A connected service ecosystem for one of the largest homeschooling brands in the country.
Timberdoodle is one of the largest homeschooling curriculum providers in the United States. Over roughly eighteen months I partnered across product, engineering, marketing, content, and print to redesign nearly every customer touchpoint — website, kit builder, scheduler app, catalog, teacher handbook, brand, and design system — into a single connected experience.
Parents entering homeschooling are expected to understand curriculum levels, teaching methods, supplemental materials, scheduling, pacing, and yearly planning — usually for the first time. The legacy experience treated each of those as a separate product. The friction wasn't in one interface. It was in the seams between them.
Catalog, editorial, and search lived in different mental models. Families couldn't tell which kit was right for which child without reading everything.
Modifying a kit meant losing the curator's logic. Parents abandoned customization rather than risk breaking the recommendation.
Once the boxes arrived, the experience ended. Families had to invent their own schedule from a stack of materials.
The catalog and handbook used different voice, typography, and structure than the site — so trust quietly leaked between channels.
We weren't shopping. We were trying to decide if we could actually do this.
Rather than redesigning isolated products, we redesigned the entire homeschooling experience — from discovering curriculum to confidently teaching throughout an entire school year.
Families begin researching homeschooling.
Browse curriculum kits and compare options.
Modify prebuilt curriculum to fit each learner.
Complete checkout with confidence.
Scheduler transforms curriculum into manageable lessons.
Parents use digital and printed resources together.
The ecosystem supports learning throughout the year.
“The goal wasn't designing a better website. It was designing confidence across an entire year of learning.”
Families faced a high-stakes decision across a fragmented experience — website, kits, scheduler, and print all spoke different languages.
Redesign the entire journey, not isolated products, so every touchpoint reduced uncertainty and built trust before asking for commitment.
Shipped a unified ecosystem that turned an overwhelming purchase into a guided year of learning — and aligned five disciplines around one journey.
Each surface was designed against a specific failure mode of the legacy experience — and judged not by how it looked, but by how confidently a parent could move through it.
Families couldn't tell which kit was right for which child without reading the entire catalog.
Discovery feels like guidance, not a search problem.
Every surface ships from a shared system — tokens, components, and patterns documented so future teams can extend the product without re-deriving its rules.
Bringing catalog, website, curriculum, and planning into one connected experience.
Helping families feel confident choosing the right curriculum instead of comparing dozens of disconnected options.
Aligning print, ecommerce, editorial, and onboarding around the same visual language and voice.
Replacing overwhelming product discovery with a clearer path from research to purchase.
Every touchpoint reinforced the same promise—from the printed catalog to checkout and beyond.
Creating a design system that could evolve with new products, grade levels, and future customer journeys.
Timberdoodle became more than an ecommerce redesign—it became the connective tissue across the entire homeschooling experience. From the first catalog to curriculum planning and checkout, every interaction reinforced the same promise: helping families feel confident about what comes next.
Framing the work as a service ecosystem unlocked the rest. Once teams briefed against one journey map, the seams between surfaces — which had been the actual customer problem — started closing on their own.
Print outperformed digital on trust, not the other way around. We ended up designing the website to live up to the catalog, which inverted how we thought about hierarchy and voice.
I'd invest earlier in shared content tooling. Engineering, marketing, and print all needed the same source of truth, and we built that muscle later than we should have.
Every case study in this portfolio began with a complex problem, an ambitious team, and a decision to build something better. If you’re solving the next one, I’d love to help write its success story.
