At Formative, our mission was to empower educators and students with tools to enhance skills and track progress.

As Design Director, I recruited a team of ux and product designers to address key challenges in ed tech— fragmented data, organizational differences and teacher productivity. Our focus on user experience and student success helped us grow to nearly 400k weekly active users, with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 75.

The Problem:

One major challenge we identified was the time teachers spent managing scattered course materials and tracking student performance. Teachers often relied on printed worksheets, various platforms, and manual grading, which didn’t capture progress over time. This fragmented approach made it difficult to access or analyze student data, limiting teachers’ ability to provide targeted support and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, the lack of system integration meant teachers spent too much time on administrative tasks instead of instruction.

Our Approach

To address these issues, we took a user-centered design approach, working closely with educators, administrators, and product managers to streamline workflows and reduce administrative tasks. Our goal was to create an integrated platform that captured student data and surfaced meaningful insights in real-time, allowing teachers to focus more on teaching.

We defined growth success metrics like sign-up completion and first assignments, using data to refine the experience. Through experimentation, we found that showing example content right after sign-up made new users three times more likely to assign student assessments. Using tools like Pendo and in-app experiments, we continuously optimized for engagement and usability.

Bringing it together

We reimagined the platform to solve these core problems by providing a single, integrated space where teachers could create, manage, and track student assessments seamlessly. By eliminating the need for printed sheets and disconnected systems, we helped teachers save valuable time and focus on what mattered most—student learning.

The introduction of a personalized home screen dashboard that served the needs of new users, teachers, and school administrators was a central aspect of the new design. This dashboard allowed users to quickly access essential information, take priority actions, and discover new features—all from one central location.

We also introduced new modes of student engagement, such as slideshow lessons, teacher-paced quizzes, and flashcard practice games, which provided students with multiple ways to build their skills while helping teacher asses daily learning progress.

On the teacher side, Formative enabled real-time tracking of student responses, offering immediate feedback that could be used to adjust instruction on the fly. Teachers could tag assessments by educational standard, grade level, subject, and format, allowing them to generate reports that aligned with district standards and tracked student performance over time. This gave educators a clear, actionable view of student progress, eliminating the need to manually compile performance data from multiple sources.

Positive Student Outcomes:

By solving the problem of fragmented data and administrative inefficiency, we significantly improved both teacher and student experiences. Teachers were empowered with the tools to track student progress continuously, reducing time spent on administrative tasks and allowing more time for personalized instruction.

Students, in turn, benefited from a dynamic learning environment that provided multiple pathways to engagement and real-time feedback. The ability to track their own progress against educational standards helped learners stay motivated and focused on their classroom goals. By capturing student performance over time, Formative allowed educators to make data-driven decisions and tailor their teaching strategies to meet the needs of each student, ultimately leading to stronger academic outcomes.