Following my time of working as a UX designer in the financial technology field at Fifth Third, I was eager to expand my experiences in a new industry. Openfield provided the perfect environment to not only expand my experience of working in a different industry, but also allowed me to grow greatly as a UX designer. Working in the educational technology space provided unique challenges that I was able to adapt to quickly. This was also my first time working for a design agency, so learning the pace of the various projects was a very different and welcome change to what I had been used to. Finally, as I grew in my role I was also able to make meaningful contributions to improve both Openfield’s process as well as Macmillan’s in a variety of ways.

During my time at Openfield, my client that I focused on working with was Macmillan Learning where I worked on their Achieve team. Achieve is a full service courseware solution that instructors could use to run their entire class. They could choose to build their course from scratch or choose from publisher provided content which was a distinguishing factor from our competition. Due to Achieve not being available to the public I cannot include pieces of my work in my portfolio, however I would be more than happy to share the projects that I worked on in person.

Working in the EdTech space was a fantastic opportunity to challenge myself in different ways from what I was used to at Fifth Third. One of the biggest differences is that when creating a solution for a particular problem, you actually are designing for 2 different users - instructors as well as students. It was critical to keep these two user types at the front of mind while designing an experience, because if there were disconnect between the two it could cause serious problems when an instructor is trying to help a student through an issue that they might have. Another key difference from the workflow I was accustomed to at the bank was that our releases were centered around the semesterly schedule that institutions follow. So instead of releasing fixes and new features as we would finish them, we would work towards big releases in the spring and fall. Because of this, we had to make sure that our designs were airtight which meant multiple rounds of validation testing throughout the entire process.

Being able to be so involved with research at Openfield was something that I valued greatly. We had an in house research team that the designers worked very close with, and I was able to learn a lot from them. Since it was so important to get our solutions correct off the bat, we tried to bring in users for input as early as possible. If a project was still in its discovery phase, we tried to get users input through surveys, interviews, and collaborative ideation sessions. All of these were great for helping us know if we were on target with what we perceived were problems, or if we needed to go back to the drawing board and reassess. We also did a variety of different validation tests, ranging from A/B testing to creating large prototypes for classic usability testing. Sometimes we would find that we were off the mark with our solutions and the usability tests would highlight big flaws in our designs when we were very far into the process, so it was very important to be adaptable so we could move quickly to solve the new problems.

One of the things I enjoyed doing as a part of research was creating in-depth and realistic prototypes to help get the best possible results from testing. In the past, I had mainly designed using Adobe products with a little experience in Sketch, but at Openfield I was able to develop and fine tune those skills in Sketch as well as other software like Figma and Axure. We switched from working in Sketch to Figma about halfway through my time at Openfield and it was a great change as we were able to move more quickly and collaborate directly in the same file. Learning Axure was also extremely valuable because it allowed us to create testing experiences that mirrored the live product. By mirroring the live product we were able to see where our users would actually go when presented with a particular problem, rather than simply creating a “happy path” for the user to follow.

I had the pleasure of playing a part in helping Openfield streamline their internal processes to help better suit our needs as our team grew. One big project that I worked on was helping refine our design critique sessions. Over time, our daily design critique meeting was becoming too formal, typically reserved for designs late into the process, when the intent for it was to be a collaborative meeting for projects at any step throughout its lifecycle. To solve this problem, we started encouraging people to bring in designs that were still in the discovery stage for feedback early on. We also encouraged our coworkers to engage in different discovery workshops if they were held up with a specific problem. We had many successful sketching sessions and gallery walk sessions that provided a change in pace to the regular design reviews and also helped our peers become unblocked with whatever problem they were working on. In addition to this, the daily meeting only had four 15-minute slots that we could sign up for to present. As our team expanded, those slots would quickly get filled up which posed a problem since our projects were usually very time sensitive. To fix this, we started to suggest that people should be available throughout the day (meetings permitting) to give more impromptu feedback. This was a huge success and proved to be invaluable once our team moved to work remote due to the COVID pandemic. We were already accustomed to being available throughout the day for feedback, so even though we weren’t working together in the office we didn’t feel isolated in our problems because our coworkers were available to help when we needed it.

