Situation
The University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) had spent years translating cutting-edge research on the power of bilingualism in early childhood into a proven curriculum for children ages 0-5. Their first digital pilot lived in WordPress with a learning plug-in: it was hard to navigate, visually dated, and not flexible enough to support growth, multiple age tracks, or a mix of English and Spanish.
The long-term vision was to license SparkLing to large childcare organizations and use the revenue to fund further research. However, the existing product wasn't robust or user-friendly enough for that kind of scale.
Task
Substantial was asked to:
- Understand the real-world needs, constraints, and workflows of early childhood bilingual teachers using or piloting SparkLing.
- Recommend the right product architecture (LMS, CMS, or hybrid) to support scale, multi-language content, and future features.
- Redesign the end-to-end teacher experience so it felt intuitive, engaging, and respectful of teachers' expertise.
- Build a platform that I-LABS' non-technical team could update themselves, without relying on developers for content changes.
Action
We combined deep teacher research, UX design, and a scalable technical foundation to rebuild SparkLing around classroom realities.
- Immersed in SparkLing's world: Conducted a 5-week discovery sprint, interviewing 12 bilingual early childhood educators across multiple states to understand their context, tech comfort, and day-to-day classroom realities.
- Defined design principles: Ran a collaborative workshop with I-LABS to distill four design principles: meet teachers where they are, activate a desire to learn, respect lived experience, and inspire confidence in the research.
- Reimagined the teacher experience: Designed wireframes for all key touchpoints. Introduced a two-pane training layout that teachers immediately recognized and felt comfortable with. Built lesson-plan views showing the full year and week at a glance with light customization options.
- Architected for scale: Conducted a technical investigation into LMS and CMS options. Recommended a hybrid architecture pairing a modern LMS API with a flexible CMS for bilingual content — enabling a custom front-end that delivers the UX teachers actually need.
Result
- SparkLing is now a cohesive digital product with an experience designed specifically for bilingual early childhood educators.
- In research sessions, teachers consistently said the new flow felt clear, familiar, and genuinely useful, and many expressed strong interest in taking the full certification themselves.
- The team has been able to substantially revise and shorten training content on their own after piloting it with teachers, using the CMS without fear of breaking the system.
- The platform supports separate tracks for ages 0-3 and 3-5, bilingual content, and richer reporting — positioning SparkLing to be adopted by large childcare organizations and to measure its impact on language comprehension over time.