Middle School Learning Platform
Peekapak
2022
ROLE
PRODUCT DESIGNER. SUPPORTED THE ROLLOUT OF THE MIDDLE SCHOOL LEARNING PLATFORM AS PART OF A COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TEAM.
IMPACT
+32% STUDENT TIME MANAGEMENT
+35% COMFORT LEVELS
+46% EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY
-30% STRESS LEVELS
INTRODUCTION
I joined Peekapak as a Product Designer to support the rollout of a new middle school learning platform, expanding the company’s existing elementary offering.
Prior to my involvement, Peekapak had identified a clear opportunity to serve middle school classrooms and conducted early discovery work with educators. This research revealed a critical constraint:
The platform designed for elementary learners could not effectively support middle school use cases.
Differences in learner autonomy, instructional structure, and curriculum complexity meant that adapting the existing product would introduce usability and scalability issues.
My role focused on helping translate these early insights into a usable, scalable product foundation.
USER RESEARCH
Before exploring solutions, we focused on building a foundational understanding of our users to ensure the product direction was grounded in real classroom needs.
I conducted 5 qualitative interviews with teachers, parents, and school administrators to understand how middle school learning environments differ from elementary settings.
Due to ethical and legal constraints, I was unable to interview students directly. Instead, teachers and parents served as proxy users, providing insight into student behaviors, expectations, and challenges.
In parallel, we reviewed middle school curricula across multiple subjects to better understand instructional goals, learning outcomes, and classroom dynamics.
This helped us align the product not just to user preferences, but to the educational intent behind the curriculum.
We identified the following insights, helping shape our digital strategy and subsequent design decisions:
Together, these insights reinforced the need for a purpose-built middle school experience—one that respected student maturity while supporting educators’ instructional goals.
STAKEHOLDERS & USER ARCHETYPES
We translated our findings into user archetypes to help humanize the data and bridge the gap between research and design.
These archetypes ensured that product decisions stayed grounded in real needs, constraints, and motivations throughout the project. Through this process, we identified two primary stakeholder groups with distinct goals and responsibilities:
Distinguishing between buyers and users helped us balance strategic decision-making with everyday usability—ensuring the platform met institutional requirements without compromising the learning experience.
DIGITAL STRATEGY
Rather than adapting the elementary experience, we carried forward its core SEL foundations and evolved them to reflect a key developmental shift: moving from learning concepts to applying them in real-world situations.
Recognizing the role of social-emotional learning in supporting both student well-being and academic success, we set out to design a curriculum intentionally built for the middle school context.
By weaving these stories throughout the platform, abstract SEL principles were translated into tangible scenarios that encouraged empathy, self-reflection, and critical thinking. This approach helped students understand not just what the concepts were, but why they mattered—and how to apply them beyond the classroom.
WIREFRAMING & OUTLINING THE CURRICULUM
We curated a broad set of human-centered SEL stories and worked closely with educators to identify the core concepts each story could support.
This collaboration helped ensure the curriculum aligned with middle school developmental needs while remaining practical for classroom use.
In parallel, we created low-fidelity wireframes to map the end-to-end user journey and define the platform’s primary features.
These wireframes allowed us to validate content flow, lesson structure, and interaction patterns early, ensuring the experience supported both instructional clarity for educators and independent navigation for students.
HIGH-FIDELITY DESIGN
With the curriculum structure and core user journeys established, we translated our work into high-fidelity designs that brought the platform together as a cohesive experience.
These designs focused on supporting two distinct but connected journeys: the student learning experience and the educator oversight experience.
THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
For students, we designed clear navigation patterns, structured lesson layouts, and feedback moments that felt supportive and personal rather than evaluative.
The goal was to encourage reflection and engagement while reinforcing a sense of progress and autonomy.
THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
For educators, we designed an experience to help educators quickly understand how students were progressing through the curriculum, identify areas that needed attention, and feel confident facilitating discussions without added administrative burden.
The goal was an experience focused on an at-a-glance overview of student activity and performance.
Together, these high-fidelity designs ensured the platform supported independent student learning while giving educators the visibility and control they needed to guide it effectively.
LAUNCH & IMPACT
Following the launch of the middle school learning platform, we saw immediate traction during rollout. Administrators began adopting the curriculum within schools that were already using Peekapak’s elementary offering, allowing for a smoother transition and faster implementation.
In addition to the positive learning and emotional impacts, the platform scaled rapidly, growing the user base by over 300,000 students within the first year of rollout.
By aligning tone, structure, and learning models with middle school developmental needs, the product supported meaningful engagement at scale—validating both the usability of the experience and the effectiveness of the underlying curriculum and design decisions.
REFLECTION & NEXT STEPS
Seeing the impact the curriculum had on students and educators was both exciting and deeply gratifying—it reinforced the value of grounding content decisions in real classroom needs. With more time, I would have liked to expand the research phase, particularly through additional user interviews, to further validate assumptions and explore edge cases.
With more time, I would have liked to expand the research phase, particularly through additional user interviews, to further validate assumptions and explore edge cases.
That said, given a tight deadline and a fast-moving project, we delivered a strong, cohesive solution that balanced quality with the realities of timeline and budget constraints.
When I left Peekapak, the product was well positioned to scale, providing a flexible foundation that enabled the team to expand the curriculum beyond its initial scope and into grades 8–12.
