Capstone Connect

EdTech B2B & B2C | Educators & Students | Responsive Web | March - Sept 2022

Role

Senior Product Designer
Mentor to Junior Designer

Teams

Product (PM, Design, Engineering

Stakeholders/Partners: Content Strategy, Publishing Teams, Marketing

Tools

Adobe XD
Miro
Jira/Confluence
Mircrosoft Teams

Users

K-5 Teachers
Elementary Librarians
K-5 Students

Problem & Opportunities

  • Capstone Connect is a digital hub combining thousands of standards-aligned, instructional resources — including PebbleGo modules and Capstone eBooks — into one platform for K–5 educators.

  • During COVID-19 and beyond, distance learning pressures made it critical for teachers to have curriculum-aligned content that could be easily found, understood, and shared within their district’s LMS. Since then, it has unlocked various modalities of learning in and out of the classroom.

  • While Capstone Connect was designed to meet this need, educator feedback revealed major usability challenges, limiting adoption and impact.

The Challenge

From the business side, Capstone also faced:

  • Uncertainty on core teacher needs and feature priorities

  • Lack of clarity on where to invest for ed-tech growth

  • Integration of a recent Buncee acquisition into the product suite in an intuitive way

  • A backlog of accessibility fixes from a third-party audit that needed implementation

Why It Matters

  • For teachers: the potential to save time, simplify lesson prep, and meet state requirements through a single, easy-to-use platform.

  • For Capstone: an opportunity to increase adoption and revenue, find product-market fit, and strengthen market leadership in K–5 nonfiction educational content while integrating seamlessly with major LMS platforms.

Goals, Outcomes & Success Metric

  • Increase educator adoption and engagement by ~15%

    • To increase client roster and annual revenue

  • Streamline content discovery and align the product with real user needs

  • Identify market gaps to inform roadmap priorities

  • Deliver a more inclusive, accessible experience

  • Position Capstone as a must-have curriculum tool in schools

Qualitative Outcomes

  • Higher teacher confidence in finding aligned resources

  • Clearer navigation paths that matched educator mental models

  • Increased interest in Capstone Connect adoption

Strategic Outcomes

  • Research-backed recommendations to shape the ed-tech roadmap

  • Defined prioritization criteria for future features based on educator value

  • Strengthened Capstone’s positioning in the teacher tools market

Research & Discovery

Approach, Activities & Methods

  • Surveys with partner schools and educator panel to benchmark current tool usage, pain points, and competitive tools

  • Competitive Analysis to review how other Ed-Tech companies hand account creation,

  • User Interviews to uncover the “why” behind teacher behaviors and frustrations

  • Contextual Inquiry to observe real-world planning and sharing workflows

  • Heuristic Evaluation to identify usability and accessibility gaps

Learnings

  • Educator quote: “I need to find materials by standard first, not by product type.”

  • Teachers need all core content (state guidelines, rubrics, activities) in one place

  • Materials must accommodate all reading levels within a grade

  • LMS integration is essential (Canvas, Blackboard, Google Classroom, Moodle)

  • Navigation should support standards-first searching rather than product-first browsing

  • There were negative sentiments: Difficult to navigate and time-consuming to use, Poorly aligned to how teachers plan lessons and units, Unclear in which materials matched standards, Lacking a clear, consistent information hierarchy, Limited in sharing content with students

Competitive Analysis

  • Review other Ed-Tech companies’ offerings, how they organize their products and services, how to create an account and manage content, and lessons.

  • Review Content Product Analysis in the EdTech Top 40

  • I learned there are a lot of Ed-Tech tools and solutions out there. How might Capstone cut through the noise, position itself as an aggregated solution, and do it affordably, as school budgets are always getting cut?

Exploratory Educator Survey

  • Goal: Better understand the experience and environment of teaching K-5 (6) right now.

  • Mix of open-ended and quant questions

  • Sent to friends, family and Capstone advisory board members

  • Areas/Pain Points discovered:

    • Teachers need things that help with time savings: lesson prep/planning that ties in with existing curriculum, units, standards and topics

    • Easy ways to give feedback on work that is personal and multi-modal (video, audio — not always written)

    • Need ways to keep kids ‘locked in’ and focused on the task at hand

    • Each lesson and child has different needs: Whole group mode, small group mode, individual mode

    • Easy integration to existing tools ans LMS

    • Community aspectes - easy ways to create, collab, share and build onto what other teachers have created.