Another project I began working on was creating a system to better track benchmarking and design inspiration that we would come across in our day to day life. Myself and two other co-workers noted this as a problem that we wanted to try and solve so we got together to try and work at it. In the past we usually shared design inspiration in our daily design collaboration Slack channel where things would easily get lost as the channel was one of our most active. So to start, we created a Slack channel specifically geared towards design inspiration so things people shared would be easier to track. In addition to this, we also wanted to create a repository that could easily be searched so when someone was looking for inspiration for a particular interaction type, they knew exactly where to go look.

Finally, in working on the Achieve team I noticed that our internal team had gaps in our knowledge of the entire product. Since Achieve was so large, our internal team only worked on about 4-5 out of the close to 10 different teams on Achieve and we noticed that many of those teams were becoming siloed off. To help with this, I set up “Achieve Knowledge Share” meetings where we took turns sharing what we knew about each of the different teams. This not only helped us fill the holes in our knowledge, but also gave us the tools to start to help break down the walls of the perceived silos.

At my time at Openfield I was able to build strong relationships with the Macmillan team and strengthen the trust that they had with us. Me and my peers working on the Achieve team routinely delivered designs that were well thought out and effective which showed the Macmillan team that we not only could get any job done that was thrown our way, but we were the best at taking on the most difficult challenges. This eventually led towards a team reorganization that placed myself on some of the most important teams within Achieve.

Achieve is a hub and spoke system where the hub of Achieve is Courseware with different tools branching off of it (Writing Tools, Assessment, Adaptive Quizzing, Production Tools, Customer Funnel, as well as many others). During my time at Openfield, I was able to get a wide variety of experience working on multiple teams. When I initially started, I primarily worked on the production tools team which focused on internal systems for content creators, customer service and admins. This was a great team to start on because it gave me a good understanding of how the entire system of Achieve worked since most of my work focused on the backend flows. From there I was moved around between a few different teams wherever resources were needed. This furthered my understanding of how the different teams work together to create a larger cohesive product. In learning more about the product as a whole, I started to notice gaps in consistency through a variety of flows and interactions. I made it a personal goal of mine to work towards filling those gaps to make a more consistent experience for our users. We had one large final team reorganization during my time at Openfield where I found myself as the lead designer on the Foundational Experience team, the team that focused on Courseware.

Being on the “hub” team, I was able to go to great lengths to try and improve the inconsistent experience for our users since our team touched all other teams. This was invaluable for me since in addition to being the lead on one of the main teams, Openfield’s lead researcher was placed on the team as our research resource. During my time on the FE team we were tasked with completing 12 different initiatives in about 3 months. Due to the large amount of juggling we were going to have to do to complete all of the projects in time, Sarah and I were able to try out a new method of organizing our projects that ended up being very successful. At the beginning of the year, our team met to level set on what progress had been made on the different initiatives as well as documenting all of the existing knowledge of each. From there we created a schedule looking out to the end of the semester that listed the order and amount of days each project would take, including both research and design time. This helped us throughout the semester to stay on top of all of our work while there were multiple projects running at the same time. This further built the trust that Macmillan had in our Openfield team as they saw firsthand how efficiently we were able to run while maintaining high quality output.

All in all, I think that Openfield was able to give me a great variety of experience that I will be able to take and apply to a role at any company. Working with my Openfield coworkers showed me how to collaborate extremely efficiently, even when we were working on different projects with different clients. We all had a good understanding of how one and another’s system functioned and our strong educational technology background allowed us to give helpful feedback on every problem we faced. In addition to this, I was able to get first hand experience working with a client which was something I hadn’t done in the past. We worked very hard to move at the pace that was required as Achieve moved towards leaving beta and the quality of our work never faltered even when we were under a lot of pressure to make deadlines. Openfield has given me the tools to confidently take on any project that is thrown my way and I am excited for the challenges that face me next.