Learning Objects measures learning by what students can demonstrate, not how long they sit in a course. That premise touches everything: authoring, grading, analytics, progress. I worked across all of it as a senior designer, from reusable grading and discussion patterns to the everyday workflows instructors, learners, and admins live in.

Three audiences, one platform, and no room for it to feel like three products.

The constraint was structural. Instructors, learners, and admins have genuinely different jobs but share screens, data, and a brand. Meanwhile, distributed engineering teams shipped in parallel, and without shared patterns each team solved the same problem a slightly different way. Coherence wasn't a polish problem; it was an architecture problem.

My first instinct was documentation, a pattern library teams could reference. It went stale fast; teams under deadline shipped whatever was quickest. What worked was building the Learning Objects design systemwith engineers rather than for them: components specced against real product needs, extended only when an existing pattern genuinely didn't fit. Adoption followed because the system became the fastest path, not a mandate.

Authoring forced a choice: lock instructors into rigid templates engineering could maintain, or allow open composition that rots into inconsistency. The block editor split the difference: free composition built from constrained, well-behaved blocks, while admin surfaces stayed deliberately plain so configuration read as configuration.

For learners, mastery only motivates if it's legible. The learner view shown above answers three questions at a glance: what have I demonstrated, what's next, and how does this work map to outcomes, without making students decode the competency model underneath.

Assessment is where competency-based learning either proves itself or collapses into ordinary grading with extra steps. I designed rubrics aligned to learning outcomes and a speed grader that let instructors move through student work quickly without sacrificing consistency between graders.

I led UX research and usability testing for discussion, grading, and insights in moderated sessions with working instructors and students across multiple rounds that shaped features before they shipped. More than once, testing killed a direction the team liked; far cheaper to lose it there than after three products had adopted the pattern.

By the end, Learning Objects worked like one product instead of three that shared a logo: shared patterns teams actually adopted, grading and discussion flows shaped by evidence, and a system that made each new feature cheaper to build than the last.

Created and scaled the Learning Objects design system across instructor, learner, and admin surfaces.

Raised design consistency and drove adoption of shared patterns across product teams.

Led UX research and usability testing that shaped discussion, grading, and insights before they shipped.

Scaled reusable patterns supporting multiple products and distributed engineering teams.