Interviews with Designers: Hannah Peckham
Hannah is a Product Designer at Teachers Pay Teachers. She’s also a pay-it-forward mentor, a life-long learner, and one hell of a baker.
Hannah and I found a quiet corner in our office to talk shop. I asked her a bunch of questions about her design practice and we also talked specifically about her experience working on products that empower educators at TpT. Here’s what she had to say:
What got you into design?
Photography. In high school, I took a lot of art and photography classes. We had a dark room at our high school, and my dad studied photography in college so we were always taking pictures growing up. My mom was a math major, but I did not inherit any of that skill.
I also took a lot of printmaking and mixed media classes. We didn’t do a lot of digital design. I had a really awesome teacher (shout out to Kate Jones!) who inspired me to pursue a career in design. I felt like art school was kind of risky, but I still wanted to do something creative. Luckily, I found the New Media Design program at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that combined technology with art, and it was the perfect fit. It was an art program, so we studied a lot of fundamentals of art and design. But then, after the first year, it was almost all digital. We learned web design & development, 3D, animation, app design, typography, etc. You kind of explored the whole field and decided where you fit in best.
I know the RIT alumni network is super active. Do you keep up with the community?
Yes, it’s an awesome community. Every year, they host an event called Industry Day where alumni from different companies come back and provide feedback to students’ portfolios and source for internships and full-time hires. Alumni who are now at Google and different agencies in New York come back to hire new grads because they know what type of knowledge and experience these students have. I got my first job through this event, as a digital designer at Mullen, an advertising agency in Boston.
There’s also a strong network for helping each other outside of this event. I got my second job, this time in product design at Evernote, through another alumnus of the program (Hi, Kara!). I keep up with what the current students are working on, and other shenanigans in the infamous New Media Lab, though their Instagram account.
When we graduated, most went to New York or San Francisco. I’ve lived in both those places in the past five years, and a lot of my closest friends are still from RIT. It’s nice to have a group of people to bounce ideas off of, for freelance projects, or new career moves. We have a Slack channel where we give feedback to each other on different projects and post about jobs. We actually just hired Nicole Formica at TpT, a fellow RIT NMD alum. She was previously at Foursquare, and it’s been awesome having her aboard the TpT design team!
What drew you to Teachers Pay Teachers?
When you first reached out to me, I hadn’t heard of TpT, so I had to do some research on the company. I think what drew me in then was the type of people who were joining. The diverse group of people and the fact that a lot of them had worked at big companies like Facebook, Google, and Etsy in the past was interesting to me. I was in a position where I could work at one of these big companies but didn’t really feel like it was for me. I still wanted to make a good career move, so it was really cool to see all these people take the expertise of their roles at these larger companies and come here.
Also, it’s important to me to work on something that has an impact on people’s lives. At Evernote, I saw how passionate people were about the app. We had a really strong community of users there and it’s similar here.
When you make a change to the product, teachers notice and have opinions. To work on something that people really care about is awesome.
What does a typical day at TpT look like for you?
I get to the office between 9:00 and 10:00 and have an iced coffee (even in the winter, when it’s snowing). I get to my desk and plan out my day. I am the design lead for our Search, Discovery, and Personalization team. I work cross-functionally on this team along with many talented engineers, our Product Manager, Tech Lead, and Community Specialist. I normally have meetings in the morning, as two of our teammates are in Ukraine and we meet before lunch because of the time difference.
At noon, one of our designers, Shem, hosts a daily stretching session. This is a great break from the day to relax and take a breath. After that, it depends on what I’m working on. I’ll either be pairing with a designer, talking to teachers, prepping prototypes to be tested, or just at my desk designing. I work closely with our engineers and PM; we all sit together so I’m often spinning my chair around to chat with my teammates.
What design challenges do you face?
Because we’re an older website (12 years and counting!), tech debt is something that I face a lot. Sometimes different pages can be on different stacks (some in PHP and others on React). We often struggle with the cost vs. benefit of porting our work to the new stack. However, we’re actively building our design system — a shared library of React components which helps a lot. The migration just takes time.
Also, because our teacher communities are so invested in the platform, we have to be careful not to change too much too quickly on them. Sometimes things we perceive to be small changes can have a major impact on their experience. We’re lucky to have such a vocal community; they’re great about providing feedback. For me, I’ve been focused on the challenge of learning how to collaborate with our longstanding teacher communities while also driving design forward.
Have you come to any conclusions on our best practices for contributing to a platform that has a lot of legacy design debt?
