Into Math

HMH's flagship math curriculum had a discoverability problem. The content was excellent, the problem was nobody could find it. How could we fix that while also helping to drive student engagement?

My Role

Lead Product Designer: vision development, design system alignment, cross-functional collaboration

The Problem

A beloved curriculum product that teachers respected but struggled to use. Navigation was a maze, digital and print felt like strangers, and a new wave of EdTech competitors were circling.

The Outcome

Redesigned experience shipped across thousands of classrooms nationwide, contributing to renewed sales growth and measurably improved teacher satisfaction scores in post-launch surveys.

Great Content If You Can Find It

Into Math had a reputation problem. Teachers trusted the curriculum, but what they told us in research sessions, again and again, was that it felt like it was fighting them. Critical instructional supports were buried three clicks deep. Students experienced lesson material as a wall of text. The content was doing everything right; the experience was doing everything wrong.

That made for a pretty clear design brief: reduce cognitive load for teachers, create entry points that actually invited students in, and do it without gutting the pedagogical rigor that made the product worth saving in the first place.

Where Print Meets Digital

This project landed in the middle of a larger transformation as HMH was repositioning from a publishing company to an adaptive learning company. That meant our print and digital products couldn't just coexist, they needed to feel like a single, coherent system.

My team's starting point was mapping the full end-to-end journey: how a teacher moved between a physical teacher's edition and the digital platform in a single class period, and where those handoffs broke down. Traditionally, the two products had been designed in silos, with different mental models, different nomenclature, and different visual languages. Students switching between them had to context-switch constantly. Unifying them wasn't so much a visual design problem as it was an information architecture one.

Unifying them wasn't a visual design problem. It was an information architecture problem first.

Building the Plane While Flying It

Of course aligning to a digital product is far easier when you aren't building an entirely new digital platform at the same time. This changed not only how we developed our digital content, it changed the structure of the curriculum itself. Our new online experience, called Classcraft (see the Try It Out case study), emphasized repeatable, modular patterns with clear information hierarchy.

Once we had that scaffold, we could reimagine our print pedagogy in this new framework.

Print and digital obviously have their individual pros and cons, so creating 1:1 parity can be a challenge, but by focusing on pedagogy and the whole-class experience we were able to create a unified system regardless of chosen medium. Further, by chunking our content, we were able to create an easy to follow gameplan for teachers that guided them through the sessions every step of the way. New teachers could literally just read the script, but seasoned vets also had easier access to routines and resources that used to be buried.

Results You Can Count (On)

Into Math 2.0 shipped on schedule and hit its adoption targets in year one. Furthermore, beyond the numbers, feedback from teachers shifted from conversations about where to find things and started being about how much easier it was to teach with them. That's the distinction we'd been designing toward for the start.