Redesigning education for collective engagement

Honor Education is a company formed by former Apple employees seeking a way to transform education with collaboration, connection, and community.

I joined Honor Education on a 4 month contract from May to August of 2023 to help focus on the Educator side of their experience.

Sometimes you should go back before going forward

When I joined I did a deep dive into the foundations of the platform to familiarize myself before looking towards my first major feature, an analytics area of the product.

What I found was some signficant design debt. The product vision was clear, but the pieces of fully realize it weren't going to be up to the task. Visual design conventions, usability conventions, accessibility principles, all rolled into proper a proper design system. A full redesign essentially.

New scope to save (later) scope

I knew it'd be worth it, otherwise any new work would have to be fully redone in 6 months. However we still needed a new Analytics area to meet our product and development timelines.

It was a hard sell, especially so early, to get a larger redesign in the roadmap. Timelines were already strained, and the benefits were unclear at some stakeholder levels.

So, in an admittedly reckless move, I pulled up my sleeves and did both. I used the new feature to drive overhauling decisions of the full system, slowly putting it together in the background.

Working in the background with the other designer in the company, we collaborated on a full overhaul, assembling "just enough" of a scrappy system to stand things up and create a vision. Enough to present.

The buy-in was strong. The old systems wasn't well liked, so presenting the new Analytics feature in a new design language was a nice win. And if it needed revisions to the full design system, well, now everyone understood the impact.

With more stakeholder momentum, I worked with Product and other stakeholders (who had already agreed earlier) and then modified the future roadmap to integrate the new work.

The impact

While it was a short 4 month contract, I strove to make the highest impact I possibly could in that time. I was meant to mostly create their Analytics system, and left after accomplishing far more.

A full platform redesign in addition to a major feature was a win for both the short and long term of the company and product. Honor Education is now better positioned to scale and adapt over 2024 and beyond in their product design.