Problem
SchoolNet recognized that many in the education community could benefit from high-quality trusted content, and that SchoolNet could further tie its member districts to a national conversation on relevant topics. The concept was to aggregate content from across the Web, and use bloggers to put an editorial spin on that content. SchoolNet also sought to diversify its revenue sources to include online advertising.

My Role
I was the UE lead, and did the interaction design, wrote the spec, and directed the visual design. I worked closely with the VP in charge, the product manager, and our visual designer.

Explorations
Initially, the team worked to get a quick-and-clean "v.1", or beta : basically some blogs implemented using Drupal, an open-source content management system. While the site was put up in about a week, there were some scalability concerns.

The first version of the site was well recieved at education conferences.

Solution
Based upon learnings from the beta, we expanded the scope of functionality to include a wider variety of social software ("ask"-type discussions, wikis, and polls) to increase end-user participation. We also refined the interaction and visual design to take advantage of a new platform.

Wireframes and screen designs from the project.