I think we’re working on it one step at a time. We’ve chunked it out so we can improve slowly. We’re making steady progress, but we still have a few hurdles to get over. We first started by porting our search page, and then the product page. Now, we’re working on getting our homepage updated because there’s a bunch of things we want to change on the homepage that we’re delayed on by this tech debt. I’m excited that it’s all coming together!
Is there a Teacher-Author at TpT you find especially inspirational?
There are so many amazing teachers on our site! Earlier this year, I was doing some research on our Teacher-Authors who create digital resources for classrooms that use Google Classroom. There’s this one Teacher-Author from South Africa, Lindy Du Plessis, who I think is just on her game. All of her stuff looks really sharp and she makes all these little videos to go along with her work. Everything she does is super engaging and I think her resources look awesome.
Was there anything about Lindy’s teaching practice that surprised you?
With the digital stuff, it’s really interesting to see how teachers use Google Slides and PowerPoint for different purposes than they were built for. For example, Lindy found a really creative way to make game interface patterns, like select boxes for interactive puzzles, inside these presentation tools. And then there was a moment where I thought it would be great if Teacher-Authors would incorporate videos of their resources in action into their product pages. Without any prompt, Lindy just started doing that on her own, so her buyers could get a better look at how to use the resources. It was great!
Since you started working as a designer, what work are you most proud of?
I think I’m most proud of the redesign of the Evernote iOS app. We re-built the whole app while I was there. It was a super cool experience to be able to change so much of the app. We set out to fix things that were broken, like the navigation, but then also rewrote the whole app at the same time. There was a ton of learning with a project that large, and I was even able to learn some Swift while we were working on it. I feel like it just encompassed so much, from research to making prototypes, and rolling it out slowly to our beta community that we were in constant contact with. It just bundled everything up super nice and it was a big unveiling. It launched to millions of people, which felt great, but also stressful because we were changing something they use every day.
I know you’re just getting started at TpT, but what’s been your proudest moment here?
I would say it’s shipping the redesigned mobile web product page. Our mobile web experience has been neglected in the past, but now we have a lot of data that is driving us to make improvements. As a first step, we wanted to see if making UI updates to the product page would have an effect on mobile web purchasing. Our hypothesis was that the existing experience seemed untrustworthy, mostly because it didn’t look like our desktop site. We wanted to test if an updated mobile web product page, one that looked and felt more like the desktop experience, would increase purchasing confidence from phones and other mobile devices. I basically took the patterns and components that existed and brought them over to mobile web. This made the actions a lot easier to use and styles that are more recognizable.
We thought there would be a little bump to our daily numbers, or even a neutral change. But it was a crazy win for the team; it improved mobile purchasing a lot. We’re still trying to see where else we can push that. Afterward, we tried updating the cart page but didn’t see any significant results. But it was cool to validate that small UI updates can directly increase sales. This was a nice proof point of design’s impact on engagement and retention, as well as sales.
Where do you go to get inspired?
I recently attended the Women Techmakers event at Google for International Women’s Day, and that was super inspiring.
Hearing stories of their struggles, what they’ve accomplished, and just learning more about the amazing women in the design & engineering community was amazing. I came back to work and was super pumped.
We heard from Jessica Matthews who invented the Soccket, the soccer ball that generates electricity when you kick it. She invented it when she was 19, and now she’s 30 and is the CEO of her own company. Hearing stories like that are really inspiring.
If you could teach anything, what would you teach and to whom?
I would teach others to bake. But first, I’d want to study pastry arts before I try to teach it! I love baking. It’s super fun and stress- relieving for me. I take a lot of classes at culinary schools in NYC. I also recently hosted a quick espresso & latte art class at our office. It’s fun to share knowledge. Even if it’s something simple like making coffee. Everyone was really excited to learn about it. As for whom, I would teach anyone who wants to learn — it would be fun to help quench their curiosity and give them new knowledge or tips for working in the kitchen.
Last Question: Do you have any advice for young designers?
Never stop learning. It’s something that I think about a lot. You’re never finished. When you graduate from a design program, it’s not like, all right, I’ve learned all there is to know. You’re always growing, and learning things. I think that’s super important.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask for help. I think most people are willing to help if just ask. For awhile, I was nervous to do that. I didn’t want to ask questions and seem like I didn’t know what I was talking about. But when you do, you realize there’s a lot you can learn.
Awesome! Thanks, Hannah! That’s a wrap.
Yay! ✌🏽
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