Discovery Education · Home Redesign

Reimagining the front door for millions of teachers and students

Discovery Education's homepage was underperforming in ways that compounded daily: users were bypassing it entirely via direct bookmarks, engagement below the hero was near zero, and the experience offered almost no meaningful personalization. I led the end-to-end redesign, from research planning through launch, building a new homepage that adapted to each user and finally felt like a place worth landing.

Role

Lead Product Designer

Company

Discovery Education

Scope

Research, IA, interaction design, personalization, onboarding

Methods

Remote usability testing, 1:1 interviews, analytics, surveys

Users

K–12 teachers and students nationwide

Discovery Education platform shown across multiple devices

Near zero

Engagement below the hero on the original homepage

Bypassed

Users navigating around the homepage via direct bookmarks

3 to 1

Onboarding screens reduced through iterative testing

AA compliant

Full accessibility compliance across screen readers and touch

The problem with the original homepage

The legacy Discovery Education homepage had a fundamental issue: it wasn't earning its position as the platform's front door. Teachers and students had figured out that going directly to the content they needed was faster than using the homepage as a starting point. That's a damning signal.

The social and activity feeds were too granular, surfacing information users didn't want or couldn't act on. Personalization barely existed beyond district-level settings. And engagement data from tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics confirmed what qualitative research was already showing: the further down the page you went, the less anyone was looking.

The original Discovery Education homepage
The original homepage. Low engagement below the hero, minimal personalization, no clear reason to be there.
Analytics data from the original homepage showing low engagement
Analytics confirmed the pattern: engagement dropped sharply below the fold.

My role

I led UX across the full project lifecycle while coordinating research responsibilities across teams. On the research side, I planned studies, helped reduce costs through international collaboration, and evaluated and implemented the tooling we needed: Figma, Maze, Airtable, Hotjar, and InVision.

I also owned accessibility compliance throughout, ensuring the new experience met AA standards across screen readers, touch interfaces, and the wide range of devices Discovery Education's users bring to the classroom.

Research methodology

We ran a combination of remote moderated and unmoderated usability testing, 1:1 interviews, and follow-up surveys. Quantitative data from Google Analytics and Pendo gave us the scale picture. Qualitative sessions gave us the why.

One finding that consistently came up: users assumed personalization already existed. They expected to be able to customize their homepage and were surprised when they couldn't. That's not a feature request. That's an expectation gap, and it set the direction for much of the design work that followed.

Research documentation and notes from homepage usability sessions
Research documentation from moderated usability sessions.
Research synthesis and pattern identification
Synthesizing patterns across sessions to identify consistent themes.
Research findings and design implications
Translating research findings into design implications and priorities.
SWOT analysis for the homepage redesign
SWOT analysis used to frame the opportunity and identify risks before design work began.

Key design challenges

Differentiating a product suite full of similar things

Discovery Education's content library is enormous, and a meaningful portion of it looks similar at a glance. Videos, articles, interactive tools — surfacing these on a homepage without them blurring together required a system-level approach to visual differentiation. We worked closely with content teams to ensure the right imagery was in place and developed a set of visual conventions that made scanning actually work.

Challenge of differentiating similar products in the Discovery Education suite
Differentiating visually similar products within the content library was a core design challenge.

Research consistently showed that larger cards with simple, relevant visuals produced a more scannable experience. Purely decorative imagery slowed users down rather than helping them. Every visual decision was anchored in whether it supported scanning and selection, not whether it looked good in isolation.

Teachers don't have time to lose

Every piece of friction in a teacher's workflow is perceived as classroom disruption. There's no such thing as a minor annoyance for a teacher managing thirty students. Any setup step, any unexpected screen, any moment of confusion costs them something real.

This shaped how we approached every interaction decision on the homepage, and especially how we designed the onboarding flow that helped users set up their personalized experience.

Personalization requires careful data handling

The new homepage was built around user-specific data: class assignments, recently viewed content, personalized recommendations. But that data had to be abstracted and anonymized appropriately given the platform's user base of minors and educators under institutional data policies. Security and privacy shaped the technical architecture of the personalization system from the start.

The new homepage

The redesigned homepage gave users real control: add and remove content sections, reorder them, and group them in ways that matched their actual workflow. Teachers could organize around their classes. Students could surface what was most relevant to their current assignments. The homepage became a tool rather than a landing page.

The navigation was redesigned in parallel as a persistent "mini homepage" accessible throughout the platform, so users had a consistent entry point to their personalized content without needing to return to the homepage itself.

The redesigned Discovery Education homepage
The redesigned homepage. Personalized, scannable, and organized around how users actually work.
Drag-and-drop reordering let users arrange their homepage around their own priorities.

We discovered during testing that users were engaging with the drag-and-drop interface outside of assigned tasks, on their own time. That's one of the best signals a designer can get. It means the interaction was genuinely enjoyable, not just functional.

Onboarding: from three screens to one

Setting up a personalized homepage required some upfront input from users. The challenge was minimizing that cost while still collecting enough information to make the personalization meaningful. We went through several rounds of iteration.

Early onboarding flow version one
Early onboarding flow: three screens, higher drop-off, especially on mobile.
Intermediate onboarding iteration
An intermediate iteration refining the information hierarchy and reducing required steps.
Final consolidated single-screen onboarding on desktop
The final consolidated onboarding on desktop: everything in one screen.
Final consolidated onboarding on mobile
Mobile onboarding saw the largest improvement after consolidation, with a significant increase in users completing setup.

Collapsing three screens into one had a particularly strong effect on mobile. Mobile users showed the largest increase in setup completion after the consolidation. The cognitive load reduction mattered more on a smaller screen with a less forgiving interaction model.

Setup changes and notes

Setup flow changes and design notes
Annotated design notes tracking the rationale behind each setup flow change.
Design and research notes from the project
Working notes from research synthesis and design decision-making.

In-product support

Any personalization system introduces complexity, and complexity means users will occasionally need help. We established three requirements for in-product support: it had to be accessible, contextual, and explorable. Help had to appear where users were already looking, be relevant to what they were trying to do, and allow them to dig deeper if they wanted to.

Post-launch monitoring

After launch, the work shifted to measurement and iteration. We ran satisfaction surveys, monitored product and event data, and worked with feedback collection teams that reported findings quarterly. The challenge with a homepage redesign is that different stakeholders measure success differently: engagement metrics tell one story, task completion rates tell another, and qualitative satisfaction data tells a third. Holding all three simultaneously is the job.

Users overwhelmingly assumed personalization already existed before we built it. That expectation gap was the most important finding from the research. We weren't adding a feature. We were closing a gap between what users believed the product could do and what it actually could.

Contributions