The Need
Students, parents, and educators experienced ACT as disconnected products and decision points rather than a coherent journey from assessment to postsecondary and career planning.
What I Led
Led the UX team in cross-functional discovery, ecosystem modeling, and experience vision work to define how ACT’s products could operate as a unified learner platform.
How it Worked
Reframed the effort from improving a single portal to designing the strategic experience layer tying identity, recommendations, diagnostics, and product pathways together across time.
Impact
Aligned leadership around a longitudinal platform vision, exposed key integration dependencies, and shifted planning conversations from isolated product improvements to learner continuity.
Context
This work focused on redefining ACT’s growing ecosystem of assessments, prep tools, diagnostics, and planning products as a more coherent learner experience rather than a set of disconnected offerings.
ACT had built meaningful capabilities across students, parents, counselors, educators, institutions, and workforce pathways, but many products evolved independently. Separate roadmaps, fragmented identity systems, inconsistent metadata, and uneven coordination made the broader experience feel patchwork and made next steps less clear for users.
The opportunity was to define a more unified platform vision connecting testing, profile data, recommendations, school and career exploration, and key life-stage transitions. This became a systems-level design challenge shaped by organizational complexity, technical fragmentation, and the need for long-term alignment.
Business Stakes
ACT’s portfolio already contained the ingredients for deeper learner engagement, but fragmentation limited continuity, cross-product value, and strategic coherence.
Success required a unifying experience vision that could guide roadmap decisions, surface platform dependencies, and reposition ACT from assessment events to a more longitudinal learner relationship.
Team
UX, Product Leadership, Enterprise Architecture, ACTNext, Research, and cross-product stakeholders across MyACT, Companion, Marketplace, Pathfinder, and related ACT entities.
Constraints
Impact Snapshot
I served as Director of UX, leading the UX team and shaping the experience vision across a fragmented portfolio of ACT products. My role extended beyond interface design into ecosystem discovery, systems modeling, cross-product alignment, and experience strategy.
Working across product leadership, research, enterprise architecture, and adjacent ACT entities, I helped reframe the effort from improving a single signed-in experience to defining a more coherent learner platform over time. This included identifying structural blockers, shaping the experience narrative, and aligning teams around a more unified direction.
Key leadership contribution: Led the UX effort to define the experience layer connecting assessment, planning, recommendations, and pathways across ACT’s ecosystem.
ACT’s ecosystem was shaped by fragmented identity systems, uneven tagging standards, independently evolving roadmaps, and competing organizational priorities.
I worked across product, architecture, research, and leadership to clarify what was structurally blocking continuity and guide the conversation toward a more unified experience strategy. That meant aligning teams around shared models and helping the organization think beyond local product optimization toward a longer-term learner platform vision.
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 that ACT had offerings across multiple life stages, but lacked a coherent experience layer connecting them.
At first glance, the challenge could have been framed as a MyACT redesign. But discovery showed the issue was structural, not interface-deep.
Identity systems were fragmented. Product roadmaps were optimized locally. Tagging standards and diagnostics were inconsistent. Recommendations, pathways, and actions were not connected by a shared experience layer.
Without addressing that structural fragmentation, interface-level improvements would remain partial and difficult to scale.
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.
Any credible solution had to reconcile:
This was a systems design and organizational alignment problem.
Discovery began with a broader question than how to improve MyACT. The more important question was how ACT’s products should connect over time so learners, families, and educators could make better decisions with more continuity and less confusion.
To answer that, the work combined ecosystem mapping, persona development, journey modeling, concept exploration, and cross-functional alignment across product, research, and architecture stakeholders. This shifted discovery away from isolated usability issues and toward where the ecosystem was breaking down across identity, transitions, recommendations, and decision support.
Student persona illustrating the uncertainty, support needs, and future-planning pressure surrounding college readiness.
Parent themes showing how family support, transition anxiety, 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:
These findings made it clear that ACT’s future value depended on designing continuity across products, personas, and transitions.
The persona and journey work exposed how fragmented the experience felt across very different users. High school students, parents, counselors, adult learners, and institutional stakeholders each encountered different slices of ACT, but none experienced a clear path through the ecosystem.
That insight showed that solving for a single persona or product would not be enough. The work needed a broader experience model that could adapt across actors, roles, and life stages while still feeling coherent.
