Overview
Blackboard is one of the largest education organizations in the world with over 150 million users in 80 countries. Their flagship learning management (LMS) system delivers everything from online courses, exams, extensions, collaboration, and insights.
I was responsible for designing and coding new components for the New School design system, auditing and fixing accessibility issues, and building engaging interactions and animations.
Design System
Blackboard’s New School design language was created to make learning online fun and enjoyable. This language was actively being applied to all of Blackboard’s core software products by our team of UI Designers.
Learning Management System
My team was supporting Blackboard Learn. Learn is Blackboard’s flagship LMS product. The LMS was being built from the ground up as a responsive web and mobile application.
There were many iterations of the interface but we eventually landed on a card based layout with a left navigation for all the important spaces in the application.
This experience was called the “Ultra experience”. Here is a video with examples of the other pages and features we implemented in the new experience.
Help Documentation
One of my projects was to design the help documentation site. This is where customers can look up help documents for all of Blackboard’s products. There are a few ways to navigate the content, search, by persona, and by product.
The table of contents was an easy way for users to view the site map and find the documentation they needed by product.
Learnings
Blackboard was my introduction into the world of education technology, a field I am passionate about to this day. I would spend the next 6+ years in education technology aspiring to improve people’s lives through the power of learning. Technically, I learned a lot about Angular and web based components, scaling a design language in a large organization (not easy), and the importance of communicating expectations.