Justin Dickinson

technology

  • Easel: Reframing Quizzes as Assessments

    Easel: Reframing Quizzes as Assessments

    Using teacher research to redefine an MVP Role: Product DesignerCompany: Teachers Pay TeachersProduct: EaselTeams: Product, Engineering, UXR, Educational Research When Teachers Pay Teachers explored building a new graded product within Easel, we initially referred to the work internally as “Quizzes.” Early teacher research revealed that while grading mattered, the quiz mental model was too narrow…

  • Shared Language: How Design Helps Define a Company’s Glossary

    Shared Language: How Design Helps Define a Company’s Glossary

    In any organization, words matter. The terms a company uses—internally and externally—shape how people understand the product, collaborate across teams, and communicate with customers. However, as companies grow, misalignment in terminology can create friction. Marketing may call something one name, while the product team uses a different name, and customer support hears yet another variation…

  • Reimagining “My Library”: A Vision for TPT’s Future

    Reimagining “My Library”: A Vision for TPT’s Future

    Overview When I joined Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), it was primarily a marketplace for printable resources. This meant that My Library—a dashboard where teachers stored their purchased materials—was mostly home to PDFs and documents, with most users having only a handful of purchases. As TPT evolved, My Library needed to be rethought to accommodate a…

  • Anatomy of Design

    Anatomy of Design

    One of the best things about design thinking is that it benefits everyone across the organization. I’ve had the opportunity to run some workshops and talks for new employees and non-designers to help them understand the design process, how to apply design thinking to their own work, and what it means to be user-centric. This…