As the Associate Director of User Research at BrainPOP and multi-disciplinary UXer, I’m focused on building an inclusive, participatory research practice. I believe ethical edtech is built on and from authentic community relationships.
As a leader in a hybrid world (and a New Yorker in LA), I also care about cultivating joyful, productive remote workspaces.
I’ve had many lives — as a writer, translator, teacher, and edtech startup multi-tool — but you could sum it up by saying I care about the cycle of how people learn and express themselves. So you’ll find me in my cyclical learning journey tumbling over in an attempt at headstand or learning new vocabulary in French conversation class.
Talking and Writing
🎞 Talk Harnessing the Power of Lived Experience via Co-Design
Feb 2023 • When we talk about “democratizing” research, often we’re describing a process of making it easier for folks who don’t have “research” in their title to enact specific processes, but what about the people with lived experience of the problem we’re trying to solve?
📰 Blog Inside BrainPOP’s New Co-Teacher Feature: Collaboration, Flexibility, and Choice
Jan 2021 • How an exploratory study on remote special education became the basis for one of BrainPOP’s newest features.
📰 Interview Professional Writers at Work Series @ NYU's Center for Applied Liberal Arts
Oct 2020 • Wondering how UX research and writing go together? So were they!
👀 Other writing samples available upon request. (Or you can check my very occasionally active Medium and my Q&As on the Learners app.)
Working with Me
Managing a Team
I was reluctant to step into the role of team leader and manager at first, but over time I’ve realized that it’s a teaching and coaching role as much as anything else. The best part is enabling researchers to do what they do best and stretch their skills. Here are a couple of pages from a “README” I created to help onboard direct reports into what it’s like to work with me.
BrainPOP User Research Playbook
When I work with cross-functional partners, I want to everyone to feel like we’re on the same journey, using the same map. So the BrainPOP UXR team and I created (and rigorously update) a playbook that lays it all out: our ways of working, philosophy, ethics, and specific approaches to crafting relevant research and actionable insights. Every research projects includes diverse collaborators at every stage, so we’re constantly offering ways for other members of the organization to hone their research craft. Here are a few sample slides from a Playbook workshop I led on how we can use common product development paradigms to craft artful research questions.
Sample slides from Playbook training. Longer excerpt upon request.
This work is owned by BrainPOP and I was involved as part of a team in creating this work while working with BrainPOP.
Founding UX Writing
In 2018, I helped establish the foundations of what would become the UX writing practice at BrainPOP. Grassroots function creation is weird! But through the creation of a writing guide, partnerships with designers, and early stabs at creating “community of practice” working groups, we got somewhere. The best decision was finding an incredible solo UX writer to tackle the challenge of scaling UXW full time.
Insights in Action
Here are a few examples of recent projects and launches I have contributed to.
Encouraging Report Design
As the “national report card” tanked during the 2022-23 school year, schools and districts became more focused on having access to rigorous, formative data on how students are doing. But how do we support a data story that supports quality instruction without creating a culture of surveillance? How do we keep the needs and capacity of our spread-thin teacher workforce at the heart of this work? Research tackled this philosophical and design strategy for BrainPOP’s newly launched administrator reports. And when we had to start from scratch to create reporting for teachers, we led a deeply embedded co-design process with teachers as active contributors and decision-makers.
Lesson Plan Content Design
Highlighter testing on two markedly different lesson plans helped us develop style guidelines that speak not only to what makes a lesson plan valuable, but also what information is most meaningful to teachers. Through a series of collaborative analysis exercises and cross-functional workshops, we developed principles that are now being applied in Learning Design, Product Design, and Professional Learning.
Sample slides from presentation which illustrate how high level findings translated into user-centered style principles. Longer excerpt upon request.
This work is owned by BrainPOP and I was involved as part of a team in creating this work while working with BrainPOP.