We redesigned the information architecture of Hooked on Phonics’ Learning Resources section, then tested the redesign as hard as we’d tested the original site. Every parent in that validation round navigated it confidently. The testing still caught two of the team’s own mistakes, and both got fixed before handoff. That second round, testing our own work instead of stopping at the redesign, is the part of this project I’d point to first.
Fall 2025
Strategy Lead
Aayushi Bharadwaj, Anvita Shah, Gloria Yang, Conor Mack
Information Architecture
Hooked on Phonics’ growth model runs entirely through its free resources: a parent finds a worksheet, signs up, then subscribes to the paid app. The client’s own success metrics for this engagement were organic traffic and the conversion rate from resources to purchases, and the site was hiding the front of that exact funnel. My audit measured the burial precisely: 4 to 5 clicks to reach a resource from the navigation, up to 9 scrolls from key landing pages, filters that behaved like a side nav and reset without warning. Parents couldn’t find the materials, couldn’t tell what to use next, and often couldn’t tell what the product itself was.
Our research question: how do parents navigate to and within the Learning Resources section, and how does the current IA support or disrupt them finding what they need?
I ran the research across three phases: a site audit and heuristic evaluation (18 findings, 9 of them critical, each mapped to a specific Nielsen heuristic), a competitive analysis of four ed-tech platforms (Mindly Games, Education.com, SplashLearn, K5 Learning), and 5 user interviews plus 5 usability tests with parents on the live site.
Resources were buried and mislabeled, and it was a critical-severity problem, not a cosmetic one. Overlapping nav labels (“Access Resources” versus “Resource Center”) and side-nav-style filters with no result counts meant parents guessed their way to materials, when they got there at all. The fix: consolidate the labels, replace the filter pattern, and surface result counts, all high-confidence changes since the audit and the usability tests independently converged on the same friction points.
Every resource page was a dead end for a parent trying to build a learning path. Breadcrumbs changed structure mid-journey and blocked backtracking, and in-body links got skimmed past: “Can I click this?” Parents’ actual goal wasn’t finding one resource, it was sequencing several: “After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?”
Parents couldn’t tell what they’d actually be buying. After scrolling the homepage and “What’s Included,” participants still asked whether the product was an app, a monthly kit, or both. The “Get Started for $1” CTA, shown before any product explanation, drew “Start with what?” from most of them. Watch this one closely if it recurs post-launch: it’s a trust problem sitting directly upstream of the client’s own conversion metric.
“After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?” A parent in usability testing
Three guiding principles, one mapped directly to each insight above: build a continuous, exploration-based experience; support a guided learning journey; communicate free and paid offerings clearly. The team, led by Anvita as Design Lead, translated those principles into four shipped changes.
Restructured IA: merged the redundant nav items, renamed the parent-education section “Curriculum Guide,” and moved filter groups directly into the navigation menu.
Resource hub: true filters with chips and result counts, subtopic filters, and cards sized to preview content at a glance.
Resource detail page: consistent breadcrumbs, clickable grade and topic tags, and a related-resources module so every page suggests the next step in the sequence.
Homepage: a plain-language statement of what Hooked on Phonics actually is, placed before any purchase CTA.
I ran 5 moderated sessions (30 to 45 minutes each) with parents of preschool and early-elementary kids on the redesigned prototype, not just the original site. All 5 filtered successfully to the resources they needed, and the guided-journey elements were the most praised part of the redesign: “The tags and related resources section are super helpful. I immediately get if this fits my child, and what are next ones to use.”
That same round caught two of the team’s own mistakes, which is exactly what it was for:
3 of 5 parents misread our new nav label, “Learn Concepts,” as the place worksheets live: “It sounds like the place where kids learn.” We renamed it “Curriculum Guide” in the final handoff.
The “$1 offer” read as a bundle on one page and app-only on another. We rewrote the surrounding copy so the offer described the same thing everywhere.
Five moderated sessions is enough to derisk an IA decision, not enough to close the question, and I’d rather say that plainly than imply more certainty than the sample supports. Our handoff to Hooked on Phonics recommended testing with a broader parent group, the backend work to power related-resources relationships at scale, and extending the clarified product story to the subscription page: the next place a confused parent becomes a lost conversion, if the “$1” fix doesn’t fully hold.
