GetAlma.com

Alma is an all-in-one student information and learning management system built on a simple premise: educators should spend their time with students, not fighting software. The platform serves school and district administrators, teachers, parents, and students across hundreds of school districts nationwide.

School management software is notoriously painful. Teachers lose hours to clunky attendance tools and opaque grading systems. Administrators juggle disconnected platforms for scheduling, reporting, and compliance. Parents are left in the dark. The existing options on the market were built for IT departments, not the people who actually use them every day, and schools were stuck choosing between “powerful but miserable” and “simple but limited.”

The challenge was designing enterprise-level software that felt consumer-grade and flexible enough to support dozens of school types and configurations, yet simple enough a teacher could pick it up on day one. I started by mapping every user role and their core workflows, identifying where existing tools created the most friction. From there, I prioritized ruthlessly: what are the six products we need to launch with, and how do we make each one feel inevitable rather than overwhelming?

In my first 8 weeks, I worked directly with the Head of Product & Engineering to take Alma from concept to production - over 300 screens and 30 user flows across six core products. As the sole designer, I then expanded the platform with features like a visual attendance taker, digital report card creator, and data dashboards that gave administrators real-time insight into student engagement.

I also designed and developed Alma’s first marketing site, created the design system and style guide, collaborated with the CEO on brand strategy, and grew the product design team.

Alma was named Best Student Information System of 2020 and has won awards for its digital report card creator, visual attendance tools, and data visualization. The core designs I created are still in use across over 1,300 school districts.

Administrators consistently praise how easy the platform is to set up, and teachers love the real-time insights that help them spot struggling students before they fall through the cracks, which is exactly what we set out to do!