Case study: organizing a mountain of research for Oregon parents

Oregon Screen-Free Parenting is a parent-led community of low-screen families across Oregon. When we started this project, there was a lot of good information: studies on screens and kids, notes on what school districts were doing, news links, ideas for parents. What was missing was a way to show it. There was almost no structure, no written copy, and no real logo or brand. This is how we turned that pile into a site a busy parent can actually use.

Start with the questions parents ask

Before we designed a single page, we sorted everything by the question it answers. Parents who find the site are usually asking one of a few things:

• What does the research actually say?
• What should I do at home with a child my age?
• What's happening at my kid's school, and how do I speak up?

Each question became its own section with a plain name in the menu: Research, Schools, Take Action. A parent should know where to click without reading anything else on the page.

A research library you can filter

The research was the biggest job. The library now holds 138 studies and official reports, each one rewritten as a short, plain-language summary. Every entry says what kind of study it is, how strong the evidence is, and what the study can and can't tell us. The original source is always one click away.

That consistency is what makes filters possible. Because every study is tagged the same way, a parent can narrow the list by age group, topic, region, study type or evidence strength, and sort by the strongest evidence first. A grandparent curious about toddlers and language can get to the few studies that matter in two clicks.

We also wrote a short page called "How we read research" that explains the ten kinds of studies in everyday words, side by side. It keeps the site honest, and it keeps the summaries short, because the explanation lives in one place instead of being repeated on every entry.

An age-by-age guide for home and school

A library is great for digging in, but most parents want the answer for their own child. So the main research page is organized by age: birth to 18 months, 18 to 24 months, ages 2 to 5, kindergarten to 2nd grade, then grades 3 to 5, 6 to 8 and 9 to 12. A row of buttons at the top jumps straight to each one.

Every age follows the same pattern. First come suggestions for home. Next to them are suggestions for child care, preschool or school, depending on the age. Below both is a short "Why we suggest this" with numbered links back to the studies. Once you've read one age group, you know how to read all of them.

A toolkit with two clear paths

The advocacy material had the same problem as the research: lots of useful pieces, no order. We noticed parents come to it with one of two goals, so the toolkit opens with two choices. One is "Change things in my district." The other is "Get a paper option for my own child."

The district path is four numbered steps: find out what's happening, learn how your district decides, build a small group, and make a specific ask. The templates (a public comment script, a board email, a public records request and more) sit inside the step where you need them, and each one can be downloaded as a Word file or copied straight from the page. The paper option path starts smaller, with five questions to ask a teacher about any screen activity.

A tracker for all 197 Oregon school districts

Parents had been collecting what they knew about device programs in their districts: when 1:1 laptops or tablets start, which apps are used for core subjects, whether there's a parent contact. We put all of it in one sortable table covering every school district in Oregon, with search by district, city or county and filters by region and starting grade.

Some of that information is confirmed and some is secondhand, and parents need to know which is which. So every entry carries a label: verified, reported in the news, parent-reported, or unknown. The key sits right above the table. "Unknown" is useful too: it shows other parents exactly where they can help fill in the gaps.

A legislation tracker that updates itself

The newest section came later, at the request of Oregon Unplugged, to support parents and Oregon Unplugged's own advocacy work. It follows bills in the Oregon Legislature on phones in school, social media, AI, online safety, play and recess, and more. Bill language is hard to read, so each card shows the official title with a plain summary under it, a colored progress bar, and a clear status: in progress, became law, or did not pass.

Nobody has time to check the Legislature's website every day, so the site does it for them. It pulls updates from the Legislature's own records daily and sorts new bills into topics automatically. Parents can filter by topic, session or status, and each topic also shows what Oregon already has on the books and what other states have passed.

A brand to hold it together

We designed the logo, an open book with mountains and a rising sun, and a small brand system around it: deep forest green, cream, moss and a warm gold, with a friendly serif for headlines. The colors do real work on the site too. Gold marks bills that became law, and cream panels hold filters and suggestions, so the same color means the same thing everywhere. A media page gives reporters and partner groups the logo files and brand guidelines in one place.

Easy to keep current

A site like this is only useful if it stays up to date, and the people running it are parents with full lives. The studies, districts, news and pages all live in a simple content editor, so adding a new study or updating a district takes minutes and no developer. The legislation tracker keeps itself current.

What we'd tell anyone with a lot to share

• Sort by the reader's question, not by your file folders. The menu should match what people come looking for.
• Use the same pattern everywhere. When every study, age group and bill is laid out the same way, people learn the page once.
• Label how sure you are. Evidence strength and data status labels let readers trust what's solid and question what isn't.
• Give people a next step. Every section ends with something to do, whether that's reading a study, finding your district or downloading a template.

Tomena and Logan led this project from the first outline through launch, and we keep building on it as new sections come along.