Try It Out

When HMH built its new digital learning platform from scratch, it was optimized primarily for whole-class instruction. That left a meaningful gap. Here's how we designed a component that ended up reshaping how the entire company thought about self-paced learning.

My Role

Lead Product Designer: concept definition, interaction design, cross-fuctional collaboration

The Problem

HMH's new Classcraft platform was built around whole-class instruction. It had no mechanism for students to explore content independently, move at their own pace, or track their own progress. This was a critical gap for our back-to-school launch.

The Outcome

Designed and shipped a new instructional object, Try It Out, from concept to launch in under two months. It hit the back-to-school deadline, earned strong teacher and student adoption, and has since become the company's standard model for self-paced learning across product lines.

Repeatable, Familiar, Friendly

For nearly a decade, HMH's digital curriculum ran on a licensed e-book platform, which while functional, was not ours to evolve. When the company committed to becoming a digital-first learning company, that dependency became untenable. We needed a proprietary authoring and delivery system we could actually design for.

The result was Classcraft: a platform built on modular, repeatable lesson patterns that established consistent routines session after session. The goal wasn't just to replace what we had, but to build something that felt genuinely friendlier to the people using it every day. Consistency, therefore, was a feature. When students and teachers know what to expect from the structure, they can spend their cognitive energy on the content instead of the interface.

Whole-Class vs. Student-Driven

Classcraft solved the whole-class experience well. What it didn't have was any affordance for students to break away and work at their own pace. They couldn’t independently revisit a step or explore on their own while the rest of the class moved on. In a math classroom, that kind of self-directed exploration isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a core part of how students build understanding.

I was leading the Into Math redesign at the time, and we needed this functionality for back-to-school launch. As a result, my team took it on in parallel, working closely with curriculum specialists and engineers to define what a self-paced instructional object actually needed to do. Three requirements emerged from those conversations:

  • Students needed to move through content independently from the class, without being locked out based on whether they'd gotten something right.
  • They needed to maintain context as they moved between steps, some of which had upward of ten sequential activities.
  • And they needed a clear sense of where they were and what they'd done, without that progress-tracking becoming a source of anxiety.

We named the tool after the behavior we were designing for: Try It Out.

Side-by-Side

Our first and most consequential layout decision was the split-panel approach: persistent instructional content and stimulus on the left, dynamic interactions on the right. The left panel never changed as students moved through steps — it was the anchor. The right panel evolved with each new question or task.

This wasn't just an aesthetic choice. In a multi-step problem, students constantly need to refer back to the original context, be it a diagram, a scenario, a number line, etc. Conventional linear layouts bury that context as you scroll forward. By keeping it fixed, we eliminated a whole class of navigation friction before students ever encountered it.

Expandable Focus

The split-panel layout introduced a tradeoff we needed to address: each panel was, by definition, smaller than a full-screen view. For most interactions that was fine, but teachers often need to project an image for the whole class, and students doing freehand drawing on an interactive canvas need room to work.

We solved this with an expandable focus mode. Either panel could be brought to full width on demand, then collapsed back again. It's a small interaction, but it meant the layout could flex to serve a whole-class moment and an individual student moment with equal fidelity, all without being two different tools.

Step-It-Out

The last piece may have been the hardest to get right, and one we're still iterating on today to make sure we get there. With some tasks running to ten or more sequential activities, students needed a clear mental model of where they were, what was ahead, and what they'd already done, all without that awareness turning into pressure to perform.

We built a stepper component with a carefully considered state system: visited, active, complete, and skipped, each with a distinct visual treatment. The design principle we kept returning to was that progress should feel like momentum, not judgment. Completing a step needed to feel satisfying, but skipping one needed to feel like a valid choice, not a failure.

Getting the visual language of those states right is paramount to the success of this instructional object, and is why we keep iterating on this particular feature.

Feedback and Next Steps

Try It Out launched on time for back-to-school and landed well, both with the teachers who'd been asking for this kind of flexibility and with students who took to the self-paced format quickly.

As a nice knock-on effect, what started as a math-specific solution for one curriculum launch became the company's go-to model for self-paced learning across product lines. Other teams adopted the pattern, iterated on it, and built on the interaction model we'd established. Watching a component you designed under a tight deadline become a de facto internal standard is one of those outcomes that's hard to put into a metric, but it's the kind of signal that tells you the design work was done well.