Product Designer

The Modern Classrooms Project is a fast-growing nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. They are seeking an experienced Product Designer to shape the end-user experience of their software, working closely with the Chief Innovation Officer and product teams to establish a design system and ensure the products are user-friendly for teachers and students.

Responsibilities:

• Refine the end-to-end user experience. Map teacher, student, and administrator journeys; define information architecture; and design intuitive paths that hold up as the products grow. Keep a clear-eyed view of where users get confused, rushed, or stuck, and design those moments away
• Wireframe and prototype before we build. Produce quick wireframes so scope and behavior get debated cheaply in a sketch rather than expensively in shipped code, then build and validate high-fidelity, clickable prototypes for high-stakes flows
• Build and own the design system. Create and maintain a documented component library grounded in MCP’s brand and extended for product needs, so engineers can compose from consistent parts instead of reinventing patterns
• Bring our product design efforts in-house. We’ve worked effectively with external design partners, but we don’t yet have a mature design operation. You’ll help us establish design best practices so that everything we build meets our teachers and their students’ needs

Requirements:

• You do the work yourself. You can take a flow from wireframe to high-fidelity to clickable prototype, and you've put your designs in front of real users to watch them struggle and succeed. You ship pixels, not just opinions about them
• You think in systems. You understand information architecture and design systems. You build components that scale using auto-layout, variables, variants, and high-fidelity clickable prototypes that other designers can easily consume, and you keep a product from becoming a maze of nested menus as features pile up
• You test assumptions. You've run usability tests and know that watching five people use something teaches you more than guessing with certainty. You're curious about behavior, not defensive about your designs
• You write, too. You treat the words in the interface as part of the design. You can make a button label, an error message, or a piece of feedback to a struggling 10-year-old clearer and kinder without being told to
• You sweat the research - and the real-world constraints. Accessibility, color contrast, touch-target sizes, school-issued devices, and shaky classroom wifi are design inputs to you, not afterthoughts. You can design web apps and learning experiences that are grounded in cognitive science learning principles
• You want to shape the world. You're motivated to be part of something larger than yourself, and you believe the highest use of your craft is empowering others. You're ready to make a real difference in educators' and young people's lives
• You have edtech experience, ideally K-12: school-issued devices, district IT restrictions, limited training time, the rhythm of a school day, and the gap between what works in a demo and what works in a real classroom
• You have light front-end skills, enough HTML/CSS/JS literacy to inspect a build, tweak a value, and make handoff frictionless (bonus if you can prototype in code)
• You've designed for young children and across wide age ranges, where reading level, motor skills, and attention vary enormously