We redesigned the information architecture of Hooked on Phonics’ Learning Resources section, then tested the redesign as hard as we’d tested the original site. Every parent in that validation round navigated it confidently. The testing still caught two of the team’s own mistakes, and both got fixed before handoff. That second round, testing our own work instead of stopping at the redesign, is the part of this project I’d point to first.
Fall 2025
Strategy Lead
Aayushi Bharadwaj, Anvita Shah, Gloria Yang, Conor Mack
Information Architecture
Hooked on Phonics’ growth model runs entirely through its free resources: a parent finds a worksheet, signs up, then subscribes to the paid app. The client’s own success metrics for this engagement were organic traffic and the conversion rate from resources to purchases, and the site was hiding the front of that exact funnel. My audit measured the burial precisely: 4 to 5 clicks to reach a resource from the navigation, up to 9 scrolls from key landing pages, filters that behaved like a side nav and reset without warning. Parents couldn’t find the materials, couldn’t tell what to use next, and often couldn’t tell what the product itself was.
Our research question: how do parents navigate to and within the Learning Resources section, and how does the current IA support or disrupt them finding what they need?
I ran the research across three phases: a site audit and heuristic evaluation (18 findings, 9 of them critical, each mapped to a specific Nielsen heuristic), a competitive analysis of four ed-tech platforms (Mindly Games, Education.com, SplashLearn, K5 Learning), and 5 user interviews plus 5 usability tests with parents on the live site.
Resources were buried and mislabeled, and it was a critical-severity problem, not a cosmetic one. Overlapping nav labels (“Access Resources” versus “Resource Center”) and side-nav-style filters with no result counts meant parents guessed their way to materials, when they got there at all. The fix: consolidate the labels, replace the filter pattern, and surface result counts, all high-confidence changes since the audit and the usability tests independently converged on the same friction points.
Every resource page was a dead end for a parent trying to build a learning path. Breadcrumbs changed structure mid-journey and blocked backtracking, and in-body links got skimmed past: “Can I click this?” Parents’ actual goal wasn’t finding one resource, it was sequencing several: “After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?”
Parents couldn’t tell what they’d actually be buying. After scrolling the homepage and “What’s Included,” participants still asked whether the product was an app, a monthly kit, or both. The “Get Started for $1” CTA, shown before any product explanation, drew “Start with what?” from most of them. Watch this one closely if it recurs post-launch: it’s a trust problem sitting directly upstream of the client’s own conversion metric.
“After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?” A parent in usability testing
Three guiding principles, one mapped directly to each insight above: build a continuous, exploration-based experience; support a guided learning journey; communicate free and paid offerings clearly. The team, led by Anvita as Design Lead, translated those principles into four shipped changes.
Restructured IA: merged the redundant nav items, renamed the parent-education section “Curriculum Guide,” and moved filter groups directly into the navigation menu.
Resource hub: true filters with chips and result counts, subtopic filters, and cards sized to preview content at a glance.
Resource detail page: consistent breadcrumbs, clickable grade and topic tags, and a related-resources module so every page suggests the next step in the sequence.
Homepage: a plain-language statement of what Hooked on Phonics actually is, placed before any purchase CTA.
I ran 5 moderated sessions (30 to 45 minutes each) with parents of preschool and early-elementary kids on the redesigned prototype, not just the original site. All 5 filtered successfully to the resources they needed, and the guided-journey elements were the most praised part of the redesign: “The tags and related resources section are super helpful. I immediately get if this fits my child, and what are next ones to use.”
That same round caught two of the team’s own mistakes, which is exactly what it was for:
3 of 5 parents misread our new nav label, “Learn Concepts,” as the place worksheets live: “It sounds like the place where kids learn.” We renamed it “Curriculum Guide” in the final handoff.
The “$1 offer” read as a bundle on one page and app-only on another. We rewrote the surrounding copy so the offer described the same thing everywhere.
Five moderated sessions is enough to derisk an IA decision, not enough to close the question, and I’d rather say that plainly than imply more certainty than the sample supports. Our handoff to Hooked on Phonics recommended testing with a broader parent group, the backend work to power related-resources relationships at scale, and extending the clarified product story to the subscription page: the next place a confused parent becomes a lost conversion, if the “$1” fix doesn’t fully hold.
