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?
Gimkit, Duolingo, Reddit, and Khan Academy are all built for student engagement. None of them help teachers collaborate with each other.
We interviewed 4 teachers and found the real blocker:
Storytelling worked best when teachers shared their own experiences
Students opened up more in low-pressure classrooms
Junior teachers knew what to change, but didn't feel safe changing it
The key insight was that the gap wasn't knowledge. It was confidence.
Mr. Smith has 17 years of experience and has learned to bend the curriculum safely.
Ms. Baker has 2 years of experience, still follows the curriculum strictly, and is losing student engagement because of 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?
Lo-fi. We built four pages: a dashboard, a note upload page, group discussion, and an AI chatbot for quick advice.
After testing. Teachers didn't trust the chatbot with student data and said they'd rather ask a real teacher. We cut it and added a peer forum instead, and simplified a dashboard testers found cluttered.
After expert review. We tightened everything into one sequence: schedule, upload, review, discuss. We added an onboarding survey to match teachers by mentorship style.
Schedule a meeting. One form, instant confirmation.
Schedule a meeting. One form, instant confirmation.
Schedule a meeting. One form, instant confirmation.
Schedule a meeting. One form, instant confirmation.
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.
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.