Contextual Inquiry with Former Teachers

  • Exploring curriculum, state standards and other requirements to understand the education domain from former educators turned content strategists.

Contextual Inquiry with Current Teachers

  • Learned so much about the struggles in today’s classrooms, the scope of the work and all teachers juggle

“Struggle, so many different things in so many different places …Have to go to like 11 places to figure out where it's stored “ — Tiffany, 1st grade

“The time is takes to get kids used to each tool - to get to a level where they're producing and sharing. …Tools don't work well together …Using too many tools to do a simple thing.” — Andy, Library Media Specialist

Ideation, Design & Iteration

Activities & Methods

Concept Prototyping and Usability Testing to validate navigation, hierarchy, feature capabilities and placement

Design Considerations Decisions

  • Restructure navigation around content curriculum standards

  • Unify search across all Capstone resources

  • Streamline content sharing for teachers

  • Define MVP based on prioritized feature needs

  • Improved content hierarchy and consistent terminology

  • Seamless integration of Buncee into educator workflows

  • Implementation of prioritized accessibility fixes

MVP Wireframes & Options

  • Based on all the research, there were several different directions we could go.

  • I worked up 4 options that needed input from Engineering on feasibility on a few fronts: integrations, navigation, timing what would take longer than other features.

  • We did a half-day workshop to review, workshop, and discuss the pros and cons and map out the impact and effort on a 2x2

Prototype & User Test

  • “I need to find materials by standard first, not by product type.”

  • Teachers and Students got to test out a concept for Captone Connect that allowed them to:

    • Create collections

    • Add content base don state and grade level content

    • Add a variety of content to the collection: ebooks, articles, learning activities

    • Customize the Collection

    • Share the collection with fellow teachers and to students

Testing, Iteration & Validation

Approach & Plan

Have educators help us prioritize our backlog of features to roll out for Capstone Connect

Activities & Methods

Feature Card Stort

Learnings

  • Core Curriculum First – Prioritize reading/writing and math as foundational offerings, ensuring alignment with standards.

  • Accessibility as Standard – Include Immersive Reader (translation, reading support) and voice search at all subscription levels.

  • Discovery Improvements – Implement cross-platform search, “read more” recommendations, and interactive tools to support exploration.

  • Content Preferences – Provide high-quality eBooks, instructional videos, and pre-made lessons; offer high-interest topics and current events to engage students.

  • Pricing Strategy – Avoid paywalls for essential features; reserve premium tiers for exclusive content, not basic functionality.

  • Video Expansion – Develop more instructional videos to complement text-based resources.

Educator Card Sort at ISTE Conference

At the ISTE Conference, we partnered with teachers in hands-on card and feature sorting sessions, uncovering how they think, what they value most, and translating those insights into clear navigation, prioritized features, and MVPs grounded in real classroom needs.

We had them rank the following feature categories:

  • Package Incentives

  • Discovery

  • Content

  • Teacher Supports

  • Personalization

  • Content Medium Types

Building & Governing a Design System

As features and scope were more defined, start building out a design library and system that is easy to pull from and evolve/govern over time.

Impact & Reflections

How did I lead, collaborate, or unblock work efforts?

  • Mentored a junior designer throughout the research and design process

  • Unified cross-functional stakeholders (product, engineering, content)

  • Advocated for educator-centered decision-making

  • Introduced a repeatable research framework for future initiatives

What kind of strategic or systems-level impact did I have?

  • Teachers shared positive feedback around content discovery

  • Prioritized features aligned directly with top user needs

  • Capstone saw increased adoption of Connect across districts

  • “75% task success rate in usability testing”

  • “42% increase in content sharing after redesign”

What did I learn and what would I improve next time?

  • Align research timing with educator schedules — avoid summer downtime

  • Offer flexible, lightweight feedback channels for busy teachers

  • Conferences like ISTE provide a unique opportunity for authentic, high-volume educator input