About the project

BoomWriter is a multi-million dollar award-winning writing application that allows educators to conduct in-classroom and remote learning assignments and activities with their students. This multi-platform, collaborative tool inspires students to write on any subject including ELA, Social Studies/History, Science and even Math. The platform currently has over 350,000 assignments and over 40,000 active writers in 30 countries.

I joined BoomWriter as a Senior Product Designer at a critical time where the company was needing to do a major redesign and re-structure of the entire application for both desktop, tablet and mobile. The main focus consisted of enhancing customer experience throughout the entire application both on the customer-facing component to increase conversion and also on the backend interface to ensure an optimized user journey for teachers, parents and students.

Industry:

Education-Technology

Role:

Senior Product Designer

Platforms:

Desktop, Mobile & Tablet

Mark Stephan

Head of Product & User Experience
BoomWriter

Recommendation

I hired, managed and worked with William at BoomWriter working on a complete platform redesign. This wasn’t a simple design and reskin, rather it was a complete rethink of the user experience. William did an amazing job at this, first working with me side by side digging into user research, and user interviews, William gained not only insights to make the product better, but a deep empathy for the user that served him throughout the redesign. I was impressed with William’s passion to get it right. I was very impressed with him. When some designers would just throw up a pretty design, William made certain to dig deep to understand not only the business, industry, and user needs, but he also dug deeper watching user sessions and creating multiple designs and passing them by me and the rest of the team to see what we thought. William was such a pleasure to work with, bringing well-thought-out ideas, that I gave him autonomy and the ability even to overrule me, with data. Every iteration of William’s was more amazing than the previous and he is always striving to improve himself. Often William would come with an idea that completely rethought an aspect of the product that simplified, made it look better, and would take less time to develop. It was moments like these where William really shined.

 

In summary, William is amazing! He’s an amazing person who is so easy to work with. He’s one amazing designer and certainly one of the best ones I have worked with, which are many. If he ever decides to leave BoomWriter (we hope not!), I highly recommend anyone looking for a top-notch designer to snatch him up.

The Process

Discovery

Since the BoomWriter platform was already existing, it was very necessary to scope out the redesign project into comprehendible milestones that aligned with inter-team dependencies before I hit the ground running. This project scope was set in line with business deadlines and pre-set launch dates.

To begin, I audited the entire teacher-student platform to obtain an in-depth understanding of the current application, it’s strengths and it’s weaknesses. I also performed competitor analysis during this stage to for better placement of what is currently working in the education industry and where we are looking to create solutions.

 

Application Map — Results of the Audit

The Application Map unearthed a few issues that needed resolving. Our current product structure segmented the platform into three parts, namely: StoryWriter, WordWriter and ProjectWriter. The core functionality of the entire platform remained the same — getting students to write more and enjoy writing. Though the product segmentation was beneficial at one point in the lifetime of the application, it was becoming more confusing to teachers based on previously conducted research as to which application would serve their students better and for brand consistency and marketing.

I presented the map to the team to synthesize my findings and discuss full app functionality, business goals and milestones.

Student Application before the redesign and update.

User Journey — Results from the Audit

Research

Prior to my joining, the incredible team had previously implemented in-browser user tracking tools that generated a wealth of research information. Nonetheless, to begin feature scoping, the team and I conducted remote research with some of our users (teachers in this case). With the approval and assistance of the Product Manager, we were able to set up in-person, moderated research sessions with some teachers from Texas and remote sessions with out of state and international teachers.

The remote sessions (via Zoom) were recorded and processed through a collaborative audio transcription tool (Temi) which allowed me to highlight and extract relevant findings to be shared with the Product team. Teachers also walked us through some typical project creation steps via screen-share to shed some light on problem areas within the live application. The total hours of research conducted surpassed 120 hours.

Synthesis

The dark room process of synthesizing the large amount of data that has been accumulated so far began. Collaborative tools like Invision, Slack and Temi allowed the product team to work closely on identifying user needs and experience gaps in a well organized manner that made sense.

Design

Several brainstorming sessions later, I begun ideating, sketching and white-boarding possible solution concepts. The next step was converting these concepts to wireframes for review. I maintained the current multi-app segmentation while creating a consistent and interchangeable experience across all three applications in preparation for a future single application experience. User satisfaction during migration and brand integrity were critical at this point.

– Teacher Dashboard

Wireframes
Menu Concepts and Color Options
Menu Concepts and Color Options
Teacher Dashboard Final Selection
Glimpse of hi-fi mocks. Over 100 artboards designed.
Student App, Hi-fi mockups
Student App, Hi-fi Comps (Over 90 artboards created)

Result: Grew User Sign-ups 8x.

The BoomWriter writing platform currently has over 350,000 activities and over 40,000 active writers in 30 countries.

 

 

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