About the project

Working at Learning Ally

I joined Learning Ally as a UX strategist with a mission to enhance the user experience of the AudioBook Solution (ABS), the not-for-profit's flagship product serving over 2,300,000 students, 600,000 educators, and more than 23,000 schools. Despite encountering challenges such as constant restructuring and stability issues, my work aimed to align with the company's mission of increasing access to reading for students with dyslexia, disabilities, vision impairments, and more.

This case study focuses most on the overall strategy, but as an Experience Lead, I also tackled a backlog of requests such as implementing bulk editing features, refining search filters, and redesigning internal pages.

Getting My Bearings

To understand my plan of attack, I started with a UX audit, finding nearly 100 UX, usability, and accessibility opportunities in the time allotted for the audiobook solution. Because the findings could be overwhelming, I sought to uncover themes to make it easier to talk about these opportunities. As a result, the audit focused on ways to improve:

• Stability,

• Engagement, and

• Usability

I put these findings together and presented to the product team and leadership, adding tickets to the product team's JIRA backlog as well.

Back 2 School

When I joined Learning Ally, the back to school season was in full swing, a notoriously busy season for our educator users. I quickly learned it’s a time of stress at Learning Ally as well because the backend infrastructure wasn't built to handle year over year data, and to solve that, all of the student data gets reset to 0 instead of archived or saved. This means educators who do any work adding or assigning books before the reset will lose all that work. It also means there's no way to see a student's previous reading history.

I considered this to be a major design flaw, indicative of a product driven by technical constraints or internal requests, rather than the needs and behaviors of its users.

I decided to conduct a qualitative and quantitative survey of educators to learn about their day to day, pain points, and perceptions of using the audiobook solutions tool during the back to school period. This would help me get a pulse on perceptions and opportunities, as well as starting benchmarks for the next year.

To find connections, I created an affinity diagram using the 300+ qualitative responses I received. With that, and an analysis of the quantitative survey questions, I pulled out important themes and quotes for a report and presentation, which I delivered to department heads and leadership to help foster empathy about educators during this busy time period.

The internal consensus within Learning Ally was that educators would be furious with the tool due to all of the pain points, and while there were definitely pain points, educators were mostly positive about Learning Ally.

But what was very clear is that educators, as well as students and parents, are struggling with a lot, and a cumbersome, unintuitive product.

Some Quotes I Shared from the Research

Soon after completing the research, I collaborated with my UX manager, Daniel, on a long-term vision for Learning Ally's future. At the time, Learning Ally had three main products - the Audiobook Solution, Excite Reading, and Professional Learning. Daniel and I sought to design a way to consolidate these into a single platform, focused on:

1. surfacing information,

2. anticipating the needs of educators,

3. ability to scale,

4. and, of course, doing away with the data reset as part of a way to provide a more comprehensive picture of a whole child (minus some pain points too)

Working closely with Daniel and this high-level concept, we planned to conduct an 11 Star workshop (inspired by Brian Chesky at AirBNB) with the executive team to think outside the box on how we could deliver a 6 or 7 star rating experience, or mix and match feasible solutions that we could apply to this long-term vision.

That workshop would never come to fruition.

An Unexpected Staff Reduction and ReOrg

Unfortunately, Daniel was part of staff reductions, the first ever in the company's long 75 year history. His access, as well as the access of other laid off employees, was cut off immediately, privacy concerns cited as the reasoning.

This significantly impacted our team's structure and capabilities. We no longer had a UX advocate at the executive level, leaving us without a champion to push for user experience initiatives. Our team was reassigned under the leadership of the Professional Learning director, marking a shift in our team's organizational alignment.

As part of these changes, the company switched its strategic focus towards short-term, cost-saving, reactionary measures. Instead of pursuing ambitious long-term goals, like the big vision we once had, the emphasis was shifted towards making incremental changes to the existing product. This decision was driven by the challenges posed by outdated and unstable backend infrastructure, which hindered our ability to make substantial improvements without moving to a different tech stack. As a result, I found myself grappling with a new product strategy I didn't agree with and a quirky legacy product.

In my eyes, it was simple: Spend now to improve the product or spend much more later doing the same thing.

Now with a Daniel-sized hole in the team, it was up to me to chart the UX course at Learning Ally. Driven by my desire to help struggling readers and make some sort of sense of the cards I'd been dealt, I led a workshop with Laura, the product manager, to prioritize features. Drawing from the UX audit, back to school research, and Laura's expertise in education and the product, we grouped features into possible themes, geared towards enhancing the audiobook solution's user experience.

As this was my colleague, Tiffany's, first role in UX, I also took on the added responsibility of guiding her through meetings I called CoWorking Hours, where we collaborated closely on our tasks. These were some of my favorite moments at Learning Ally, as I provided guidance, addressed her questions, and watched Tiffany craft beautiful hi-fi designs.

