Pearson Places 2.0 launches on this day! (I finished up at Pearson earlier in the year, when the majority of the design work had been completed.)
Understanding the brief
Understanding the brief
- Pearson Places 1.0 had been in use by almost all schools and teachers across Australia since 2007, and wasn't very well maintained. It looked and felt dated
- My Product Manager and I spent many months talking to stakeholders and customers to understand what the new platform needed to be capable of
- In this stage, we produced a lot of low-fi wireframes, concept site maps, and user journeys
Building the design system
- We had to ensure that we aligned to the greater Pearson brand (which at the time was heavily print-based) and worked for as many people as possible
- I built the system from scratch in Figma, as Pearson didn't have any sort of UI library or guidelines
- We ensured responsiveness and ensured all screens were designed to accomodate our users on the most common device sizes
Building the platform
- With a team of developers, product managers, and designers, we spent many months redeveloping and reconceptualising Pearson Places
- I led a team of 3 junior designers on this project and Lightbook at the same time
- We had fortnightly presentations to stakeholders across the Australian business for feedback and progress updates
- The design for Pearson Places 2.0 was mostly finished by the end of 2019
User testing
- My team and I spent a month going to different types of schools across the country to do thorough user testing with teachers
- We stress-tested it with over 20 users, since there were many different personas we needed to validate
- The prototypes were very successful, so until the end of the year we were just making minor tweaks to address any feedback
Pearson Places is used by millions of users daily across Australia – in both primary and secondary schools, by teachers and students, as well as a significant number of internal users. This project was incredibly important and is considered to be very successful.