Scaling a B2B education content marketplace
For: Teachers Pay Teachers
Timeline: 3 months in 2020
My skills: Interaction & interface design, UX research, Design system management, Creative workshop facilitation
Customer problem and business outcome
Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is a two-sided marketplace for teachers to buy and sell materials. A few months before I joined, TPT launched a B2B service, selling subscriptions to schools. These schools pay to access content and, in turn, provide content licenses to teachers. Thanks to this subscription, teachers don't have to pay out-of-pocket for as much teaching content.
One major problem, though, was that TPT account managers managed licenses for school admins. This process was a major pain point for teachers, administrators, and account managers. It made it difficult for teacher's to use the materials they needed on TPT. I designed and helped launch the first tools that admins could use to distribute content licenses to teachers. These tools improved customer acquisition and retention.
Work artifacts
Our team hub, a design single source of truth in Figma
The product manager and I managed an opportunity solution tree across our product scope. From that map, we prioritized potential solutions for this opportunity with other teammates. I facilitated workshops to help the team visualize these possibilities, so we could better decide and move forward together. I provided an overview and hub for the team in Figma that helped us stay focused, which you can see here.
User flows and writing the interface
Two of my favorite tools to explore design possibilities are user flows and a technique I call “writing the interface,” in which someone writes possible content and actions on a screen-like space. With my TPT team, I led collaborative exercises in these techniques: the product manager, researcher, and engineers I worked with quickly drew user flows and wrote the interface with me so we could explore concepts quickly together.
Playing with themes within brand guidelines
Analyzing options in interaction logic
Responsive layouts and final designs
