Best in Class

Content Design, Strategy, and Product Development, 2021-2023

At Common Sense we found that teachers were even more time-strapped after distance learning than before. As a result, our primary experience for finding tools — browse and search — wasn’t as appealing as when it was first designed in 2012. This motivated me to workshop the Best in Class content type. The goal was to create a new experience that would capture interest from search (which accounted for 90% of our traffic) and offer teachers a fast way to research tools we’ve vetted.

Since product development time was in short supply, we tested it first using our blog articles. The idea of my initial prototypes was to present teachers with just a few actionable recommendations out of a massive field of possibilities. We’d also showcase our approachable editorial voice in small snippets. 

This test went well, showing high satisfaction among users and a lot of engagement up and down the page. As a result, myself and a small team including a product manager, engineers, copywriter, and product designer, used a design studio process to develop, test, and iterate a brand new content type. I served as the key content stakeholder and worked with the copywriter on boiler plate copy. I also created the editorial processes and style guides the guided the curations as well as the design of the page. Together, my editorial team developed and wrote all of the curations.

During the design studio process we slimmed the initial prototype down, automated a lot of the content generation on the page, and developed a comparison table at the bottom of the page that provided at-a-glance analysis across all the products on the page. The new content type reduced page creation time significantly and tested extremely well with users.