A learning community for kids

Primer, 2022

Overview

Primer is a startup with a mission to change the education system from the ground up. I joined Primer as the 1st designer and built the design team from scratch!

Established team design process, user research, and set the bar for design quality.
Managed Primer’s design team and internship program.
Led product & design strategy for key initiatives including Primer Clubs, Rooms, Pursuits, and Journals.
Partnered with a brand studio for the Primer rebrand and logo redesign initiatives.
Cultivated company culture during the pandemic by organizing remote-friendly events like lightning talks, birthday parties, and game sessions.

Highlights

During my time at Primer, we went through a lot of product strategy shifts! As an early-stage startup, we had to pivot a lot to find product market fit. These are some of my favorite projects we worked on:

Live, audio chat spaces for learning

Primer Rooms were live, interactive experiences for small groups! Both educators and students could design and lead learning experiences using this tool.

Pen (12), a student who loves to draw, started a weekly club on their own called Really Cool People Person's Club (RCPPC for short) using Primer Rooms. A group of ~10 preteens met on a weekly basis to practice drawing and critiquing each other's work.

Multi-week, immersive learning experiences

After experimenting with short one-off events, we realized that parents might be more willing to pay for long-form experiences similar to courses. We launched Galactic Explorations as our first experience where students worked together to research and discover exoplanets.

Connecting teen artists from around the world

We realized that managing COPPA regulations were hindering our ability to quickly grow our online community. I led an experiment called Art Fair where we tested a limited experience for teen (13+) artists. Art Fair reached nearly 1k sign ups in a month.

With this experiment, we modified the structure of clubs to have more structure including daily art prompts, required feedback cycles, and organized art swaps.

Customization for empowering the community

We wanted to empower our students to feel like they had ownership over the online community! In fact, Primer's motto's was 'Take kids seriously.' One of the first projects I led was a custom background editor that used CSS. The vision was to eventually make the editor into an educational experience similar to how Neopets personally taught me CSS 😇.

Led team user research trip to Miami schools

The last pivot we made was creating in-person microschools. I won't dive into all the details, but I led a full-team user research trip to Miami to conduct research! Our goals were to:

Dive deeper into known pain points
Surface pain points that teachers and students have in the Microschools classrooms
Return with shared language and artifacts that help the team make product decisions

Built the design team from the ground up

I established the Primer's design process, user research, and set the bar for design quality. Everyone on the team had a basic understanding of Figma and was able to create mock ups using our design library!

This image is from one of our earliest team brainstorms for building out a challenges system.

Creating student-designed Primer merch

One of the best parts about working at Primer was that we worked with students to design our merch. I think we had some of the best company swag our there 😈.