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Corinne is a true UX leader – she combines deep quantitative research and analysis, strategic business alignment, and a user-centric design approach and aesthetic to deliver impactful solutions to market. She sees the big picture, partners with stakeholders and tackles high priority jobs to be done with a reliance on her user empathy, market testing and data and desired outcomes.
- Daniel Ginsburg, Interim head of product at Education.com
Timeline
8 months: May 2018 – Dec 2018
KEY GOAL
Improve the conversion of site visitors through better user experience and wayfinding. Improve the user experience and retention for existing users.
TEAM
Co-CEOs, interim head of product, SEO director, VP of content and curriculum, VP of marketing, curriculum team, product management team, engineering teams, one data scientist, internal design team, internal researcher, UI designer Joe Shoop, IA expert Andy Fitzgerald, a researcher from Re/Mix, and me.
My role
UX lead on several simultaneous projects and interim design team lead. Strategy, discovery, wireframes, UX management, UI art direction, and engineering-ready designs.
Imagine you are a parent trying to find materials online to help your child with math. You search on Google and click on a promising-looking result. When you arrive at the site, it's unclear what the site offers, whether it costs money, and the brand isn't memorable. You may download one item, but you're unlikely to remember you signed up for the site or sign up for a paid subscription.
Education.com creates content to help children, but their product users are teachers and parents, including homeschoolers. The mental models and understanding of the subject area are widely variable. Everyone wants to help kids, but their expectations, goals, and tasks vary considerably.
I worked with one CEO and the heads of many departments to coordinate this cross-company initiative. I also collaborated closely with engineering partners and members of the onsite design team.
I worked with the team through remote working sessions and review meetings, online documents and design tools, and daily standup meetings. Most of the team is co-located in California, while some were in Texas, Colorado, and I was in Seattle.
Research:
Affinity diagraming friction points in the conversion journey.
An online card sort where users organize the site content and name their own groupings.
Sketches of global navigation approaches for SEO requirements and user mental models.
Sketches of ideas for the Learning Library (search results), which is the most common place where visitors enter the website.
Through the discovery process, I determined that the search experience is critical to conversion since it is the most common entry point and the gateway to all of the curriculum.
Global navigation is less important for this particular site, but still an important wayfinding tool. In addition, since global navigation appears on all pages it provides an important tool in explaining the brand, purpose, and scope of the website.
These UX redesigns coincided with a massive rebranding project. This made it important that we user test and AB test functional changes independent of the visual changes in order to control our variables.
The designs I created for Education.com show:
Qualitative user research confirmed that users preferred the new designs. Parents and teachers were able to comprehend the site more easily and find the specific resources they needed. User awareness of premium features increased.
I left the team with documentation of further work to be done to refine the navigation model and feature naming, improve the search algorithm, and refine the UX to better meet user needs and business goals.
See more of my work
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Corinne Sherry Design, Inc.
Independent UX specialist based in Seattle, WA, USA. Since 2009 I've been creating great products remotely with teams located anywhere. This is a woman-owned business.
(206) 383-0748
newbusiness@corinnesherry.com
No solicitations
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