Sown To Grow
About the Project
Sown To Grow is a web-based platform that enables schools to improve student social, emotional, and academic well-being through a weekly classroom check-in and feedback process.
I was initially hired as the founding UX and visual designer responsible for re-architecting two separate teacher-led products into a harmonious experience tailored for district-wide implementation, as well as creating a mission-aligned visual brand reflected across product, curriculum, and website.
I am now working with the team on a contract basis advising on UX efforts and supporting on visual design for product and marketing fronts.
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UX/ UI design
Product re-design
Visual Identity
Design System
Illustration
Motion graphics
Website design
Marketing Collateral
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February 2019 - present
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Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe After Effects
Lottie Files
Procreate
Foundations
When I joined, one of my priorities was to get to know the types of people we wanted to serve. To do this, I conducted multiple 30-minute interviews with teachers, principals, and school admins, as well as visited classrooms to observe how students were engaging with our product, gathering feedback in situ.
The outcome of my research was documentation of our personas— their goals, needs, journeys, and frustrations, culminating in a company-wide UX website that can be updated, shared, and referenced to ensure a user-centered approach for product design.
As the team expanded and I moved to a contract role as I pursued my master’s degree, the new principle designer has since added new personas as our product and company vision grew.
Research
Documenting the teacher customer journey from introduction to our product to reaching engagement (when teachers were our main decision-maker user base) helped me to understand any friction points that might come up in the adoption process of our platform. I also made sure to note where divergences happen between successful and less successful types of engagement.
Design System
When I joined, the STG team was outsourcing a variety of stock images, UI, and photography to build their brand.
I initiated the discussion of redesigning Sown To Grow’s entire customer-facing interface to align how our team wanted the company to be perceived:
Accessible
Inclusive
Professional
To do this, I curated a selection of colors, fonts, standard page layouts, and customized interactive components.
The result was a library of modular, reusable assets, the Design System, that is used cross-functionally to design for the product as well as for marketing and outreach materials.
As part of this work, in an effort to standardize and unify brand aspects across product and outreach teams, I lead a collaboration with the new Senior UX designer to create a brand guideline website.
Illustration
For Sown To Grow, I developed a bespoke illustration style that matched the welcoming and friendly brand we wanted to illicit.
Because Sown To Grow wanted it clear that they were a student-first, person-first brand, the illustrations I created are mostly made up of inclusive character art.
These illustrations together formed an extensive, diverse library of vector and animated assets, and they are used not only in our platform, but in our outreach collateral and website.
Core Product
When I first joined, the Sown To Grow product was split into two.
Custom Teacher Platform
Meant to be a catch-all platform to be customized on a case-by-case basis for each classroom.
After signing up, teachers can set up their students’ check in cadence (cycles), as well as the parameters of the check ins. Students will then reflect on how they feel during the cycle and their reflections will be tracked over time. Teachers are also able to respond with feedback.
Advisory Teacher Platform
A tailored version of the custom platformed, optimized for teachers to help students keep track of their grades and reflect on their own performance.
Teachers are also able to respond to their students’ reflections with feedback.
New Platform
The strategic opportunity was to reposition the product from a teacher-led adoption model to a school-wide SEL infrastructure platform, where administrators owned deployment and configuration, and teachers focused on facilitation.
I led the re-architecture of the product to support this shift:
- Designed an administrator dashboard as the primary control surface for configuring, assigning, and monitoring SEL modules across schools.
- Reframed modules into a scalable content library, enabling schools to standardize or mix SEL experiences based on student needs and school support goals.
- Designed role-based experiences for administrators, teachers, and students, reducing cognitive load by tailoring complexity to each role.
- Streamlined the teacher experience, removing setup overhead so their role became primarily facilitation.
- Maintained a lightweight, consistent student experience to preserve engagement while enabling structured data collection.
- Established a framework for age-band differentiated student experiences, starting with a highly engaging early learner experience.
Project Snapshots
Differentiated Experience for Young Learners
As we branched out into a young learner user base, it became necessary to create a version of our platform that catered their specific needs. This included a differentiated illustration and UI style, simplified language and navigation, as well as features to accommodate read-aloud functionality.
I began this effort by creating a survey experience. The initial research, UX learnings, UI patterns and illustrations I compiled then informed the design of other features that needed to also be adjusted for our young learners.
Marketing Support
As part of several marketing campaigns, I collaborated with our head of marketing and outreach to develop a series of both print and digital collateral.
Notable projects included:
K-2 poster series
Adult SEL card game
Sensory grounding stickers
Animated graphics
Infographics
TL;DR?
I’ve summarized this project in a slide show, which you can check out below.