel management. It's a top-to-bottom, full-service system for getting a brand online to the fullest capacity.
The platform is fully customizable across content, imagery, fonts, colors, themes, and components, with a Google Material-like card system and a hierarchy of inheritance that makes fully customizing a business web platform from scratch with over fifty unique pages take minutes.
How do you develop a system that allows for fully custom content without overwhelming an audience traditionally outside of the technology space? And how do you do it in an age where designs have to respond to many different devices and input methods? This was a big ask, and we worked with customers and through multiple stages of design to find the best solution. Systems like Squarespace had a piece of the puzzle but are far too complex for a lay audience.
In the end, a hybrid design of internally produced layout templates, user-chosen card components, and a development focus on extensible, structured coding practices that could keep it all together proved to be the best route forward.
