Case study
Led the shift toward one connected learner experience across 37+ systems and 5+ product lines.
ACT had products spanning testing, planning, scores, and next-step decisions, but they had evolved independently. Separate roadmaps, identity systems, and handoffs meant learners often had to re-establish context as they moved between products.
What began as a MyACT redesign became a broader question: how could ACT better connect the learner journey across its products?
ACT had built a broad portfolio of assessments, prep tools, diagnostics, reporting systems, and planning products across students, parents, counselors, educators, institutions, and workforce pathways. But these offerings evolved more as separate products than as a connected learner experience.
As a result, students and families encountered ACT through isolated moments such as registration, testing, score reporting, prep, planning, or exploration. Each interaction could be useful on its own, but the ecosystem did not provide a clear sense of continuity, next steps, or how the pieces fit together over time.
This limited learner clarity, reduced cross-product value, and made it harder for ACT to express its broader role across school, postsecondary, and career decisions.
Ecosystem diagram showing ACT offerings across multiple life stages and the missing experience layer connecting them.
I started with MyACT, but discovery quickly showed that the larger challenge lived across the surrounding ecosystem.
Identity systems, product roadmaps, tagging standards, and diagnostics had evolved independently across products. Recommendations, pathways, and actions were not connected by a shared experience layer.
Connecting the experience meant working across identity, navigation, data, and product ownership throughout ACT’s ecosystem.
ACT’s ecosystem already contained many of the ingredients for a stronger learner experience. The challenge was that the underlying systems, product models, and organizational incentives were not aligned around continuity.
The strategy had to account for:
This made systems design and organizational alignment part of the UX challenge.
Discovery showed the biggest continuity gaps were between products, where identity, data, navigation, and product ownership did not consistently carry context forward.
That changed the work from improving MyACT usability to mapping where the learner journey broke across the ecosystem.
Discovery quickly moved beyond MyACT itself. We needed to understand how ACT’s products connected over time so learners, families, and educators could carry context forward and make better decisions.
I used ecosystem maps, personas, journey models, and early concepts, working with product, research, and architecture to find where the ecosystem was breaking across identity, transitions, recommendations, and decision support.
Student persona illustrating support needs and college-readiness decisions.
Parent themes showing how family support, transitions, and long-term planning shaped decision-making across the journey.
Counselor journey map revealing the operational complexity of coordinating testing, communication, and student support in schools.
Several patterns became clear across the research and systems work:
The findings pointed toward a product direction that connected the learner journey across ACT products.
The persona and journey work showed how differently each audience experienced ACT. High school students, parents, counselors, adult learners, and institutional stakeholders each encountered different parts of the ecosystem, which made continuity across them especially important.
A single persona or product was too narrow to represent the full experience. The model had to adapt across roles and life stages while still helping people understand where they were and what came next.
Journey map showing opportunities to connect awareness, registration, preparation, results, and future planning.
The strategy moved beyond improving one portal to defining how ACT’s products could work together around the learner.
I modeled the experience across identity, recommendations, planning, diagnostics, and support so teams could see the learner journey and the technical dependencies behind it.
The key constraint: connect independently evolving products while allowing each to remain distinct.
The work expanded from improving a signed-in ACT portal to defining how ACT’s products could support a more connected learner experience over time.
The strategy connected identity, recommendations, diagnostics, exploration, and action across products and life stages. Identity, integration, and product boundaries therefore became part of the UX work rather than downstream implementation details.
System model showing how a personalized ACT experience could connect ACT.org, shared platform elements, and a broader product ecosystem through a unified experience layer.
The concept was a modular experience that could adapt to different personas while maintaining continuity across the ACT ecosystem.
Core principles included:
That gave teams a concrete model to use in product and roadmap discussions.
The work also reframed retention around the longer learner journey.
Retention became a longer-term question: how could ACT stay useful across planning, testing, results, and later decisions?
Learner journeys became the organizing model for the work.
Simplified alignment model showing how multiple prototype and release paths could converge around a shared platform direction.
I turned the strategy into a more personalized signed-in experience designed to help learners understand what to do next based on where they were in their journey.
The Roadmap Builder, unified navigation, and pathway-based recommendations made the direction concrete. Teams could react to a real experience and discuss the platform model through something tangible.
The Roadmap Builder connected learner profile data, majors, schools, careers, and ACT offerings into a usable planning experience.
Once the direction was clear, I moved into experience modeling: how should a learner carry context across planning, testing, results, and next-step decisions as they move between ACT products?
