For the parent enrollment journey and new family dashboard, we focused heavily on redesigning the experience around what families actually need to successfully complete enrollment. Essential requirements, forms, communication, and onboarding tasks were reorganized into simpler grouped steps that felt clearer and less overwhelming for parents. Research showed that many prospective families struggled to understand what Harmony was, how the program worked, and what steps were required to get started. The new prototypes reflected a much cleaner and more intuitive path toward stress-free enrollment completion.

Using rapid prototyping in Figma, we mapped and rebuilt the onboarding journey around the expectations and concerns of new families. Where helpful, we reinforced the “school-at-home” concept and integrated common parent questions and explanations directly into the experience. We also removed many distracting or unnecessary elements that had previously appeared universally, reorganizing content more intelligently by state, school, grade level, and program type.

A major focus of the redesign was reducing cognitive overload and creating a clearer path toward conversion. Navigation, page hierarchy, calls-to-action, and content structure were reorganized to guide users naturally from discovery into enrollment and eventually into the new family dashboard experience. Interactive prototypes allowed the team to rapidly test ideas, collaborate across departments, and refine workflows before implementation. The result was a much clearer and more unified onboarding experience that improved parent understanding, trust, and confidence throughout the process, while also helping establish a stronger foundation for rethinking the employee dashboard and internal workflows later in the project.

the employee dashboard redesign focused heavily on reducing operational friction within a highly complex educational environment. employees previously relied on fragmented systems, unclear workflows, and repetitive manual processes that slowed operations and increased confusion. interviews revealed that employees were effectively acting as human middleware, guiding parents through a broken system while simultaneously managing their own disconnected tools and workflows. i began by mapping operational dependencies, employee responsibilities, approval chains, and recurring friction points to better understand the realities of daily operations.

a major focus of the redesign was consolidating disconnected tools into a more unified and intuitive operational platform. dashboard layouts, information hierarchy, user roles and privileges, role-specific dashboards and actions, and navigation systems were reorganized around the real priorities and behaviors of employees rather than the limitations of legacy systems. i prototyped a workspace organized around roles and daily tasks, consolidating approvals, communication, reimbursements, and student management into a more coherent internal experience. complex operational workflows were simplified into clearer and more guided systems that reduced unnecessary navigation, repetitive work, and cognitive overload.

special attention was given to surfacing the most important actions, statuses, approvals, and workflows in clear and accessible ways. through rapid prototyping and iterative testing in figma, workflows could be explored, refined, and validated before implementation. this process allowed operational concerns, employee feedback, and organizational goals to shape the system architecture early in development, resulting in a more scalable, maintainable, and human-centered operational platform.

another major focus of the redesign involved improving the quality, structure, and usability of organizational data. in previous years, data was often inconsistent, fragmented, and difficult to trust, limiting its usefulness for operational planning, financial oversight, and strategic decision-making. reporting systems lacked clarity, and important trends related to student retention, enrollment behavior, finances, and organizational performance were difficult to identify or act upon.

the redesigned systems were built with a much stronger emphasis on structured and actionable data. workflows, database relationships, and dashboard experiences were reorganized to create cleaner and more reliable information throughout the platform. the goal was not only to improve day-to-day operations, but to give management and marketing teams far greater visibility into user behavior, retention, financial trends, and organizational performance. by creating more consistent and accessible data systems, the platform introduced a new level of clarity and operational control that better supports long-term growth and decision-making.

i designed a number of key operational pages around a consistent system of reusable tables, forms, and workflow patterns. these interfaces were organized through a global navigation structure that grouped related operational areas together in a more intuitive and scalable way. employee access throughout the platform is permission-based, allowing users to view only the global systems and tools relevant to their responsibilities and role within the organization.

a major part of the redesign involved introducing a dedicated “my role” navigation where employees can directly access the dashboards and workflows most relevant to their daily responsibilities. these role-based dashboards became the primary workspace for employees, allowing operational tasks, approvals, communication, reimbursements, and student management to be cleanly organized within role-specific environments. this structure reduced confusion, improved efficiency, and created a far more focused and maintainable operational experience across the organization.

at this stage, i began taking a deeper look at the data the organization had collected over previous years and exploring how it could be better structured, organized, and presented across a variety of operational views. i started mapping relationships between families, students, school years, curriculum, courses, vendors, mentors, and users while making detailed plans for how the new tables and interfaces would function. this early systems planning led to a number of important optimizations later in development, helping transform previously fragmented information into clearer, more actionable operational data.

i evaluated stack options against performance, security, data integrity, scalability, and the team’s ability to realistically maintain and extend the platform over time. because the rebuild represented a long-term investment into the future of the company, technology decisions were approached with careful consideration rather than short-term convenience. i spent significant time researching modern development ecosystems, studying production architectures, watching technical discussions and expert debates, and comparing how different stacks aligned with both our current operational requirements and the company’s projected future needs.

beyond technical capability alone, i also considered ecosystem maturity, long-term community support, developer experience, maintainability, hiring potential, and the projected longevity of each technology. particular attention was given to selecting tools with strong momentum, healthy communities, and architectures that aligned well with scalable operational systems. the resulting stack was chosen not simply because it was modern, but because it represented the strongest balance between performance, reliability, maintainability, flexibility, and long-term sustainability for the organization.

The new platform architecture focused heavily on creating a scalable relational data structure capable of supporting the growing complexity of Harmony’s operations while addressing fragmentation across the system. The redesigned architecture centralized relationships between families, students, school years, schools, employees, courses, approvals, communications, and enrollment workflows into a more unified and maintainable platform.

A major focus of the redesign was building reusable and flexible structures that could effectively support multiple states, schools, grade levels, funding models, and operational requirements. The system architecture was designed to better reflect real-world organizational relationships while remaining adaptable for future growth, evolving workflows, and long-term business needs.

The completed platform now provides families with a much clearer path from discovery to enrollment and ongoing participation within the program. Parents can more easily manage student registration, onboarding, document submission, course selection, orientation, reimbursements, communication, and school-year workflows from a centralized dashboard experience. The new architecture also better supports multiple schools, states, grade levels, and operational requirements while reducing many of the inefficiencies and frustrations that previously required manual staff intervention.

Today, the platform serves families through a significantly more organized, modern, and scalable experience that better reflects the value of Harmony’s educational model. The redesigned system improves usability, communication, workflow clarity, and long-term maintainability while creating a stronger foundation for future growth, automation, analytics, and AI-assisted operational improvements.

parallel to the family dashboard, the employee experience was developed through ongoing iterative ux work in close collaboration with key staff members across the organization. the redesign focused heavily on reducing operational friction, simplifying workflows, and consolidating fragmented internal systems into a more unified operational platform. through continuous feedback and iteration, the dashboards evolved into highly practical workspaces tailored around the real responsibilities and daily behaviors of employees.

the new role-based dashboards became one of the most impactful improvements within the platform. these dashboards were designed to surface critical information at a glance while providing fast access to the actions employees perform most frequently. staff can quickly drill into detailed family and student information, while filters, count indicators, and workflow groupings help organize workloads and provide clearer operational direction. by reducing unnecessary navigation and surfacing the most important actions more prominently, the system significantly improved clarity, efficiency, and day-to-day usability.

automation systems such as automatic school placement and mentor assignment further reduced administrative workload and eliminated onboarding delays that previously required extensive manual coordination. improvements to data structure, reporting, and operational visibility also provided leadership with greater insight into retention, finances, employee workload, and organizational performance. the result was a more scalable, maintainable, and human-centered operational environment that improved usability, efficiency, and visibility across the organization.