Journey map illustrating how fragmented ACT experiences created friction across awareness, registration, preparation, results, and future planning.
The work was reframed from improving a signed-in ACT portal to defining how ACT’s products could function as a more unified learner experience over time.
Rather than treating the effort as a portal redesign or feature expansion, the strategy focused on the experience layer that could connect identity, recommendations, diagnostics, exploration, and action across products and life stages. This shifted the conversation from isolated enhancements to the structural decisions required to create continuity.
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 strategic concept was a unified, modular experience that could adapt to different personas while maintaining continuity across the ACT ecosystem.
Core principles included:
This established a more coherent direction for the experience.
The strategy also changed the retention conversation. Rather than viewing retention primarily through test-cycle events, the work repositioned value around longer-term learner engagement.
That meant thinking less about isolated transactions and more about relationship-building across decision points. The product experience was no longer just about access, but also continuity, relevance, and guidance.
This was one of the most important shifts in the work: moving from product silos to learner journeys as the organizing model.
Simplified alignment model showing how multiple prototype and release paths risked fragmenting into separate products without a shared platform direction.
With the strategic direction defined, the work shifted from ecosystem framing into experience modeling. The goal was not to improve a portal in isolation, but to define how ACT could support learners across connected moments in planning, testing, results, and next-step decisions.
The experience model introduced a shared layer between ACT.org and the broader product ecosystem, creating more continuity through navigation, account access, recommendations, and personalized pathways. Rather than forcing users to rediscover context at each entry point, the intent was to preserve momentum over time.
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:
This shifted the experience from product access toward guided progression.
One of the strongest directions was the Roadmap Builder, which translated the broader ecosystem strategy into a more tangible planning experience.
Instead of presenting education and career decisions as isolated choices, the concept connected learner inputs, majors, schools, and career paths into a visible pathway model. This made the strategy easier to understand and gave stakeholders a clearer view of how continuity could be expressed through interaction design.
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. The direction positioned the personalized web experience as a connective layer, helping unify navigation, account context, recommendations, notifications, and shared access patterns across products.
Rather than consolidating everything into a single product, the goal was to create coherence across independently evolving parts of the ecosystem. The higher-fidelity concept made that direction more concrete by showing how the shared experience layer could begin to resolve into a product experience that stakeholders could evaluate more directly.
The work produced:
This made the strategy easier to evaluate, communicate, and use in roadmap discussions.
Because this initiative operated at the platform and ecosystem level, validation focused less on isolated usability findings and more on whether the direction made structural sense across products, personas, and organizational constraints.
The work was pressure-tested through cross-functional discussion, concept reviews, journey modeling, and alignment with product, architecture, and adjacent teams. The core question was whether the experience model could credibly support a broader learner relationship over time.
The work made ecosystem fragmentation visible in a way teams could act on.
It reinforced that:
This increased confidence that the effort was addressing the right level of problem.
Although the work was strategic and phased, it still produced meaningful outcomes.
It helped:
Most importantly, it changed the level of the conversation. Instead of asking how to improve individual product moments, teams could begin asking how ACT should work as an ecosystem.
The opportunity was no longer just to support a student through a single test event, but to build a longer-term relationship through planning, recommendations, and transitions across life stages.
That reframing mattered because it tied product direction more closely to learner value over time, rather than short-cycle transactional engagement.
1. Ecosystem value must be designed, not assumed
ACT already had a broad portfolio of offerings, but breadth alone did not create continuity. Without a designed experience layer, users still encountered the ecosystem as disconnected moments.
2. Identity and access are strategic UX concerns
A unified learner experience depends on more than screens and navigation. Identity, account structure, and personalized access patterns shape whether continuity is possible.
3. Platform strategy needs tangible experience concepts
Ecosystem thinking became more actionable when it was translated into visible concepts such as the Roadmap Builder, unified navigation, and pathway-based recommendations. Strategic clarity improved when stakeholders could see how the model might work in practice.
4. Organizational alignment is part of the design problem
This work was not only about designing for learners. It also required aligning product, architecture, and ownership models so the experience could become more coherent over time.
5. Longitudinal engagement creates a stronger product frame
Reframing ACT around learner journeys rather than isolated test events opened a more durable product direction. It shifted the focus from transactional interaction toward ongoing support across decisions, transitions, and life stages.
