A future for everyone

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a multi-faceted, mission-driven organization with ambitious, long-term goals to fundamentally move the needle in significant ways on dire issues within the realms of Education, Science, and Justice through its many different levers: technology, grants, and community building.

The Education initiative centers on an equitable, whole child approach to learning, and supports many research, technology, and policy endeavors that seek to move the field of Education towards the future of learning.

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What did you work on at CZI?

When I joined the Chan Zuckerberg team, they were looking to staff a research and development project with a Product Designer that had 0-to-1, startup experience - and that was me! I joined a small, 4-person working group (PM, Specialist in Education, Researcher, me) for several months as we embarked on a journey to figure out how CZI could be most effective in the space of child development.

After this project disembarked, I joined the core product team for Summit Learning, which, at the time was the Education Initiative’s primary investment.

As a Designer on Summit, I proposed a strategy for engaging (and re-engaging) parents in their child’s learning journey, I re-designed one of the most complained about aspects of the platform (how to see your grades!), and I concept tested ideas for a new part of the platform that would connect classroom teachers with intervention specialists.

 
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QUICK FACTS

Design team:
15-20 Designers (Around 8-10 Product Designers)

Organization:
CZI-at-large (Close to 1,000 employees)
Education initiative (Around 300 employees)

Primary platform:
Responsive web

 

MY TENURE

I joined CZI around March of 2018 and decided to leave the team to join Khan Academy in late 2019.

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Flexible grade management

In 2019, Summit Learning decided it wanted to make its standardized grading policy more flexible - so that schools had more autonomy and control over the way students received grades. That policy change required product changes, as now administrators needed to be able to adjust the weight of elements of a student’s grade on a course-by-course basis.

 
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A firm foundation

The product team at CZI had never had a Design Systems designer, so a majority of the components that existed in the product came directly from a few designers’ minds as the needs arose. This made it challenging for strategy-heavy/UX-centric designers to participate in the product, since they didn’t feel confident creating new UI elements.

On top of the last of standardization, many colors in the product did not meet contrast standards, which came up all the time in research when teachers would try to project the product in their classroom.

 

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Bringing teachers together

If a student is working with a Math or Reading specialist at school, they are often living two (or more) completely separate lives throughout the week. Typically, their classroom teachers have no idea what the student is working on in intervention time, and interventionists have to peek at printer stations to see what students are working on in the classroom. What if there was a way for them to communicate about shared needs of a student so that they, as a team, could better support that student?