B2C, UX, Design System
history.org's Customizer
Building a web editor that gives teachers the ability to personalize existing content pages from history.org.
Role
UX, Design System
Tools
Figma
Year
2025-26
Agency
Grow
Providing Top-Tier History Assets
Teaching K-12 is hard. And teaching history with trustworthy resources can be even harder.
So, when a site like history.org comes around that provides teachers with a vetted library of educational sources all in one place, curated just for them, it empowers them. They get access to multiple source types (artifacts, artworks, documents, & more) each assigned to one or more grade levels.
But empowerment isn’t just about access; it’s also about building tools that put dominion back into the teachers’ hands for their students.
Teachers Need Flexibility
Despite history.org’s success in sharing their content library, they lacked one thing – customization. Many of the teachers we talked to loved the content, but often felt boxed in. They wanted to edit and rearrange the content to meet their classroom needs.
Teachers are also extremely short on time. So whatever we crafted had to work with them, not against, and made teachers itching to come back.
Content Brought to Classrooms on Their Terms
🗣️ The Ask
Create a tool that gives teachers more control over the content they share with their students in classrooms that exporting can’t support.
⭐️ The Goal
Give students a fun digital place to learn in class, crafted by their teacher with minimal time spent and total ease.
Customizer 1.0 (MVP)
When tasked with editing an existing content library, our team’s minds went straight to a website builder. Our first pass was strictly scoped as an MVP to gain an understanding of how teachers and students are using history.org in their classrooms.
During testing, many teachers loved the MVP Customizer. Our patterns were working, but many teachers were expecting something a bit more advanced that catered to all different student reading levels. It also took teachers a beat to get started with editing.
Customizer 2.0
With the gathered information, it was clear that editability needed to be streamlined, simplified, and accomplished more quickly. So to optimize teacher's time and reflecting workspaces today we added a few new features: "click to edit”, auto-save, onboarding, and a side rail introduction.
Editability is now all up to the teacher. Teachers no longer have to depend on additional clicks to view their edit options, and now get to delineate which mode they are ready to dive into – Edit or Style.
Making history.org A True Workspace
The Customizer was the catalyst in shifting history.org from a content resource to a full-blown workspace for teachers. So much so that many design changes made to the content pages were applied to the front-facing site upon client request.
After my completion of the Customizer design work, I was also tasked with revamping the design system by consolidating pre-existing elements, updating and sunsetting outdated modules, and adding the Customizer in the mix.
The Team
Megan "Jax" Jackson
Associate UX Director
Aidan Molloy
Senior Copywriter
Jared Beck
Senior Designer
Miles Aylward
Senior Full Stack Developer
Nate Witte
Tech Director
Matt Taylor
Producer
Lindsey Parker
Executive Producer & Client Partner
