Newsela – Newsela Lite

Newsela:
Newsela Lite

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

Newsela's product offerings are unclear in regards to what differentiates one from the other. With such limited understanding, encouraging teachers and administrators to upgrade from a free account to a paid license became an extremely difficult task.

Newsela as a free product versus a paid product were functionally identical, leaving it unclear what benefits came from having a paid license.

My role

I led this project from a design standpoint as the lead product designer. I was in charge of creating designs for all aspects of Newsela Lite. In addition, I oversaw the partnership with all other teams across the product organization and worked to address any design discrepancies and needs. I also worked closely together with the engineers building Newsela Lite to make sure that all designs were accurately built and implemented. While this effort involved countless individuals, I worked primarily with the product differentiation team. This consisted of one product manager, one copywriter, one tech lead, one user experience researcher, three QA engineers and nine software engineers.

Mapping out a new experience

In order to help emphasize Newsela's value in the classroom, the product team was directed to create a clearer separation between the free and paid experience. The free experience, Newsela Lite, would now offer teachers four hand-picked articles that would get cycled out over the course of a month and give them a preview of what's available to them if they start a 45 day full-access trial.

These changes necessitated a massive audit of the product as a whole. Pulling together designs from each product team at Newsela, I worked with my product manager to figure out what changes needed to be made for the Lite version of each product feature. From there, I then created a library of assets to be implemented throughout the product to indicate what is available to a Lite user and what is a premium-only feature.

Onward towards release

Once designs were hammered out, I worked together with our research team to put Newsela Lite in front of teachers in order to gauge user sentiment and to see if any further modifications were needed to offer our users a better experience. Through continued partnership with this team as well as our engineering and quality assurance leads, I made sure to keep the designs up to date to reflect feedback from testing as well as from our internal stakeholders.