Project Overview

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt needed to transform their printed high school textbooks to digital format for use on Apple iBooks. More than reformatting text for digital space, the books contained hundreds of quizzes, maps, graphs, equations and timelines that needed to transform into simple, informative and engaging widgets.

Contributions:

Widget Production Management | Lead Design | Quality Assurance

Programs:

iBooks Author, Keynote, Illustrator, JIRA

15 high school textbooks. 1200+ interactive widgets.

A team of 10 production designers were orchestrated to create over 1200 widgets for 15 textbooks of varying grade levels and subject matter. As Design Lead, a agile workflow was crucial to the success of completing the 8-month project.

What is a widget anyway?

In terms of digital publishing for Apple iBooks, a widget is an interactive content component, housing different forms of media, like slides, videos, audio, and images. Several types were used in designing tests, readings, reveal diagrams, and equation widgets—to name a few—for student engagement in this project. Widgets were designed in Keynote and packaged as a widget file in Apple iBooks Author.

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Synchronized team. Beautiful results.

Creating a clear method for organizing client assets and producing widgets were essential since the production team consisted of 2 office locations, 10 production designers and 2 lead designers (myself included). Production designers were trained on the process and the most efficient methods in creating each type of widget.

Better than a well-oiled machine

With sudden growth of the creative team and overlapping timelines, the project manager and I adapted an individual workflow to a team process. We utilized folder tags to mark stages in the production and client was kept in the loop with JIRA. The combination of training, organization and procedure development maximized production speed and the team was always on-time, and often ahead of schedule.

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