Finalizing a Roadmap

Following the new shift in direction, I considered our team's new UX goals and the prioritized features to create an achievable 1 year plan, tied to the organization’s new goals, and presented it to the leadership team. While the leadership team was more focused on stability, I was focused on laying out a long-term plan for slowly revitalizing the aged, unintuitive audiobook solution. I came up with a 4 stage plan based on the previous research:

1. Quick wins - accessibility and usability enhancements

2. Give educators more detailed in-app data to make empowered decisions about their students

3. Create a self-help hub to increase user satisfaction and reduce call volume about the features and experience we would be slowly updating

4. Conduct book discovery research to optimize the app's core pathways for searching, adding, and reading books and provide value to educators and students

An Opportunity Presents Itself...

One of the Quick Wins we identified was to provide clarity on how books appeared on the student bookshelf. Students had no way to distinguish between books added by their teacher and those they added themselves. Even though product only asked for an exploration of that specific feature, I felt it was the right time to explore what we could do with a refresh of the bookshelf, without straying too far from the current look and feel.

Because it wasn't really a project on the roadmap, I pulled Tiffany in and we talked about capacity, deciding to do a 2 week sprint, work together, and get as many of our Quick Win items completed, so we could explore a refresh for the Bookshelf. We ended up having 2 days time to flesh out ideas, do a little competitive research, and explore concepts.

At the end, I created a feature release timeline to show the dev team how we could incrementally refresh the bookshelf, a design I hypothesized would be easier and more usable. Of course, testing a prototype before dev was part of my plan. My hope was to foster excitement among the leadership team and show the possibilities available in the future of the audiobook app's experience, even at a slow place.

A People and Priority Shift

The VP of product and the product manager voluntarily left the company after the reduction, leaving a leadership void in prioritizing features. The search for replacements for these positions took a long time, but eventually, we welcomed a new VP of Product and also a new VP of Technology.

I shared my roadmap and product insights with both, aimed at building a collaborative partnership, like the one I had with the previous VP of Product, and taking a chance to make my voice heard at the executive level.

Instead, the roadmap was disrupted when Learning Ally shifted priorities yet again, pivoting towards short-term goals, such as integrating the audiobook solution into external platforms like Google SeeSaw using Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI), focusing on larger customers. Whatever resources we would have had to accomplish the roadmap were now diverted towards this new initiative, and stability of the product.

To me, it signaled a clash between making profit and delivering a platform that meets the needs of educators and students alike, beyond just audiobooks - A short term cash cow in favor of building a long-term, sustainable, and competitive educational solution that truly supports diverse learning needs and outcomes. That said, the executive team was pretty hush hush about their plans and reasoning, so it's possible I was missing the full picture, which is not a feeling I enjoy as part of a team.

Spoiler Alert...

The company still did not have a clear vision or strategy for the audiobook solution, so while the new VPs were zeroed in on making stability enhancements, I pushed forward with the book discovery research, knowing that it would help LTI initiatives and also uncover additional user needs.

However...

Not much later, I was part of a staff reduction and so my strategic work at Learning Ally was over.

How We Got Here

Looking back at my time at Learning Ally, it's clear that getting our design team in sync with the company's goals was a journey filled with twists and turns. Losing our UX manager threw a wrench into my plans, making it trickier to integrate our design work with the bigger picture. Dealing with a history of departmental silos that fueled a lack of cross-functional teamwork also made it feel like we were swimming against the current.

The company’s shifting business strategy, coupled with a lack of transparency, made it difficult to establish a strong fit between design and what the organization felt was its problem.

Despite my efforts to transition the team from reactive design to a more strategic approach, the ambiguity surrounding the company’s goals hindered my ability to create partnerships and differentiate design from other functions at Learning Ally. To me, this signaled a mismatch between the org's perceived problem and its target users' needs and expectations, something I tried to address by sharing user feedback.

As I continued to navigate these waters, my focus remained on demonstrating the impact of design efforts and carving out a place for design. After all, the journey is about making a meaningful difference along the way.

Impact

Learnings

📢 Communicate often and effectively. Find a way to keep everyone outside of the close-knit team informed and aligned to help facilitate collaboration. A communications plan helps bridge teams that don't normally work with design.

🥳 Celebrate the small victories to help boost morale and motivation, keeping the team energized

🤝 As a strategist, maintaining a focus on long-term vision while being responsive to short-term goals is essential for driving UX initiatives that people can get behind

🚧 Assets can offer value even if they're not polished or refined; sometimes speed is preferable to perfection

👍🏽 There's still good work to do in the face of constantly changing circumstances and challenges (but it sure ain't my favorite way to work)