Frog Street

I defined the product ecosystem the whole platform still runs on: a teacher-facing application and a separate content-and-admin backend. That split structured every build decision that followed: where content lives, how it's authored and published, what teachers see, and how districts are provisioned.

A real part of that lift was translation. It meant first understanding the print curriculum — how it's structured, and how teachers actually use it — then adapting it into something that works digital-first rather than a scanned copy of the page, while staying congruent with the print products still in classrooms. Print and digital had to read as one curriculum.

I designed the platform's core surfaces and the flows that connect them: login, invite, and account creation; SSO and self-service district rostering; the teacher hub and dashboard; program selection; the Resource Center with its search, filter, and bookmarking systems; and onboarding for both teachers and district admins. This is the spine of the product, the path a teacher takes from logging in to running their day.

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I built Frog Street's first design system — tokens, components, patterns — and documented it for the team. Its WCAG-compliant color system was engineered for parity with Frog Street's print materials, bridging the digital product with the company's print heritage. The system has since been expanded twice and codified for AI-assisted prototyping.

Frog Street's flagship new capability is a formative-assessment experience for early-childhood educators. I owned its design from kickoff mapping through dev handoff: observation capture "in the moment," the reporting suite (progress by domain, by child, by class), level-progression and pacing views, child portfolios, and the admin settings that configure it all. The developmental framework and standards these reports express belong to the curriculum team; the product that lets a teacher capture an observation one-handed and read a class's progress before a checkpoint closes is mine.

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In usability testing, educators comparing the Assessment Center against the assessment tools they were leaving — including the market-leading platform — consistently described it as the easier of the two.

Accessibility was in the work from year one and became a dedicated compliance track, a WCAG/508 epic covering color and contrast, keyboard focus, screen-reader support, alt text, and WAVE remediation. I compiled the platform's accessibility posture into a procurement-ready questionnaire and an honest, standards-literate risk read.

I established the platform's research practice: the first structured test plan, teacher interviews, a moderated-testing program, analytics instrumentation, and on-site user testing in Texas, routing findings straight back into the report designs. Frog Street later onboarded a data scientist and a dedicated UXR team who carried the program forward, which is exactly what a founding practice is for.

The practice produced product decisions, not decks — and kept producing after the handoff. In 2025, twenty-two sessions across three rounds fed the roadmap. My spring usability round — five educators across five states — found teachers treating the Planner's filters as tools for editing their week rather than just viewing it; that insight shipped as the Week Summary, Week Details, and Daily Prep enhancements introduced in the onboarding above. In the fall, the UXR team's exploratory interviews on how teachers document and level called for in-the-moment leveling support; a month later, thirteen wireframe sessions with preschool, pre-K, infant, and toddler educators found teachers overwhelmingly appreciating the leveling guide, and drove the streamlined three-step observation capture shown earlier.

The loop keeps running. When the UXR team ran a rapid four-session round on the new Favorites feature, it confirmed the core flow worked — every participant already kept a workaround system outside the product just to find resources again — and found that a flat list wouldn't scale, because teachers think in themes and weeks. I reviewed the findings with the team and redesigned the hub around exactly that structure, translating the round into a ticketed epic of fixes, from entry-point states to search scoped inside Favorites.

On the digital side, I procured, onboarded, and directed a contract designer. On the print side, I sourced a staffing partner and helped hire a print designer who went on to contribute to Frog Street's new infant product, a hire that had real impact on the print product line.

I built the team's AI-assisted design practice around the design system itself: the tokens, components, and patterns are codified so that tools like Claude generate on-system, testable prototypes instead of throwaway mockups. That's what makes the daily practice — generative wireframing, copy iteration, research synthesis, prototype scaffolding — compound: every session starts from the system's real vocabulary, so quality accrues across designers and sessions rather than living in one person's head.

It's also what the research program runs on. The interactive HTML prototypes used in moderated testing with educators are built this way, at the speed of the research calendar — which is how a finding like the Favorites flat-list problem could come back from the UXR team and go out again as a testable redesign, on-system, without a rebuild.