OVERVIEW
As a product manager and designer on the project I led the product development lifecycle: scoping features, defining strategy, and working closely with design, client stakeholders, and engineers to bring the vision to life.
View our admin dashboard demo! The tutor view will be shared later in this case study.
Product Manager,
UX Designer
16 weeks
About Client & Users
OnYourMark Education provides virtual, individualized, high-dosage instruction in foundational early literacy skills. Over two years, OnYourMark has grown from 60 to 3,000 students and aim to serve 40,000 total students by 2026.
OnYourMark tutors teach children in K-5th grades how to read, using the Science of Reading and ensuring students’ learning and social emotional needs are met. They focus greatly on building relationships to help developing readers succeed.
THE PROBLEM
The Integrated Literacy Success Portal is designed to help OnYourMark staff input and manage student data efficiently in one unified platform. Currently, they rely on multiple disconnected tools to handle different types of student information, resulting in wasted time and fragmented workflows.
Tutors work hard to support at-risk students, but it's challenging without:
A clear way to track real-time progress
Tools to identify struggling students in large groups
Actionable insights from overwhelming data
Administrators face similar problems as the tutors and currently require several tools to monitor student progress, tutor performance, and school data.
THE PROCESS
Before any designing began, I worked closely with the client to craft a Product Requirements Document (PRD) and project plan to define the must-have features and KPIs for the dashboard, a critical step in aligning both the team and client on priorities before diving into the design process.
To make sense of the task to create both an admin and tutor dashboard from scratch, the team mapped out the information architecture with crucial features.
Each designer drafted three low-fidelity versions of the main dashboard and I worked closely with the client to select a direction that felt intuitive and matched OYM's goals. From there, I built a cohesive design system with the Design Manager.
Version 1
Overlooks key features needed for quickly tracking student progress.
Version 2
Layout is not conducive to a data-driven dashboard.
★ Version 3
Data visualizations and tasks are clear.
Confusing initial designs
After I created a design system to ensure consistency across screens, the team created lo-fi and mid-fi designs for each required feature. I worked closely with the team to edit designs and apply design system elements to each screen.
Student profile feature screens.
We surveyed OYM tutors and admins with the above designs and the feedback was clear. The dashboard was confusing, overwhelming, and hard to navigate.
Now that was a wake-up call! A clean design wasn't enough. We needed to guide users more effectively, especially those who are new to OYM's tutor workflow.
Simplifying and educating
We reworked the interface to simplify navigation and introduce a concise onboarding tutorial to aid users as they navigate through the platform for the first time and for future reminders.
Simplified dashboard
Only the most commonly used features are displayed up front.
Onboarding tutorial
Walks users through each feature of the dashboard.
Prototyping with hi-fi designs
After confirming the high-fi designs with our client, we began creating prototypes for both the tutor and admin dashboards, allowing the team to quickly test key interactions (especially exam administration), gather feedback from stakeholders, and refine usability before development.
Portion of prototyping process
After simulating all of the user flows with our prototypes, I collaborated with my team and client to uncover friction points across the portal. We focused heavily on the exam administration section, since different exam types required unique interactions and were most likely to cause confusion for users. By iterating on the prototype as we discovered issues, we were able to test solutions early, validate our assumptions, and ensure the final design would support a smoother experience for users.
Our dashboard was a hit… mostly!
To see how real tutors and admins used our dashboard, I ran a usability test with 15 participants through UserTesting.com. We watched them complete five core tasks and gathered key insights like task completion times, success rates, and user comments.
A snippet of data
The results were clear: while most tasks were easy to complete, the assessments section wasn’t working. People got stuck, and some features simply broke. So, we fixed it fast!
Polished and ready to go
We finalized 130+ high-fidelity screens and built clickable prototypes for both the tutor and admin dashboards. Most importantly, we cut report generation time by 60%, from >10 minutes down to just ~4.
Tutor Dashboard Prototype
This dashboard helps tutors track student progress and manage assessments.
Admin Dashboard Prototype
This dashboard helps admin manage school data and student performance.
Tutors told us this would save them hours every week and make it easier to manage large student loads without burning out.
We also presented our portal design and process to six industry professionals at Bloomberg, who praised our ability to tackle such an ambitious project in just 16 weeks.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Reflecting on this journey
Over 16 fast-paced weeks, I learned just how critical clear communication is when managing a team across time zones and working styles. We moved quickly and often worked late into the night to fix last-minute issues.
I’m incredibly proud of the creativity and collaboration that powered this project. We explored a wide range of design directions to get the dashboards just right. Finally, presenting our final work to Bloomberg mentors was a key milestone and a valuable opportunity to practice sharing our design process. This project truly strengthened my design skills and gave me hands-on experience with user testing that will be invaluable in future roles.