Designing a flagship reading application with 20+ features for students, teachers, and admins

Scholastic wanted to create a reading application that would foster independent reading and empower educators

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Scholastic was looking to create their flagship digital product, which would be sold directly to schools and used by students, teachers, and administrators. 

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They hired our agency, Backpack Interactive, to research, design, and test the entire product.

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The goal was to create a product for elementary age students that would foster intrinsic motivation for independent reading.

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‍For teachers and administrators, the product should track student progress and provide actionable insights to drive instruction.

Students value choice, and educators want segmented, actionable data

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Research showed that 88% of kids say they are more likely to finish books that they pick themselves and that 89% of kids say that their favorite books are the ones they pick themselves.

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Teachers and administrators were interested in data that would specifically inform instruction at different levels: the student, the class, and the district.

Literacy Pro: a personalized reading experience for students and data deep-dive for educators

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I completed the information architecture, UX, and UI for Literacy Pro.

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For students, we designed a fully personalized reading experience, which included:

• A reading recommendation engine to generate personalized book recommendations
• An ereader and ebook library that hosted over 2,800 books from Scholastic’s library
• An advanced search function to filter by Lexile level, genre, interest, and number of pages
• Student profiles with the ability to see stats and set reading goals
• A reading log with the ability to log reading minutes and rate books

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For teacher and administrators, I designed the Scholastic Administrator Dashboard, which included:

• A advanced dashboard with over 60 data attributes across 6 categories of student data
• Drill-down data, giving educators the ability to drill down through data at the district level all the way to the student level, so they had actionable insights at each level of instruction.

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Released in 2019, Literacy Pro is still broadly used by hundreds of schools in the United States and 67 million reading minutes were recorded in 2023.

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An external case study also documented its efficacy in raising reading scores for 3rd graders by 20+ points on a state assessment. In addition, The Scholastic Administrator Dashboard won the 2023 SIIA CODiE Award for Best K–12 Solution.