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.

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, brand designer, customer experience (CX) designer and web designer.

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 for (in big part) USA schools. Their solutions includes 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 after working closely with the PO, marketing team, SEO, copywriters, growth, customer success and product team, led to a set of different deliverables to several teams.

From working on the website redesign and designing features’ UI/UX for 4 dashboards and 3 mobile apps for mainly 4 target personas and the end user – the K-12 student, I also redesigned the company’s logo, brand identity, including  graphic materials. I created a design repository and design systems for solutions that are serving mainly 4 target personas and the end user – the K-12 student.

Research

First, I had to get to know the company and made tons of research within definition of personas, user flows, and journeys in Miro. 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.

But most of all, after defining personas and user flows, the whole product, marketing and development teams gained tons of valuable info about who we are addressing and whose problems we are solving and how we might make that in the best possible way. While having the company teams spread across the world, this was a huge breakthrough for company operations.

From UI/UX for 4 dashboards and 3 mobile apps to product design

With new features requests on dashboards for IT admins, delegates and teachers, I worked on designing solutions, considering the end users and current user flows for web and mobile apps, having in mind the value that a feature will bring to the end user, combined with consistent design. I did quite a lot of analysis of the current solutions and how they’re handled and solved from the developer’s side and how users use the interface to be able to continue providing the same experience or enhance it, where possible.

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

I worked on planning and designing new features and also finding solutions to enhance the existing user experience (UX). At least two of all features that I worked on were incorporating custom AI tools into current dashboards and  enhanced dashboards’ usability – the overall classroom experience on the teacher/student dashboard and the back part of whole solution ecosystem – the admin and delegate dashboards.

I worked on features that enable:

• Worldwide school IT administrators to better manage school policies and filters on school-owned devices to prevent harmful online behavior, manage and track school inventory or lost/stolen devices
• Enable IT admins to set limits of what kind of online student behavior could be considered a threat and enable a proactive approach to deal with the situation on highly scalable levels (notifying parents, school authorities, police)
• Enable IT admins and delegates to immediately detect any signs of threats in school by monitoring all online behavior
• Enable IT admins to see which parents are involved in the process of maintaining a safe digital environment for their kids
• Enabling teachers to better manage their online classes, have a thorough view of what each student is doing and if he’s on track with the rest of the class
• Enabling teachers to better communicate and assist students through various channels

Additional to new features, I also worked enhancing the overall product experience by simultaneously designing better 404 pages, subscription limit reached messages, account expiration notifications and error pages. During my investigations, I found those to be significant for better user onboarding and a more pleasant user experience.

I like to look at the products wider, how they are used, who uses them and what’s the overall experience of any kind of communication with the company’s products. Therefore, working with the PO, product marketer, the QA team and developers was my everyday routine.

The design system

After some months of working on solutions for new dashboard features, I stumbled upon a glitch in the design-to-development process. Developers were lacking a central database of primary and secondary brand colours, typography and clear guidelines to be able to develop a feature inside existing layout without me having 50+ micro tasks on my table.

Therefore I created a design system where they could easily found all the necessary info.

Beside that, the design system will be very useful in future for rewriting of the code for the product. This will enable developers to consistently develop and implement UI elements such as buttons, colours and fonts throughout the whole range of products.

I’ve defined all main components and variables with clear instructions for further usage in the development process.

Website redesign

During all time, I was quite connected to the marketing team, working on landing pages for webinars, podcast series, but mainly I was focused on a new design for the company’s website that would better reflect the company’s solutions.

I’ve created a prototype for a new, redesigned website, while at the same time creating mockups and prototypes for several event 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 with components for the website
• Creating low- and high-fidelity mockups (sorry, I cannot share high-fid here)
• Working on information architecture, creating a sitemap and crawling through existing pages, planning for website redesign process

Within the ability to see the bigger picture, I’ve managed to create backups of existing inventories that led to better handling of missing pages or code.

Logo design and brand identity system

While designing some merchandise in between for the marketing team, I designed a motif for a T-shirt that raised a lot of attention on trade shows from the visitors’ side, so the CEO decided this should be the company’s new logo. It reflected the company’s brand identity (the story behind the company’s mission and vision). My work includes:

• Logo design
• Brand identity design system
• Guide and plan the redesign transition on numerous internal and external channels
• Aligning the whole 60+ people team and handoff of pre-defined templates and graphics for further use

So during a few months, we’ve managed to execute all the transition from the old logo to creation of new repositories and a design system so that the new identity usage could be consistent.

The logo itself 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 product 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. My work includes:

• 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 design and goodies (merchandise)
• Raffles, podcasts and webinars design (webpage, socials, email marketing…)
• Brochures, flyers, data sheets,…

The goal: to stand out from the competition, create a unique company voice, gain credibility with consistency 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 quite an amount of trade show back walls, banners, tables and promotional material to keep the visuals on the same level. My focus was on driving a unique brand voice throughout the whole batch of company assets – physical and digital.

Systematisation of work processes

For being able to effectively track workload, work flows, people and tasks throughout all teams, 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

The value I see in this collaboration was creating a better world for the whole school ecosystem, from IT administrators, to principals, teachers and their dashboards, students and also parents as a vital element for keeping and maintaining a safe environment for kids.

With all work done on-site with part of the team in EU and most in US 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 shootings, cyberbullying, threats and suicides.