Pearson
After success with Wall Street English, Pearson transferred me to their Higher Education division - a collection of many individual products, teams, platforms, and strategies in general. This was the rude awaking of a 100+ year old publishing company figuring out how to create digital products. Pearson was vocal about their need to transform - and I knew if I could help them fundamentally build better products I would improve the lives of their massive market of learners.
My role within this group changed day to day, as the company changed directions, in general they were as follows:
30% Design Ops - “How can we help our designers do their best work?”
25% Design System Strategy - Translating company goals to actionable initiatives.
25% Product Consulting - IA, Interaction Design, and Visual Design consultations.
20% Design System Delivery - Creating guidance and implementation assistance for our users, Higher Ed designers.
Design Systems
UX Framework
This was the team I first assisted when joining Pearson’s Higher Ed group. From the nitty gritty of individual components to selling it’s adoption to the wider group.
Gravity
This was the second design system undertaken by the Higher Ed group and more encompassing. My contributions ranged from designing individual components, ways for teams to contribute to Gravity’s development, to defining the final set of principals that guided all of our products.
Information Architecture
Throughout both of the design systems and the various teams use of them, I recognized the need to unify our information architectures. Figuring out how to produce something helpful and long lasting for the wildly different needs of all our different products was probably my favorite task at Pearson. Interviewing designers and gaining their buy-in, while developing a handful of elegant solutions for our mountain of use cases proved to be challenging and educational.
Technically “Organization Systems” is more precise, but keeping “Information Architecture” made this topic easier to convey when presenting.
These navigation diagrams here were based upon existing patterns to ensure easier adoption and increased consistency.
This element of IA was the most transformative, as it was the first cross-product push for a unified search strategy.
Labeling is an often overlooked part of IA strategy, and defining this to be applicable to products using different design systems (or none at all) was a helpful challenge.
What I Learned
The highlights of what I learned at Pearson Higher Ed are largly around design ops and the further development of what I call Oversimplifications. Here’s the basic format:
A memorable mantra ( “_____ over _____” )
Why is this important? (one paragraph)
Summarize the idea and outcome. (one sentence)
Like this:
Teach > Tell — “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for the day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime.” This is true of design as well. If you take the extra effort so that your product owner, developer, and other designers truly understand the rationale of your design decisions, you head-off the unhelpful questions and invite the helpful ones. Helping others understand your design logic enhances future collaboration.