Colin Spence
Product Designer

Typing.com

Teacher and Student Portal Redesign and Improvements

  • Role

    Product Design
    Frontend Development, UX Strategy, Illustration

  • Timeline

    2017 - 2020
    Full time

  • Category

    web app
    education
    administration
    product design

The Challenge

Classroom software fails when it adds friction at scale, dozens of students, limited time, and constant context switching. Teachers needed faster assignment and monitoring workflows, and students needed clearer progress cues to stay motivated. The challenge was to reduce cognitive load without flattening the nuance of learning paths and performance signals.

    Design Approach

  • Make progress legible for teachers and students

    Improved progress visibility so teachers could spot issues earlier and students could understand growth over time.

  • Streamline assignment and classroom workflows

    Reduced steps and clarified actions for creating, assigning, and adjusting curriculum work across classes.

  • Reduce navigation ambiguity

    Reworked information architecture and labeling to make 'where am I' and 'what's next' instantly clearer.

  • Design for real classroom constraints

    Prioritized quick scanning, bulk actions, and resilient UI states to support busy, high-variance classroom use.

Results & Impact

Assignment time cut significantly
Teachers could create, assign, and adjust curriculum work across classes with fewer steps and less context-switching.
Students stayed oriented
Progress cues and clearer navigation helped students understand where they were in the curriculum and what to do next.
Built for real classrooms
Bulk actions, quick scanning, and resilient UI states held up across high-variance, time-pressured classroom use.