K–5 Design System

Design systems suffer from the chicken or the egg problem: it’s difficult to create them without first having a realistic prototype of a product, but let the product develop too much without a system in place and it becomes time consuming to audit and update. Amplify Reading, a student-facing educational product, was the first in the company’s suite of supplemental software. While the product was successful, having been adopted by some of the nation’s largest school districts, it had not been built with a unified design system and in places was inconsistent and inaccessible. When Amplify decided to invest in a Math supplemental, I was asked to lead the design team on this new initiative. I had been collecting best practices over my years working on the Reading product, and saw an opportunity to consolidate those learnings into a foundational design system for Math.