Experience HMH ThinkCentral Platform UX

First published by : December 2017

Consulting as a User Experience (UX) designer with the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) ThinkCentral new features team was a constant challenge and delight in equal measure.

My contract was renewed over five years.

Impact

I took ownership of the user experience (UX) of legacy platforms and developed a fierce advocacy to our users.

My role helped an enthusiastic team to turn around a necessarily feature-first developer environment into one of shared UX goals. Together, we updated the platforms from the architecture out taking satisfaction many steps closer to delight.

Feedback

Barb

Pat... stepped out of the LD (Learning Designer)1 role to show our engineering developers that it really wouldn't be so difficult to change the code behind the ThinkCentral (TC) interface and, therefore, had probably the biggest impact on TC's usability and experience possible.

Barb McDonald
Learning Design Manager, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2015

I hadn't so much stepped out of my LD role as stepped up to my UX one providing a "full-stack" UX/UI service from analysis, concept, and design to development, implementation, and evaluation. It was the best craic!

JC

"So impressed with your work Pat. I wish you were on the UX team as your ideas come so natural.

With...UX there is a lot of back and forth and opinion differences that we often agree to disagree. But every project I have worked with you on, it's been amazing...it makes my job so much easier and I believe the customer experience is top notch. Thank you!"

Jim Cveykus
Program Manager, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Note: HMH employed Learning Desigers (LDs) to design and to improve the user experience of HMH platforms.

LDs specialise in learning experience design when researching, designing, and delivering face-to-face learning or instruction and e-Learning requiring combinations of cognitive, content, interaction, and user interface design.