Role: Sole/Lead Product Designer
Scope: End-to-end UX/UI design across the full Scaffold application suite (course/LMS dashboard, migrations, archiving, data catalog and governance, schema version control), design system ownership, and public website design
For most higher-ed institutions, migrating or archiving LMS data was a heavy manual process, one that consumed academic staff time, left data disorganized across systems, and drained institutional resources that could have gone toward teaching and student support. K16 Solutions built Scaffold to solve that problem: a platform for LMS migration, data archiving, and data governance built specifically for higher ed. The product needed to make dense, technical, data-heavy information (course records, schema changes, migration status across thousands of courses) understandable to non-technical academic staff, while still giving IT and data teams the precision they needed, in a fast-moving, first-to-market environment with some existing visual design, but no true system, in a fast-moving environment following a pivot from the product’s original LMS model to its current migration, archiving, and governance focus.
As sole product designer, I owned UX and UI design across the entire Scaffold platform and the K16 Solutions website. I worked across the entire company, partnering directly with PM, leadership, engineering, sales, and marketing to keep product decisions aligned with the business and go-to-market strategy, not just the interface. That span covered a student- and course-facing dashboard, multi-step migration and archiving workflows, a data catalogue and lineage system, schema version control tooling, and the public website that introduces and sells the platform to prospective institutions.
Making dense data approachable. Research with educators and administrators drove every design decision, keeping real user needs at the center of a fast-moving environment. The core design challenge was consistent across the product: take complex, data-rich information and make it approachable without losing the depth technical users needed, through clear hierarchy, intuitive flows, and contextual help like tooltips where it mattered, without cluttering the interface for users who didn’t need it.
Data catalogue, lineage, and governance. Institutions needed to understand where their data lived, how it connected, and what would break if something changed. I designed a data catalogue and lineage system that lets admins trace relationships between data entities visually, and a schema version control tool that surfaces breaking changes in a side-by-side comparison view before an update goes live, turning what would otherwise be an opaque backend risk into something a non-engineer could review and approve with confidence.
Migration and archiving at scale. Course migrations touch hundreds of courses at once, each carrying its own risk of data loss or broken content. I designed the import and progress tracking experience so institutions could see exactly where every course stood (queued, kicked off, archived) in real time, a guided multi-step setup wizard for configuring new archiving integrations, and a migration workbook that let K16’s team and client stakeholders collaborate directly on QA and course-level feedback during a migration, instead of routing every issue through email or spreadsheets.
Design system and cross-team consistency. I inherited a product with some existing visual design but no true design system behind it, in the middle of the company’s pivot from its original LMS-first model to its current migration, archiving, and governance focus. I built the actual system, components, patterns, and consistent structure, on top of that starting point, giving engineering a shared foundation instead of one-off screens as the product expanded into new modules. That system became the reference the broader team worked from across the entire product suite, not just the pieces I was actively designing.
Bringing it to market. Beyond the product itself, I led the redesign of K16’s public website, the site prospective institutions see before they ever log into Scaffold. The redesign positioned Scaffold’s migration and archiving capabilities as the company’s lead offering and gave K16 a scalable design framework and visual identity to support its marketing and sales goals as the company grew.
