Brand & Design System at Outschool

Background

Outschool is a marketplace of small-group online classes for kids with 3 audiences: parents, educators, and kids. Over 2 years, Outschool grew from 100K users to 1MM users world-wide.

Over this time, I led 2 rounds of rebranding and design system updates — first as the solo designer, then as the design executive collaborating with the CMO to evangelize and implement the change across the company.

Approach

When I first joined, I created the initial brand guide that aligned design, marketing, and support to provide a holistic experience. I also created a design system that was easy to implement for our 4-person engineering team.

When Outschool grew to a 10X bigger business, I worked with the CMO and brand consultants on a rebrand, then led designers to create a new design system and and coordinate the transition with a 50+ person product and engineering org.

Highlights

Initial Brand & Design System (2019)

I created this first brand guide as the solo designer for a startup of 20 people, prioritizing ease of understanding and adaptability across technical and non-technical teams, so that each team is empowered to run fast while staying coherent.

Similarly, the design system focused on guiding instead of constraining, so engineers are empowered to adapt to new needs by following the spirit of the guide.

Rebrand & Robust Design System (2022)

As the Head of UX at our now 180-person company, I was 1 of 3 executives leading a rebrand to better engage teenage students as identified by market research. Collaborating with an external branding agency, we provided essential context, balanced aspirational goals with practical execution, and secured company-wide buy-in.

After the new brand was established, I led the design team in creating a design system that extends the primary brand colors and improves accessibility. Then we worked closely with product and engineering to transition to the new brand cohesively without slowing down feature development.

My raison d'être as a design leader was to transform Outschool from a transactional platform where "parents buy classes" to a engaging experience "where kids love to learn." This involved reimagining Outschool's brand, running iterative experiments, evangelizing across product, engineering, and CX, and cultivating a UX team that had expertise on kids.

A few of the many accomplishments in this effort: introduced Learner Mode which captured 34% of total MAU, introduced Learner Groups which had 100X higher engagement than async classes, invented "love of learning" impact metric, unlocked a new business model that's not limited by "zoom fatigue" or live teacher time.

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