GoGuardian: Giant Steps

We worked closely with GoGuardian to design, test, and develop Giant Steps — a digitally-enhanced learning experience focused on driving better outcomes through thoughtful gamification and the best-in-education science.

Agency & Role: Instrument, Senior UX Strategist

Process & Methods: MVP Definition + Feature Prioritization, Sprint Planning, Information Architecture, User Stories + User Flows, Wireframing & Prototyping, Usability Testing, Product Requirements Documentation

Teachers, students, and parents alike are inundated with software and tools that promise better learning. However, as K-12 education incorporates online tools, most technology fails to translate learning science into compelling, digitally-enhanced learning experiences.

We dove deep into the market and their competitors before kicking off a series of ideation workshops to lay the foundation for how Giant Steps can impact learning in the classroom and beyond.

Together with GoGuardian, we came up with over 400 ideas across 13 features and narrowed them down into an MVP feasible to design and build within our timeline.

Once we established MVP requirements we crafted user stories, and developed user flows for each feature.

With collaboration and iteration at the core, our cross-disciplinary team of designers, strategists, producers, writers, and engineers designed, tested, and revised design hypotheses, for teachers and students.

Throughout the project, we worked at varying levels of fidelity, refining and improving upon the foundation of our design system, interaction patterns, and functionality.

User research was embedded from beginning to end, helping ensure that the end product is not only usable but valuable and compelling for teachers and their students alike.

We conducted a total of 8 research sprints, in which we recruited a diverse pool of teachers and students within our key target audiences across the country—paying special attention to diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, region, and school district.

Our team developed and refined a design system based on a bold and warm color palette with organic shapes and details that inspire joy and nostalgia. The system includes an extended color palette, new illustrations, and a rich typographic system.

The Playtime design system library includes functional tooling such as buttons, tooltips, toasts & badges. As well as an extended color palette and rich illustrations. The typographic system allows for creation of rich brand moments and highly functional typographic treatments.

Read more about Instrument's work for Giant Steps here.