Teachable

Teachable

As Teachable’s Head of Design, I led a team of Product Designers working across various vertical, cross-functional teams. Alongside my Product and Engineering peers, I led strategy for products for knowledge business owners, focusing on outcomes versus outputs. During my time at Teachable we introduced and executed on the product Design System, implemented a company rebrand, migrated our admin frontend, and scaled from a centralized team of 2 product designers to a team of 10, to name a few accomplishments.

Frontend Migration

In early 2021, Teachable’s Product directors partnered with our Engineering counterpart and decided to address years’ worth of tech and UX debt. We weighed the pros and cons of slowing down to speed up, and determined we would dedicate 3 quarters towards migrating our frontend code, and opportunistically tackle some UX papercuts. By partnering with our colleagues on our Customer Care team, calling upon a researcher to gather user feedback, gathering data regarding user behavior, and tightly coupling this effort with the build-out of the Design System, we were able to not only see immediate performance improvements, but we were also able to pull in the rebrand into the product, creating a more cohesive feeling for our users.

As of September 2021, we were still gathering feedback from users, keeping an eye on our metrics, and continuously evaluating the new experiences across the board to measure improvements and need to adjust.

Design System

Anyone who knows me, knows I love Design Systems. When I arrived at Teachable, there was no system in place, creating unnecessary efforts across our Design and Engineering teams. This effort has gained quite a bit of traction over the past few years, and in 2021 we were finally able to hire a dedicated DS team made up of 1 visual designer and 2 FE developers. This effort has made our FE migration effort significantly easier and measurable.

Here are some metrics to date, September 2021.

• Number of components imported: 695

• Number of components created: 55

That’s 640 components that didn’t need to be re-created.
That’s 640 times we avoided stylistic and behavioral inconsistencies in the app.
640 “free” components × 15 hours* = 9,600 hours saved

 *a conservative estimate, since it includes Design, Engineering, and QA.

Rebrand

In May of 2020, Teachable underwent a rebrand, updating a look created in its nascent phases to a more contemporary feel, better aligning to our Creators’ needs and our mission. This effort initially rolled out on our Marketing site and collateral assets, and in late 2020 slowly began to make its way into our product by way of our Design System.