ReMo
Reimagining a platform to help students discover their reading identities and engage with books they’ll love.
Timeline
February 2023 — May 2023
Client
Michelle Deblois, CEO
Peter Janett, CFO
Design Team
Naomi Desai, Jenny Chen, Jyaleen Wu
ReMo is a platform that provides readers in grades 4-12 with insight into their reading habits, and works to engage students with books they’ll love while enabling educators to foster a safe space for students to explore their individual, unique reading identity. To enhance their existing web app, we embarked on a full redesign project. During our four-month schedule, we upgraded the application with new and improved branding, information architecture, and overall user experience on both the teacher-facing and student-facing aspects of the web app.
What part did I play?
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Created user friendly interface for both teacher and student-facing aspects of the app
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Improved information architecture to streamline user navigation
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Redesigned branding to create a more cohesive and engaging identity
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Established a design system that scales for designers
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Collaborated with designers and developers
RESEARCH
Understanding ReMo
We kicked off the project with a client meeting to gain a deeper understanding of ReMo, their brand mission, and personality.
Elevator Pitch
ReMo is the only reading web application that enables teachers to foster a safe space for students to explore their reading identity. It is meant for teachers who want a more personalized way of following their student's reading progress, and for students who desire a more tangible way to track their own progress in an effort to mitigate stigma around reading, and to navigate away from the current K-12 achievement-based learning model.
Personality Levers
During the initial meeting, we asked our clients to complete a personality lever chart with the intention of understanding more about ReMo and how we could apply their brand personality to a design system.
Competitor Analysis
In order to familiarize ourselves with the existing competitor landscape, we researched ReMo's three main competitors: Book Buddy, Liblib, Epic!, Classroom Checkout, and Booksource Classroom.
User Stories
We then created user stories off of our research in order to get a better feel for a typical ReMo user's wants and needs. This was a full-team exercise, meaning our engineers and PM also participated, in order achieve cross-team clarity on what to build, for whom, why, and when.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Connecting the Dots
Our next step was to redesign ReMo's convoluted information architecture. We needed three flows: onboarding, a teacher-facing flow, and a student-facing flow.
Teacher-facing flow
Student-facing flow
Onboarding flow
DESIGN EXPLORATION
Lo-fi Wireframes
Based on our project goals, we had 3 main workflows:
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Login and onboarding
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Teacher-facing flow
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Student-facing flow
Using Figma, we created many iterations of low-fidelity prototypes for these desired flows.
Early Iteration Lofis
Late Iteration Lofis
Brand Identity
What does reading look like? What does reading for kids look like? Keeping these questions in mind, we revisited our initial brand exercise with the client, which defined ReMo as conversational, celebratory, and unconventional. Our final design system drew inspiration from school highlighters, ensuring vibrant, playful visuals while maintaining strong color contrast for accessibility.
Brand Book
DESIGN SYSTEM APPLICATION
Hi-fi Wireframes
Below are a select number of our final hi-fi frames. To view the entire prototype, check out the Figma!
So...what difference did we make?
This is just a brief overview of the extensive work that went into ReMo, and I'd be glad to share more details if you're interested. Once our team’s developers completed the build, our client launched ReMo in the public schools of Lewiston, Maine, for testing.
Some insights of the old vs. new experience: "...the kids love it. They're no longer seeing numbers comparing them to other students, they're only seeing how much they're improving, which is great for their confidence." ReMo's mission accomplished!