Newsela:
Knowledge Pages

Newsela provides engaging, relevant instructional content for teachers. With nearly two million teachers signed up, Newsela helps kids improve their reading skills in all 50 states and more than 150 countries.

The problem

Discovering content that satisfies the learning needs of a teacher’s classroom, and expectations of district administrators, is time consuming and complicated. Teachers felt that it was difficult to balance finding relevant quality content with having enough time to assign it to their students.

Finding relevant articles and videos previously relied on a teacher searching for and sifting through individual pieces of content.

My role

I defined the visual look of the new content discovery experience and was involved in giving feedback and collaborating on the functionality from its inception to its execution. I worked with one product designer, one copywriter, one user experience researcher, one product manager and two engineers.

Understanding our users

To tackle this problem, the content discovery team and I interviewed a diverse group of educators using Newsela to figure out the primary drivers for teacher decision-making when looking for educational content. During these sessions, we interviewed the teachers about how they find content for their classrooms, how they wanted to find it, and how they made their decisions about what content to assign their students. Once we understood their motivations and how they use Newsela, we then were able to create an optimal solution that would improve the content discovery experience for our users.

Improving the content discovery experience

Working together with my team in content discovery, I created a refined experience that incorporated a variety of types of content for teachers. Instead of having to search for individual articles or videos related to a topic, a teacher now has access to a landing page experience that groups together relevant articles, videos and educational standards that are tied to the subject. 

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