We redesigned the information architecture of Hooked on Phonics’ Learning Resources section, then tested the redesign as hard as we’d tested the original site. Every parent in that validation round navigated it confidently. The testing still caught two of the team’s own mistakes, and both got fixed before handoff. That second round, testing our own work instead of stopping at the redesign, is the part of this project I’d point to first.
Fall 2025
Strategy Lead
Aayushi Bharadwaj, Anvita Shah, Gloria Yang, Conor Mack
Information Architecture
Hooked on Phonics’ growth model runs entirely through its free resources: a parent finds a worksheet, signs up, then subscribes to the paid app. The client’s own success metrics for this engagement were organic traffic and the conversion rate from resources to purchases, and the site was hiding the front of that exact funnel. My audit measured the burial precisely: 4 to 5 clicks to reach a resource from the navigation, up to 9 scrolls from key landing pages, filters that behaved like a side nav and reset without warning. Parents couldn’t find the materials, couldn’t tell what to use next, and often couldn’t tell what the product itself was.
Our research question: how do parents navigate to and within the Learning Resources section, and how does the current IA support or disrupt them finding what they need?
I ran the research across three phases: a site audit and heuristic evaluation (18 findings, 9 of them critical, each mapped to a specific Nielsen heuristic), a competitive analysis of four ed-tech platforms (Mindly Games, Education.com, SplashLearn, K5 Learning), and 5 user interviews plus 5 usability tests with parents on the live site.
Resources were buried and mislabeled, and it was a critical-severity problem, not a cosmetic one. Overlapping nav labels (“Access Resources” versus “Resource Center”) and side-nav-style filters with no result counts meant parents guessed their way to materials, when they got there at all. The fix: consolidate the labels, replace the filter pattern, and surface result counts, all high-confidence changes since the audit and the usability tests independently converged on the same friction points.
Every resource page was a dead end for a parent trying to build a learning path. Breadcrumbs changed structure mid-journey and blocked backtracking, and in-body links got skimmed past: “Can I click this?” Parents’ actual goal wasn’t finding one resource, it was sequencing several: “After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?”
Parents couldn’t tell what they’d actually be buying. After scrolling the homepage and “What’s Included,” participants still asked whether the product was an app, a monthly kit, or both. The “Get Started for $1” CTA, shown before any product explanation, drew “Start with what?” from most of them. Watch this one closely if it recurs post-launch: it’s a trust problem sitting directly upstream of the client’s own conversion metric.
“After this resource, what’s the next one I can give my child?” A parent in usability testing
Three guiding principles, one mapped directly to each insight above: build a continuous, exploration-based experience; support a guided learning journey; communicate free and paid offerings clearly. The team, led by Anvita as Design Lead, translated those principles into four shipped changes.
Restructured IA: merged the redundant nav items, renamed the parent-education section “Curriculum Guide,” and moved filter groups directly into the navigation menu.
Resource hub: true filters with chips and result counts, subtopic filters, and cards sized to preview content at a glance.
Resource detail page: consistent breadcrumbs, clickable grade and topic tags, and a related-resources module so every page suggests the next step in the sequence.
Homepage: a plain-language statement of what Hooked on Phonics actually is, placed before any purchase CTA.
I ran 5 moderated sessions (30 to 45 minutes each) with parents of preschool and early-elementary kids on the redesigned prototype, not just the original site. All 5 filtered successfully to the resources they needed, and the guided-journey elements were the most praised part of the redesign: “The tags and related resources section are super helpful. I immediately get if this fits my child, and what are next ones to use.”
That same round caught two of the team’s own mistakes, which is exactly what it was for:
3 of 5 parents misread our new nav label, “Learn Concepts,” as the place worksheets live: “It sounds like the place where kids learn.” We renamed it “Curriculum Guide” in the final handoff.
The “$1 offer” read as a bundle on one page and app-only on another. We rewrote the surrounding copy so the offer described the same thing everywhere.
Five moderated sessions is enough to derisk an IA decision, not enough to close the question, and I’d rather say that plainly than imply more certainty than the sample supports. Our handoff to Hooked on Phonics recommended testing with a broader parent group, the backend work to power related-resources relationships at scale, and extending the clarified product story to the subscription page: the next place a confused parent becomes a lost conversion, if the “$1” fix doesn’t fully hold.