Building the first real-time collaboration platform for K–12 classrooms

The problem

Discovery Education's Board Builder was the incumbent creation tool: aging technology, clunky sharing flows, and no real-time collaboration. Teachers worked around it constantly. Students passed files back and forth like it was 2005. The product had become an obstacle rather than an enabler.

The ask was to replace it entirely with something that reflected how modern classrooms actually work: connected, collaborative, device-agnostic, and fast. I was responsible for the complete user experience from initial research through launch and beyond.

My role

As UX lead and architect, I owned the full experience: research, information architecture, interaction design, motion, design system integration, and cross-functional alignment. I worked alongside engineers, product managers, educators, and the marketing team across every phase of the project.

A significant part of this work was organizational. Studio was ambitious. Getting the company aligned on a shared vision, a clear set of principles, and a realistic roadmap was just as important as the design itself.

A new model for classrooms

One of the core insights from early research was that teachers and students didn't mainly want a better creation tool. They were managing a fragmented mess of content: downloading, re-uploading, emailing, screenshotting, and improvising workflows that shouldn't need to exist.

So Studio changed how digital resources lived in a classroom. Instead of files that moved between people, Studio introduced shared Boards: persistent, living spaces where teachers and students could bring content, create together, and build on each other's work in real time.

Research, planning, and alignment

I built on prior research to map user frustrations, desires, and existing behaviors. From there the challenge was alignment: Studio could do a lot, which meant the risk of trying to do everything was real. I used personas, journey maps, and working sessions to anchor the team on the users who mattered most and the outcomes they actually needed.

Early exploration

Early prototypes were too complex. The first iterations gave users too much control at once, which worked fine for power users but overwhelmed everyone else. The lesson was that open-ended creation tools need guardrails.

We iterated fast. Prototypes went through multiple rounds of usability testing with actual teachers and students. Each round tightened the interaction model and clarified what mattered most to the people using it.

Key features

Accessible color themes

Not everyone thinks about accessibility when creating things, and in a classroom that has real consequences. I designed a suite of color themes that maintained accessible text contrast and accessible background options, so teachers could customize boards without inadvertently creating barriers for students with visual impairments.

Guided customization

Users consistently ask for more customization options when surveyed. What research actually shows is that too much customization increases cognitive load and reduces completion rates. I solved this with guided customization: a layered system that surfaced sensible defaults first and revealed depth only when users reached for it.

Tangible real-time collaboration

Most "collaboration" tools let people take turns editing a shared file. Studio did something more ambitious: users could see each other's cursors moving on screen in real time, which felt much closer to working at the same table. In a classroom, that made a big difference.

Because so much of the collaborative experience was motion-dependent, I used After Effects and Principle to prototype and communicate interaction behavior before engineering investment. Testing intent through motion early saved significant rework downstream.

Board history and participation tracking

Every Studio board maintained a full history. Teachers could see how a board evolved over time, replay the creation process, and review individual student participation. Teachers could see how students worked through a problem, as well as what they handed in.

Launch

After more than two years of design and development, Studio launched with a progressive rollout coordinated around the school calendar. A soft launch preceded the full release, giving us a controlled window to catch issues before reaching the full user base.

Post-launch, the work shifted to delegating, prioritizing incoming feedback, and shipping features on a rolling timeline while stabilizing the product under real classroom conditions.

Supporting users and building product literacy

Discovery Education has a strong reputation with educators, and we needed Studio to earn that trust. Onboarding and literacy were as much a part of the design as the product itself.

Template marketplace

The Marketplace gave teachers a starting point instead of a blank canvas. Teachers could save and share their own board templates, and the community grew its own library of reusable starting points. It reduced the cold-start problem and accelerated adoption in classrooms where time was always scarce.

In-product help and contextual support

I built contextual help into Studio using third-party tooling, surfacing guidance based on what the user was trying to do rather than forcing them to leave the product. As we identified gaps in feature engagement, we layered in progressive in-product messaging to guide users toward features they hadn't discovered.

Performance and outcomes

Studio drove a 30% increase in repeat student engagement. It also launched before COVID made remote and hybrid classrooms the norm, with no comparable tool on the market at the time.

Studio had to integrate across the entire Discovery Education platform, so success metrics were composite. We tracked traditional usability measures: time on task, success rates, error frequency. We also tracked behavioral signals from retired legacy tools to understand which features mattered most and how usage patterns shifted after migration.

What we could have done better

Staying on strategy longer

As Studio's internal visibility grew, pressure to respond to stakeholder requests increased. The shift from fully production-focused to partly politics-managed was gradual, but it created moments where we moved off of well-researched directions before we'd fully tested them. Looking back, holding the line on strategy for longer would have reduced some of the rework.

Revisiting discarded work sooner

More than once we returned to concepts we'd set aside a year or more earlier. In some cases, those earlier explorations turned out to be closer to the right answer than the path we'd taken in the interim. Keeping a more accessible archive of explored directions would have shortened some of those loops.

Additional contributions

• Defined Studio's design principles, product vision, and feature roadmap
• Owned the full visual direction including interaction patterns and states
• Integrated Studio into the broader Discovery Education design system
• Designed inclusive, accessible experiences for students across all device types
• Prototyped collaborative motion and interaction behaviors in After Effects and Principle
• Led usability testing with teachers and students across multiple research rounds
• Coordinated cross-functional alignment across design, engineering, product, and marketing
• Designed the Template Marketplace and supporting teacher community experiences