Project type: Enterprise Application // Employer: Discovery Education
Product: Discovery Experience
Discovery Education: Search & Standards Experience
Transforming search to surface the right resources, at the right time, for every teacher.
THE CHALLENGE
Teachers struggled to find the right resources in a massive K–12 library. Search felt overwhelming, inconsistent, and cluttered with similar results. High-value and standards-aligned materials were hard to spot, and a rigid card layout buried the best content.
Goal: Redesign search to be smarter, clearer, and aligned to how teachers plan and teach.
CONTEXT
Search is core to Discovery Education’s value proposition. Improving it directly impacts:
Daily engagement
Resource adoption
District trust in standards alignment
THE BUSINESS GOALS
Improve search relevance and usability
Surface high-value, standards-aligned content
Strengthen district renewal confidence
Create flexible foundations for personalization and future discovery
MY ROLE
Led discovery to understand teacher search behaviors
Mapped “Search by Standards” and “Filter by Standards” workflows
Redesigned search, browse, and filtering UX
Partnered with research to plan and run usability testing
Collaborated on improved tagging and metadata structure
DESIGN APPROACH
Research showed that the one-size-fits-all card design limited flexibility and hid important details. To address this, we created a system that adapts to user intent, content type, and instructional context.
Our solution:
Introduced modular layouts (clusters, snippets, flexible groupings) to highlight a wider range of asset types
Redesigned resource cards to surface key details like grade level, standards alignment, and duration
Ensured high-value assets appear throughout the experience—not just at the top of the page
KEY UX ENHANCEMENTS
Browse by Standards: Reformatted to mirror each state’s structure
Filter by State Standard: Combine keyword + standards filtering for precision
Refined results organization: Prioritized lessons/activities; grouped videos; surfaced related assets dynamically
Improved tagging: Updated data alignment with the latest core subject standards
Flexible system design: Built to deliver the best result, not the same result, every time
OLD PRODUCT
Discovery Education: Search results page
NEW PRODUCT
Refined results organization, filtering, card design
Stakeholder alignment.
To align on stakeholder perspectives around current user challenges with asset cards and search results, we shared a short set of questions to capture honest, detailed insights that would help shape the conversation.
Research + Iteration
Partnered with UX Research to plan and conduct multiple rounds of usability testing
Synthesized findings into clear patterns and actionable themes
Prioritized insights with product, engineering, and content teams
Iterated on designs to remove key friction points and improve task efficiency
Strengthened clarity, speed to resource, and overall teacher confidence in the system
Sample screen designs
Final Flows for Search by Standards
Anatomy of a video card.
Teachers searching for videos often saw hundreds of nearly identical results because short clips were pulled from longer parent videos. A search like “photosynthesis” returned every related segment, making it impossible to identify the most useful option.
To fix this, we consolidated all segments into a single parent video card. The clip that matched the teacher’s search was elevated to the top, and all other segments were organized in a carousel underneath. We also surfaced the metadata teachers cared about most, including favorites, language options, grade level, instructional intent, and standards alignment.
Search Standards snapshot