CASE STUDY · AGE OF LEARNING · EDTECH UX

Creating a Seamless
User Experience for Teachers

Teacher journey maps, assessment flows, wireframes, and annotated mockups

As a Senior UX Designer, one of the most critical decisions is choosing which UX artifacts to create — with so many potential deliverables, selecting the ones that build shared understanding, meet the deadline, and keep user needs visible is fundamental. At Age of Learning, an EdTech company serving 50+ million children globally, I designed a Teacher Assessment Tool to address a critical gap: educators had no built-in way to track student performance and were manually managing progress, reports, and parent communication. My children were using ABCmouse.com educational games at home during this time, which grounded my understanding of how teachers and parents work together to support learning. I led the design by creating a teacher journey map, detailed assessment flows, use case sketches, wireframes, and annotated mockups — artifacts that unified curriculum specialists, visual designers, and engineers around a shared vision.

Role: Senior UX Designer
Timeframe: 2017
Company
Industry: EdTech
Company Size: 450 people

SituationTeachers Managing Progress Without Tools

Teachers were using ABCmouse.com activities in their classrooms, but had no integrated tools to monitor student performance or track learning outcomes. This forced them to manually track progress, create reports, and communicate updates to parents — a burden that made it difficult to provide personalized support to individual students.

I was brought onto the school team to create a Teacher Assessment Tool that would give educators real-time insights and enable immediate action on student progress.

TaskMapping the Teacher Experience

My job was to understand how teachers actually worked — from sign-up through lesson creation and reporting — and then design a tool that fit naturally into their workflow.

I also needed to work closely with curriculum specialists, visual designers, and engineers to make sure the assessment experience was pedagogically sound and technically feasible. This collaboration was essential.

ActionCreating Artifacts That Aligned Everyone

I started by creating a teacher user journey map, covering everything from sign-up to lesson creation and assessment reports. This became a critical artifact — it helped identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, and it gave everyone a shared understanding of the problem.

From there, I created a detailed assessment user flow that showed how teachers, students, and parents would interact with the system.

Assessment user flow diagram showing how teachers, students, and parents interact with the Teacher Assessment Tool. — Assessment user flow

I followed that with use case sketches for each scenario, then moved to wireframes for the dashboard and class assessment lists.

Hand-drawn use case sketch: 'Assign an Independent Assessment,' showing four steps — select a class or group, select assessment model, select a self-assessment, and confirmation. — Use case sketch — assigning an independent assessment

Wireframe of the Teacher Assessment landing page, showing assessments, results, few-correct-answers list, and lessons. — Wireframe — teacher dashboard

Wireframe of a class assessment results list, showing per-student performance, score, incorrect and unanswered counts, and completion status. — Wireframe — class assessment results list

I also mapped the full teacher-facing site structure to keep the team aligned on scope and navigation as the tool grew.

Teacher experience site map for ABCmouse.com desktop HTML5, charting class builder, lesson builder, lesson library, progress tracker, teacher resources, settings, family engagement, curriculum overview, and support flows. — Teacher experience site map

Finally, mockups and annotations explained every design decision — turning research and structure into screens the team could build from.

High-fidelity mockup of the ABCmouse.com teacher dashboard, showing tools and resources, activities completed to date, assigned lessons, family invitation status, and students by level. — Final mockup — teacher dashboard

Annotated mockup of the Create New Lesson screen, with callouts explaining entry behavior, the lesson library browse action, naming field, and advanced naming module. — Annotated mockup — create new lesson

These artifacts — the journey maps, flows, sketches, and wireframes — weren't just for me. They were communication tools that brought the whole team together around a shared vision.

OutcomesCollaboration and User Journey as Foundational Tools

The teacher user journey became far more than a diagram; it was a tool for thinking. Mapping the end-to-end experience across all touchpoints brought clarity to the entire team and revealed pain points and opportunities that I would have otherwise missed. This artifact enabled us to design a truly seamless experience that made teachers' lives easier while supporting their ability to provide personalized student support.

Collaboration with curriculum specialists, visual designers, and engineers proved fundamental to the work. Their diverse expertise shaped every design decision, ensuring the assessment tool was both engaging and pedagogically meaningful. This cross-disciplinary collaboration wasn't simply helpful — it was essential to creating a solution that honored the complexity of teaching and learning.

Feedback from the TeamVoices from Age of Learning