What at first seemed like an interesting UI/UX position in an IT company with offices in Slovenia turned from just designing for web to me completely turning the look of this company internally and externally in the past year or more.

Working closely with the product owner, marketing team, customer success, QA and devs, I could be describe my role in a number of ways, from UX researcher, product designer, UI/UX designer, product design lead, graphic web and print designer, creative director, customer experience (CX) designer, web designer, product design lead … In this fast paced agile work environment I might as well be called a design solution Superbanana :).

About the company

This California-based EdTech company provides a complete school student safety solution, combined with content filtering on their devices (so they can eliminate the bad content on kids’ screens) and an advanced classroom management interface for effective 1:1 teacher-student communication. Their solutions include interfaces for the whole school environment from system administrators of school districts to principals, teachers, students and event parents on multi-OS web and mobile devices.

My work

My work for this company grew from working closely with the marketing team, SEO and analytics, customer success team, user experience design, to completely redesigning the company’s logo, brand identity, including graphic materials and a design repository, to creating a design system, complete website redesign (in progress) and UI/UX design for 4 dashboards and 3 mobile apps for mainly 4 target personas and the end user – the K-12 student.

Research

First, I had to get to know the company and made a bunch of research within definition of user flows, journeys, defining personas in Miro with the current designer. Getting to know this whole new market to me was a journey itself, since the one-on-one solutions in K-12 school districts for keeping student safe online were quite new to me.

UI/UX for 4 dashboards and 3 mobile apps

With new features on dashboards for IT admins, delegates and teachers, there came tasks of designing solutions, considering the end users and current user flows for web and mobile apps, having in mind the value that a feature brings to the end user, combined with consistent design. So I also did quite a lot of analysis of the current solutions and how they’re handled from the developer’s side.

Using Adobe XD and Figma, I designed mockups and prototypes to be able to present and test solutions before delivering the final results to developers after the product owner’s approval in an agile work environment using Scrum Sprints in Jira.

Website redesign

For redesign of the website that was currently not fully aligned with what a user would want to see, I worked on creating a prototype for a new, redesigned website, while at the same time tweaking the current one and creating mockups and prototypes for marketing landing pages. My work included:

• analysing user flows and journeys for different user personas (partners, customers, non-customers)
• creating flows and solutions for marketing landing pages and customer success pages
• collect analytics, SEO, marketing, sales, customer success input
• analyse current website structure and re-create a repository of pages for better informational structure
• creating a design system
• creating low- and high-fidelity mockups (in progress)

Logo design and brand identity system

While designing some merchandise in between for the marketing team, I designed a T-shirt that gained so much good feedback on trade shows that the CEO decided this should be the company’s new logo. It reflected the company’s brand identity so I’ve managed all the transition from the old identity to creation of new repositories and a system so that the new identity usage could be consistent:

• Logo design
• Brand identity design system
• Guide and plan the redesign transition on various internal and external channels
• Aligning the whole 50+ people team and handoff of pre-defined templates and graphics for further use

The logo represents two hands, facing upward to an open book, which reflects the mission and vision to keep students safe in their learning environment.

Social media and marketing graphics

Consistency and innovation were the two main guides that I wanted to follow to create a distinguishing corporate look-and-feel, but at the same time create imagery that would address the specific personas in this USA market of school IT administrators, delegates and teachers.

• Creating a consistent and corporate look and feel in graphics
• Aligning the whole team with the guidelines
• Graphics for lead generation (e-mail marketing)
• T-shirts
• Goodies
• Raffles
• Brochures, data sheets …

The goal: to stand out from the competition, gain credibility and invite new potential clients.

Designing trade show material

As a chief designer, I was also asked to design a 6x3m booth for trade show presence and an amount of trade show back walls, banners, tables and promotional material to keep the visuals on the same level.

Systematisation of work processes

For being able to effectively track work load, work flows, people and tasks, I created numerous documents to guide the whole team and align with focus on delivering the most important tasks first and on time, even before we had the agile Sprint planning system for better task management and transparency.

Conclusion

With all work done on-site with part of the team in EU and most in USA time zones, working in this fast-paced environment, I am happy to have gained an enormous amount of experience while learning about how EdTech solutions can keep kids in school safe from harmful behaviour like cyberbullying, threats and suicides.