Beagle Learning.

Boston, USA

Beagle is an early-stage EdTech Startup that helps students learn real-world problem-solving through an inquiry-based approach. The platform lets students and teachers interact – producing course outputs by creating content together, fully remotely.

 

  • We were brought on to help Beagle become a product-led startup and to design the next iteration of their learning management platform – taking it from a functional MVP to an intuitive and flexible standalone web app for instructors and students to complete entire academic courses.

  • This project involved myself and my colleagues Jack and Freddie from Fable & Faber. I lead the UX stream, along with Freddie in support. Jack was creative director on the project. Fable & Faber was co-founded by myself and Jack in 2017.

    We worked remotely from London and Melbourne to work in concert with Beagle’s tech team based in Boston. We reported directly into the CEO and Head of Engineering, and were responsible for producing all design assets to define user flow, UI concepts, wireframes and high-fidelity designs.

  • Timelines were very aggressive and it became clear that we wouldn’t have time to spend writing formal functional requirements.

    We had to be flexible and as lean as possible to support Beagle who were just getting used to an Agile process. So, instead of more typical user stories containing more detailed feature requirements, we used a user story map combined with detailed and annotated wireframes to outline specific functionality.

 
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Approach.

 

A major part of our remit was educating their team on working using agile methodologies - managing and prioritising a backlog of features, defining epics and user stories, working in sprint cycles, and managing workflow between the development team.

Our other objectives were:

- Deeply understanding the company and its target customers.

- Auditing, reorganising and supplementing customer and user insights to align the whole company behind prioritised needs.

- Educating the team on best practice and putting new product discovery, design and delivery processes in place

- Working day-to-day with the CEO and Tech Lead to build the product roadmap and prioritise releases and turn complex, abstract concepts into simple, component-based feature sets and designs.

Concept moodboard.

 
 
 
 

Site map & IA.

User Flow.
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Hi-fi UI mockup.

 

The key tasks I conducted were:

- Coaching the CEO and wider team on product and design best practices

- Reworking the entire company’s approach to product management, user-centred design and Agile delivery

- Supporting the product strategy and day-to-day management

- End-to-end Product Design (UX & UI)

- Content strategy and guiding the product copywriting

Outcomes.

 

The first release was shipped on time for the beginning of the academic year and we’re worked to continue updating the backlog and scoping for future releases.

Feedback has been incredible (both from the client and their customers and users) and we’ll be working with Beagle not only on growing the product for this market but also with their plans for expansion into new markets including public and private sector learning and development and teamworking use cases.