The Lexia Core5® Reading Skill Checks was one of the first projects where I served as Product Design Lead. In this role, I guided every aspect of the design process—writing art specifications, prototyping user experiences, leading UI/UX design, and collaborating with 3D artists to develop a templated system for celebration animations.
Skills: Project Management, UX Strategy, Prototyping, UI Design, 2D and 3D Art Direction
The Challenge
Design an additional task that provides students the opportunity to demonstrate proficiency in the skills they just learned that looks like it belongs in the program, but removes distractions to allow the student to focus on the task at hand. Additionally, navigation through activities needed to be adjusted to show progress and display information about these new tasks.
Design Exploration
Navigation
I started with an idea to complete the existing menu and open up a new menu that showcased art and presented the activities in a more celebratory way to indicate this is the last step before level completion.
Task Backgrounds & Progress Monitoring
For task backgrounds, we needed to minimize distractions, be flexible when it came to hosting tasks, and still feel like it belonged in the same product. Working with a team of creatives, we decided to explore utilizing elements from existing activity backgrounds to create monotoned patterns that build connections to previous tasks. For question counters, we decided to explore a standard graphical element to track progress.
Skills: UX/UI Design, User Research
Tools: Adobe XD for design and prototyping, Adobe Illustrator for background design, Confluence and Jira for specs and tickets.
Celebrations
One of the things that makes Lexia Core5® Reading’s design special, is that everything is unique and custom. So, how do we maintain that level of detail with templates?
Working with 3D artists, I helped establish the idea of utilizing templated animations. With these templates, we can swap out all elements to make each celebration unique. From swapping text, images and celebratory elements like confetti and balloons, we were able to create 125 unique celebrations using only 6 templates.
Skills: UX Design, 3D templating knowledge, Project Management of art asset creation
Tools: Photoshop, 3DS Max consult and review
The results
After numerous iterations, reviews and student testing, we decided to rely on common UI elements already known to our students for progress monitoring and task selection.
With the addition of custom, patterned backgrounds and templated celebrations, I was able to lead a team of 2D and 3D artists, and UI/UX designers to design and deliver a cohesive feature that looks like it has always been part of the well established product.
Skills: Team leadership, Product and Project Management
Tools: Confluence and Jira for specs and tickets.