CATEGORY
UX/UI Design
YEAR
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
TEAM
Allison Y, Elsie N, Sophia N
Storytelling helps students connect with the curriculum. Teachers know this, they just can't fit it in without extra work or risk.
How might we help 5th–7th grade teachers bring storytelling into a standardized curriculum?
Stories build trust
Storytelling worked best when teachers shared their own experiences.
Lower pressure opens dialogue
Students opened up more in low-pressure classrooms.
Confidence enables action
Junior teachers knew what to change, but didn’t feel safe changing it.
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About
A veteran middle school math teacher with 17 years of experience in Washington, who values personal connection over rigid curriculum.
Behaviors
Avoids the text-heavy workbook. Uses personal stories to make lessons stick.
Pain Points
Balancing strictness with empathy. Students distracted by tech and outside pressures.
Key Insight
He has the confidence to adapt, but no way to pass that down to newer teachers.
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"I know exactly what my students need, but with rigor walks watching, I don't feel safe trying it."
About
In her third year teaching 5th grade in Texas, focused on building a classroom community around collaboration.
Behaviors
Sticks close to the curriculum to avoid risk. Finds small ways to build peer connection.
Pain Points
Engagement drops fast. Rigor walks and job risk limit how much she can adapt.
Key Insight
She knows what to do, but institutional pressure keeps her from acting on it.
The gap between them became the core design problem.
How do we help junior teachers borrow the confidence and judgment senior teachers have already built?
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Upload notes
AI merges everyone's notes into one shared summary.
Group Discussion
Teachers review the summary and comment on each other’s reflections. This was the professor’s favorite page in our final review.
Behind this page
Forum
Teachers connect by school or district, organized by topic.
My role was…
I conducted one of four competitor analyses and one of four user interviews, collaborated on personas, journey mapping, and information architecture with the team, and owned the UI design of the Group Discussion Board where is the platform’s central collaborative workspace.
Looking back…
Talking to real teachers changed the project more than anything else we did. The AI chatbot was the clearest example. It seemed like an obvious feature until instructors told us directly that they didn’t trust it with student information, and would rather hear advice from another teacher anyway. That one finding reshaped the whole platform.
The biggest constraint was time. Teachers are busy, which made recruiting hard, and it meant we had to design something that wouldn’t add work for people who already felt stretched thin. With more time, I’d want to interview a larger, more varied group of teachers across different schools and districts to see how these tensions shift outside our sample.