ABCmouse

I joined as one of Age of Learning's first two UX designers, a team that had grown into a full UX department by the time I left in 2017. In those years my focus was the production tools behind the product: the content-management systems teams used to ingest raw source art, down to layered Photoshop files, and assemble it into the interactive activities and games that filled ABCmouse's library.

It was some of the most technical UX work I've done. The problems sat squarely between game-design tooling and interface design: an authoring pipeline complex enough to build real games, made usable for the producers and designers working in it every day. Alongside that, I designed for the enterprise management systems of that era, the earliest version of the admin tooling I'd return to years later.

Back on my return in 2022, on an agile scrum team, I led UX/UI for the SaaS admin side of the platform: account management, onboarding, SSO/SAML, licensing and rostering, two-factor authentication, reporting and analytics, accessibility (ADA), and third-party integrations.

The highest-stakes piece was district rostering: getting thousands of students, teachers, and classes into the platform and keeping them in sync. A wrong move could wipe a live roster, so I designed the experience around consequence: three clearly-distinguished upload modes (add, replace, or automated SFTP sync), each with plain-language guidance, and a per-entity preview of exactly what would be created, updated, or deleted before anything committed. For districts that wanted it hands-off, I designed the SFTP automation: setup, connection, and scheduled sync, all with explicit guardrails about where data could be edited.

Beyond the admin dashboards, I contributed to front-end product work for teachers, including an assessment tool and an early MVP, as well as a caregiver-facing portal.

When I returned in 2022, the design org was fairly entrenched in Sketch: local files and hand-managed libraries, with no shared single source of truth across a growing enterprise product line. I'd just spent two years at Moda Health watching the remote-work toolset mature, and I'd seen firsthand that Figma was the better way for a distributed team to work. With more than one designer and remote collaboration now the default, a shared source of truth wasn't a nice-to-have. I made the case for the switch, and the team was glad to make it.

I treated it as a systems problem, not a tooling swap, and ran the conversion as progressive enhancement rather than a big-bang cutover. As new projects rolled in, we built them in Figma only, a few months of that until one day the old Sketch workflow was simply gone and no one missed it. I set the standards for how components and libraries would be structured and rebuilt the design system as Figma libraries: the single source of truth the enterprise products now shared, instead of the same decisions re-invented file by file.

I ran short training sessions for the fellow UX designer I was leading: how to build and maintain the Figma library, so the system lived in more than one person's head. And I brought the engineers along, showing them how to pull specs straight from Figma's inspect panel instead of waiting on hand-written redlines. That part landed hardest: the dev team loved it.

Card sorts, user flows, journey maps, personas, wireframes, and prototypes, then stakeholder walkthroughs that translated executive and partner feedback into design direction.