Begin | Elana Grinberg Product Design Portfolio

Designing the Begin Site

Unifying multiple education brands under one digital experience—and laying the foundation for product bundling

Overview

During my time at Begin, I worked across its suite of sub-brands—including Homer Learning, codeSpark, and Little Passports—designing acquisition experiences, landing pages, and funnels. Later, I was part of a small, cross-functional team tasked with an ambitious challenge: build the Begin site—a unified platform that could house all of the company’s offerings and introduce bundling as a core part of the customer experience.

This case study focuses on that pivotal project: designing the first version of the Begin site—a one-stop shop for Begin's digital and physical learning products.

The Company
Begin is an early learning company offering a portfolio of educational products that span reading, coding, global exploration, and creative play. Over time, it had acquired several brands—Homer, codeSpark, and Little Passports—each with its own identity and digital presence.

Homer

HOMER is a digital learning app under the Begin umbrella, designed to support children ages 2–8 with foundational skills in reading, math, creativity, and critical thinking.

codeSpark

codeSpark is the #1 learn-to-code app for kids, introducing children ages 3–10 to the fundamentals of computer science through storytelling and game design.

Little Passports

Little Passports is a subscription service delivering hands-on educational kits for kids ages 3–10, focused on science, geography, and world cultures.

The Problem
As Begin evolved, it needed a centralized platform to:

Tell the story of Begin as a unified brand
Showcase all its offerings in one place (including blog content, printables, podcasts, and partnerships like Sesame Workshop)
Introduce bundled subscriptions to increase customer lifetime value

My Role
At the beginning of this initiative, I collaborated with the original product design team to:

Create wireframes and customer journey maps in Figma
Explore the site architecture and potential paths through content and products
Design early page layouts and modules—without any branding yet in place

Following a major company re-org, I became the only remaining designer from the original Begin site team. I then partnered with two product designers from other sub-brands and took the lead in:

Translating the new Begin branding (developed by Red Antler and the marketing team) into a usable product design system
Establishing a shared style guide and UI library with standardized type styles, color palette, spacing system, buttons, headers, and sample modules
Designing core pages like the homepage, bundle promotion modules, and navigation for seamless product discovery

The branding we recieved from Red Antler:

The Design System we developed and began applying to the pages we were designing:

Design Challenges

We had to create a cohesive, scalable design system that worked across multiple product types and marketing surfaces
The homepage had to support bundle messaging—convincingly showing how purchasing multiple subscriptions could provide greater value
We were building the site from scratch, transitioning from a brand-led identity to a product-driven experience

Research and Competitive Analysis

I conducted research on direct and indirect competitors. For direct competitors I researched companies that had a portfolio of educational brands geared toward children (BYJUs). For indirect competitors I researched companies that offered products and content for specific age groups (PBS) and companies that offered parent content (Good Inside).

For each competitor I looked at their site structure, information architecture and visuals. I looked at what they did well and where Begin was different.

Header and Hero Considerations

A global header was important to set up on each of the brand sites which we were keeping as separate entities. This would allow users to move between Begin brands without getting lost.

Our main CTA, "Shop Begin Products", gave users a clear action.

The header and and hero image showcased that Begin is an educational brand with digital and physical products for young children.

Including reasons to believe in the hero had been a winning conversion rate tested hero at Homer and so we used the same formula for a MVP on the begin site.

Shop Our Products Considerations

Our third module was the shop our products module. The goal of this page was to communicate to a parent the value of getting all three of Begin's main subscription products together as a bundle.

I wanted to showcase Begin's suite of brands tailored to the child's age while also showing how bundling the products would provide the child with a comprehensive education that included math, reading, social-emotional learning, and hands-on learning.

This was the MVP of the bundling strategy that would be further developed as the Begin brand developed.

I designed this module so that a users could see all the Begin had to offer at a glance and understand the value of getting a bundle of the three products together.

Blog Considerations

An important part of Begin's early strategy was to utilize all the blog content that already existed on the sub-brand sites, especially on Homer. This content would position Begin as an all encompassing resource for parents who wanted support in guiding their child's development.

I had heard in usability testing many times that filtering by age was very helpful for parents so we did that again in the blog section. That meant coordinating with the content team to ensure that they tagged each article by age as they reviewed them for transfer to the Begin site.

Another key feature of trust in the Begin brand was that the content was developed by an educational professional. We wanted to engage parents with the brand and allow them to submit questions that they had if they had trouble finding an article related to their particular question.

Reflection and Learnings

In the future I would have designed more dynamic ways of hiding and displaying more information on this page so that the user could learn about a particular product.

Eventually the design of the site was changed and the business strategy moved away from bundling. They instead decided to focus on the different types of product offerings (digital apps, physical kits, and content) in the second module and simply displaying the brands and what age they were geared toward in the third module. Perhaps there was a lot of copy in the original MVP and instead the information should have been displayed more simply we the what, then the types, and then the individual brands. From this starting place we could have tested what to add and take away to see what increased trial start rate.

We could also do more usability tests to see if the user understood the brand and the content earlier with more simple modules.