The model connected ACT.org and the broader product ecosystem through shared navigation, account access, recommendations, and personalized pathways. The goal was for learners to carry context forward across entry points.
The concept centered on a personalized signed-in environment that could adapt to a learner’s goals, profile, and stage in the journey.
Core behaviors included:
The signed-in experience was designed to help learners understand what mattered next.
The Roadmap Builder was one of the strongest directions because it turned the ecosystem model into a planning experience people could actually react to.
It connected learner inputs, majors, schools, and career paths in one visible pathway. That let stakeholders see how the continuity model could work in an actual interaction.
Early Roadmap Builder concept showing how ACT could connect learner profile data, majors, schools, and career paths into a more personalized planning experience.
A key question was how the signed-in experience should relate to ACT.org and the broader product portfolio. We positioned it as the place that could carry navigation, account context, recommendations, notifications, and shared access patterns across products.
The products could keep evolving independently while sharing navigation, identity, and pathway patterns. The higher-fidelity concept showed how those patterns could come together in a signed-in experience that stakeholders could evaluate more directly.
The work produced:
Teams used these artifacts in roadmap discussions.
We tested the direction through concept reviews, journey modeling, and cross-functional discussion with Product, Architecture, Research, and adjacent teams. The work clarified dependencies and open questions.
The concepts gave those groups something concrete to use when evaluating dependencies, roadmap decisions, and the broader learner experience.
Because the work was early and covered the broader ecosystem, reviews tested whether the direction could hold together across products, personas, and platform constraints.
Product, architecture, research, and adjacent teams challenged the model against existing product boundaries, identity dependencies, and integration realities.
The work made ecosystem fragmentation visible in a way teams could act on.
The reviews highlighted the decisions teams needed to coordinate:
The reviews kept the work focused on the cross-product scope.
The reviews made several cross-product decisions easier to discuss:
It helped:
The shared model gave teams a common way to discuss how ACT should work as an ecosystem.
The opportunity expanded beyond a single test event to a longer-term learner relationship through planning, recommendations, and transitions across life stages.
Planning, recommendations, and later decisions became part of the product conversation.
My ACT work operated at two very different scales. The Unified Learner Experience gave ACT a clearer model for the learner relationship across products and between major testing moments, while separate product work kept me close to detailed learner workflows.
Together, those separate initiatives reinforced the importance of working at multiple levels of abstraction: setting direction across products and systems while staying close enough to detailed experience work to guide important learner workflows.
Separate ACT initiative
Registration was separate from the Unified Learner Experience work. Under my UX leadership, the team simplified the workflow from roughly 30 minutes to under 7 minutes. I stayed close to the experience work while also leading the broader UX function.
DESIGN SYSTEM APPROACH
At ACT, implemented styles lived with Engineering, which was common at the time. Design systems were only beginning to emerge as a formal UX practice, so we created consistency through detailed documentation and close collaboration across teams.
Our UX team created a detailed enterprise style guide that brought UX patterns and brand guidance into one place. It helped teams reuse interface decisions instead of resolving the same questions product by product.
Today I'd carry that same intent into a shared, coded component system with clear ownership across Design and Engineering, connecting the design language, accessibility decisions, and production implementation from the start.
AI RETROSPECTIVE
At ACT, the evidence lived in a lot of places: usability studies, interviews, support data, analytics, and journey maps. The broader experience also stretched across 37+ systems and five product lines.
For the broader ecosystem work, I'd use AI to work across evidence from ACT's product landscape, looking for recurring patterns, conflicts across sources, emerging learner needs, and questions worth validating. For a focused initiative like registration, I'd use it with the team to explore more flow and prototype options before committing design and engineering effort.
My role would still be to set direction, weigh the evidence, help the team decide which learner needs deserve the most attention, and choose what we validate with real students.
1. Design continuity across the portfolio. A shared experience layer could connect ACT’s broad range of offerings into a more coherent learner journey.
2. Treat identity architecture as part of the experience A unified learner experience depends on screens and navigation, identity, account structure, and personalized access patterns. All of those layers determine whether continuity is possible.
3. Use artifacts to make strategy concrete and debatable The Roadmap Builder, unified navigation, and pathway concepts gave stakeholders something concrete to react to. That made the strategy easier to discuss and challenge.
4. Make ownership and alignment explicit early The learner experience depended on product ownership and architecture as much as screen design. Teams had to coordinate decisions across those boundaries for the model to work.
5. Design for the relationship between major moments Thinking about ACT through learner journeys opened a broader product direction, with more emphasis on ongoing support between major test events.
