Capstone Analysis
12.11.2025
: Redesigning HPL for Parents
For our group’s capstone project, we focused on redesigning How People Learn (HPL) for a parent audience. Our goal was to adapt the existing course so that it better fits the realities, needs, and constraints of parents who want to understand learning but do not have the time or energy to engage with heavy academic content. This required us to analyze not only the content of HPL itself, but also the lived conditions of parents in the U.S., the specific challenges that shape their learning needs, and the kinds of media and structures that could realistically support their participation. The analysis below unpacks the major design decisions we made and the reasoning that guided each stage of the process.
From the outset, we grounded the project in user-centered design and aimed to address its potential limitations by strictly adhering to the design justice principle of designing with, rather than just for, our audience. (Costanza-Chock, 2020) We approached the redesign through backward design and the IDEO Design Thinking framework, beginning with empathy and problem definition before generating solutions. (Wagner, 2020) Before creating any materials, we needed to understand who our learners were and how their circumstances should inform the instructional design. To do this, we conducted a short survey and held interviews with several parents. While our survey had only eight responses due to limited time and access, the interviews offered more depth. I spoke with three mothers—a parent of a toddler, a parent of two teenage girls, and a parent raising a tween. Two of the interviewees were Harvard students studying education, which naturally shaped their preferences toward more theory-based materials. This made their perspectives valuable but also introduced bias, since they do not reflect the broader population of U.S. parents. All of our interviewees were also mothers, which further limited the diversity of viewpoints, especially regarding how parenting roles and expectations differ across genders. Their opinions still helped surface important themes: one parent wanted deeper theoretical grounding, another preferred short, low-barrier “crash-course” style modules taught by authoritative experts, and others expressed a strong desire for immediate, practical strategies for everyday parenting challenges.
Because this sample was small, non-random, and skewed toward highly educated mothers, we knew it could not be considered representative. To fill this gap, we reviewed research and public discussions on U.S. parenting patterns, common stressors, and structural constraints. This additional evidence helped validate and contextualize the themes we observed in our interviews, especially around time scarcity and the competing demands faced by working parents. Across both our interviews and the literature, one theme appeared consistently: parents have extremely limited time. Many of them juggle full-time jobs, household labor, and childcare responsibilities, leaving very little bandwidth for sustained study. This was reinforced by employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025), which reported that in 2024, 66.5% of married-couple families with children had both parents employed, and in 91.4% of those families, at least one parent was employed. This evidence helped confirm that time scarcity was not just an individual preference but a structural condition affecting most parents. We therefore defined “time constraint” as the primary design parameter shaping all later decisions.
After clarifying the audience, we used these findings to generate a parent persona with ChatGPT—both to distill the major themes emerging from our research and to protect privacy. This persona became a touchstone throughout the design process, reminding us to avoid overly dense materials, long lectures, or assignments that would require uninterrupted time.
With our audience defined, we moved into the ideation phase, where we sought to challenge assumptions and generate innovative solutions. Here, we drew on Learning Experience Design (LXD) as a framework to 'unify the principles of User Experience Design with learning principles and instructional design principles'. By integrating interaction design, graphic design, and cognitive psychology, we aimed to focus on 'learning enablement'—creating experiential, multi-layered pathways that ensure engagement and retention. (Wagner, 2020) Our group’s diverse background—spanning design, research, and education—was essential to this process, as effective learning design relies on the ability to collaborate with colleagues from a wide variety of disciplines to optimize the learner's journey. Through weekly discussions and collaborative workshops, we generated ideas about how to restructure HPL’s content and how to choose media that felt empathetic and engaging rather than overwhelming.
We organized our design decisions into two major strands: 1)How to redesign the content to make it relevant, low-barrier, and connected to real parenting. 2)Which media formats would best support learning while respecting parents’ limited time.
In the content redesign, we centered the goals of reducing cognitive load, embedding learning into daily routines, and increasing emotional resonance. We reviewed all existing HPL modules and selected only those that related most directly to parenting. We then rewrote them to make theories feel grounded in familiar scenarios. This approach directly aligns with the framework of connected learning, which is defined as learning that is "socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity". Research indicates that "when a subject is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes". By incorporating specific parenting situations rather than abstract examples, we aimed to meet parents where their interests already were, ensuring the content was not "sequestered from everyday social life" but rather situated "within the flow of everyday social life, work, and other kinds of purposeful activity". (Ito et al., 2013)
Media selection required even more intentionality. Initially, we explored multiple options: building a website with community features, creating podcasts that parents could play while multitasking, or producing short, accessible videos with quick parenting tips derived from HPL concepts. However, after revisiting the assignment constraints, we decided to house the project on Canvas. Rather than discarding our early ideas, we adapted them into Canvas-friendly forms. The guest lecture from Michael Oliveri and Sean Snyder was especially influential here. Their demonstration of AI-assisted workflows showed us how AI tools could speed up prototyping, help storyboard ideas, and visualize concepts that would otherwise require more time than we had. Although I am trained as a designer and often skeptical about AI for final production, I found that AI was extremely helpful for rapid visualization during early iterations. It supported the creative process without replacing professional design judgment.
