Reframing classroom assessment around teacher workflow.

At Formative, the core challenge was not just assessment creation. Teachers were managing scattered materials, disconnected systems, and manual grading processes that made it hard to track progress over time. The product needed to reduce administrative overhead while giving educators clearer, faster insight into student learning.

As Design Director, I built and led the design team around that problem and helped shape a more integrated platform experience for teachers, students, and school administrators.

We used a user-centered process grounded in teacher research, growth metrics, and rapid experimentation. Working closely with educators, product managers, and engineers, we streamlined workflows, defined success metrics like sign-up completion and first assignments, and tested how better onboarding and personalization could improve activation.

One important finding was that new users were far more likely to complete key behaviors when they were shown relevant example content aligned to their classroom needs instead of being dropped into a blank starting state.

The redesign moved the platform toward a more unified teacher workflow, combining assessment creation, classroom activity, and real-time reporting in one place. It also created a more useful home experience for different user types, helping teachers prioritize actions, discover features, and understand student performance without jumping across tools.

The broader product work supported strong growth and engagement while making the experience feel more purposeful and easier to adopt.

• Showing example content after sign-up made new users 3× more likely to assign assessments
• Weekly active users grew to nearly 400k
• Net Promoter Score reached 75