Common Core Standards
This was a huge project with over a half a billion dollars budget. It involved several teams across US and it was done in collaboration with Apple Computers. The object of the projects was to create an iPad app for the use in schools by students, teachers and administrators. I was in charge of UX for one of the teams responsible for a section of the project and also for a period of time I coordinated work of different UX designers and researcher to ensure consistency of design.
​
You can learn more about CCS here.
General App Structure
We started with reviewing the project requirements and discussing possible way sof structuring content and navigation. This gave us a general direction which governed further work on particular sections of the app. Since we had several hundred people working in different teams in agile it was important to gain the consensus early and to follow the pattern. That allowed us to move fairly quickly from concept to prototype.
​
You can see the sample document here.
Working in Agile UX
Since this was a large and complicated project we worked in several teams using agile methodology. In order to move fast most of the initial sketches were done on the whiteboard with the whole team participating. That allowed our dev team to start ahead with all the programming while designers were finishing up details. This also reduced the workload on producing documentation as in most cases we would use an annotated photo of the whiteboard as documentation.
​
Adding proper wireframes
During the sprint, while dev teams worked on backend and functionality I would quickly create proper wireframes based on earlier defined design strategy and whiteboard sketches. This was done to generate a proper documentation for the project as well as to iron out any details overlooked during design sprint.
​
You can see the sample document here.
Applying Styles
In order to again minimize the amount of documentation and to maintain the speed of the project we developed a library of styles. Those were immediately applied to the prototype via CSS and after the review and testing any necessary changes were applied directly on the staging server. This was loosely based on Atomic Design principles and Live Styles coding environment.
​