For prototyping, we selected a set of tools that helped us translate ideas into concrete materials. We used Google Flow to produce short parenting scenes as video hooks, Speechify to generate audio explanations for lightweight podcast-style learning, and Gemini to turn dense developmental charts into more visual and accessible representations. Because we could not redesign the full HPL curriculum, we focused on Module 1.2.3, which covers developmental stages across childhood. The original Module 1.2.3 presented several challenges for our target audience. It was heavily text-based and theory-driven, offered developmental information without connecting it to parenting practices, and relied on formal quizzes that did not support meaningful application. To address these issues, we redesigned each component with parents’ time constraints and learning needs in mind:
- Retitled the module to make its relevance to parenting more explicit.
- Replaced the text-heavy developmental chart with a visual chart generated through Gemini to present children’s growth stages in a clearer, more accessible way.
- Redesigned the introductory video by adding a realistic parenting scenario as the opening hook. Using Google Flow, we created a scene where a child behaves unreasonably and a parent struggles to respond, followed by a developmentally grounded explanation to bridge theory and lived experience.
- Converted lengthy theoretical explanations into a podcast-style audio segment, generated with Speechify, allowing parents to learn while multitasking.
- Removed quiz-based assessments and replaced them with a structured parenting journal, giving parents a tool for reflection, application, and ongoing use beyond the course.
- Eliminated additional readings and videos that added unnecessary cognitive load, substituting them with a family activity adapted from Project Zero that directly reinforces the module’s core ideas.
Throughout the redesign, we kept accessibility and universal design principles in mind, recognizing that 'when learner variability is not addressed in a design, it is inevitable that many learners will experience obstacles to their learning'. (Gronseth et al., 2020) We added subtitles to all videos, made transcripts downloadable, wrote alt-text for images, and designed multiple journal templates across file types to accommodate different preferences. While working with AI-generated media, we also encountered issues such as biased outputs or visually distorted images. These moments reinforced our belief that AI should be used only for prototype demonstrations, not as final production tools. If this course were ever fully developed, images and videos would be produced by trained designers to ensure accuracy, representation, and safety, especially because the content involves children.
Our next phase was testing. With limited time, we treated the course gallery walk as an informal pilot test. We presented the original and redesigned Module 1.2.3 side by side so visitors could clearly see the differences. The feedback from guests was encouraging and affirmed many of our design choices. Several visitors commented that the redesigned materials felt more accessible and easier to navigate, especially the integration of visuals and audio in place of dense text. Some participants also offered constructive suggestions that pushed our thinking further. One notable idea involved enhancing the developmental chart by allowing parents to customize it—selecting their child’s age or even aspects of identity to generate a more personalized representation. This level of personalization could increase parents’ sense of relevance and connection to the material. At the same time, we recognized the challenges such customization would introduce. Personalization at the level of identity raises concerns about underrepresentation, especially if the visual outputs do not sufficiently reflect the diversity of family structures, cultural backgrounds, and developmental pathways. It would also significantly increase the editing and maintenance workload for the HPL learning design team, which runs counter to the practical constraints of keeping the content housed on Canvas in a stable, easily navigable format. For these reasons, we chose not to implement the suggestion in this pilot version but flagged it as a direction worth exploring in future iterations, especially if more robust data and resources become available.
Looking ahead, we recognize that a fuller redesign would require more robust user research, including both quantitative and qualitative data, to better understand parents’ evolving needs. In addition, based on feedback from interviews and informal testing, we identified Social Presence from the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework as the most relevant element to support parents’ learning experiences. Social Presence emphasizes learner–learner connection and acknowledges that participants bring valuable knowledge from their own lived experiences. (Costa, 2022) For parents in particular, learning is often deeply personal and context-dependent, and many benefit from hearing how others navigate similar challenges. Several parents expressed a desire not only to learn from course materials, but also to feel less isolated in their struggles. Prioritizing Social Presence allows the course to support this need without requiring intensive instructor involvement or synchronous participation. In practice, this could take the form of low-pressure, optional spaces for parent interaction, such as an informal discussion board. These spaces would not require parents to engage in academic discussion or complete additional tasks, but would instead allow them to share experiences, tips, and reflections if and when they choose. This approach respects parents’ time constraints while still creating opportunities for mutual support and peer learning.
This project brought together my background in industrial design and my growing practice in learning design in a way I did not initially expect. Working through this capstone reminded me that learning design requires a different kind of responsibility than product design. Designing for learning means attending not only to usability, but also to context, emotion, and sustainability over time. This experience helped me rebuild a more intentional, learner-centered design mindset and reinforced a principle I plan to carry forward: meaningful learning experiences emerge only when designers remain open, humble, and willing to design with learners rather than for them.
Reference
Costa, K. (2022). Community of inquiry (COI) model online teaching checklist (revised, 2022). 100 Faculty. http://www.100faculty.com
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001
Gronseth, S. L., Michela, E., & Ugwu, L. O. (2020). Designing for diverse learners. In Instructional Design. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/id/designing_for_diverse_learners
Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-Green, J., & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, April 23). Employment characteristics of families – 2024 (USDL-25-0564). U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
Wagner, E. D. (2020). Becoming a learning designer. In Instructional Design. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/id/learning_designer