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July 1, 2021 - No Comments!

Why Users Struggle in Your edTech Product

Users experience challenges in edTech products for all sorts of reasons. Everything from overly complex navigation patterns to visual noise can distract from your learning content and prevent users from getting the most out of your tool. 

Has your customer service team noticed a pile-up of user feedback on the same feature? Or are your sales dwindling unexpectedly? If so, it's time to get to the bottom of things with user experience research.

By using tools from the UX research process, you'll be able to pinpoint specific areas of frustration and develop better solutions. This could mean conducting a full UX audit or holding one more round of user testing to get to the bottom of your users' product challenges.

Below, we break down UX research best practices for identifying the biggest product challenges for your edTech users. We also decode some of the most common design feedback we hear from teachers and students. If any of these comments mirror user feedback for your own product, you'll be ready to move faster, identify the problem, and design solutions that delight your users.

How to Identify Product Challenges with User Experience Research

It can happen to any edTech brand. 

Your learning content is solid, your marketing team is doing well, but your users bail on activities early in their journey. Or teachers and parents have started to leave negative reviews identifying the same issue.

Where do you go from here? 

Turning to the UX research process is your best course of action. Here are the three UX best practices we use again and again to identify sticking points within edTech products.

  1. Conduct a UX audit

Conduct a UX audit of your existing product to illuminate areas with unintentional obstacles in the user's journey. Most likely, there's some challenge between your user and their intended goal. Your audit will help you determine what those challenges are.

Within your audit, a heuristic analysis can provide guidelines and criteria for evaluating usability. We recommend Jakob Nielsen's principles for interaction design as a starting point. By applying heuristic analysis to your product, you'll uncover the design pitfalls that lower its overall usability. 

 

  1. Identify specific pain points with user testing

Observing users as they perform tasks in real time will tell you a lot about their challenges within your existing product. 

Before you spring for a feature re-design, get to the bottom of the issue by conducting several rounds of user testing. What stumbling blocks do you notice? What kinds of feedback do your users provide? 

 

  1. Audit your competitors

Competitive audits provide industry-wide insight into common UX patterns. By understanding which UX patterns your users are familiar with, it will be easier to design intuitive interactions within your edTech product.

Not only will competitive audits help you avoid making the same mistakes as your competitors, but they also offer a fresh lens for evaluating user challenges within your own product.

 

4 Common edTech Design Challenges and How to Fix Them

Challenge #1: Targeting the Wrong Age Group

If your digital reading tool is designed for second graders, testing might reveal that the UX copy is easier for fourth and fifth graders to understand. Or it might be that your product's UI doesn't quite appeal to the young students who are your target user base. 

Whatever your specific challenge might be, user feedback points to a mismatch between existing content or design and the targeted age group of your users.

Typical user feedback: When testing adult users of your product, you might hear things like, "I like the learning content, but other products do a better job making content visually interesting for my students." 

If you're testing student users, you may hear specific design or content-related ideas, including, "I like when products have themes that change," or, "I like when I can customize my avatar."

Actions to take: Review the customer feedback you've already received. Based on feedback, conduct focus groups that target students in the right grade levels. Focus groups with real users at different developmental stages ensure that students are responding to design decisions in the way that you intend.

You might also consider running A/B tests on different visual solutions for your product. Which solution performs better? Can you offer different designs targeted to each grade band? What responses do students have to specific themes or characters? 

For an even more thorough approach, audit the visual interface, illustration, and theme decisions of your competitors and consult educational experts for additional insights into the developmental needs of specific age groups.

Challenge #2: Product Navigation Doesn't Follow a Logical Sequence

While playing around with common UX patterns can result in interesting visual design choices, you may also unintentionally create confusion for your users. 

For example, if your log-in button is located at the bottom of a landing page, rather than on the right-hand side of your screen, young users might have a tough time accessing your product.

Typical kinds of user feedback: User feedback on navigation issues can be spectacularly blunt or straight-forward. You might hear users say something like, "I don't know how I got here. Why did clicking on this link bring me to this page?"  

We've also heard teachers give feedback like, "I know my kids would be so frustrated by this," or, "This doesn't make any sense." Time to go back to the drawing board!

Actions to take: Start with a user test and observe students or teachers trying to navigate within your product in real time. Once pandemic restrictions lift, you may even be able to conduct a field study by going into a classroom and observing kids using your product in their typical environment.

Collecting anecdotal information will also help you pinpoint where the navigation breaks down for student users. With more information, you'll be able to better reconfigure your screens, or streamline the user flow for the most troublesome areas of the product. Don't forget to test your new solutions!

Challenge #3: Lack of Visual Engagement

Even if your UX works like a charm, your user interface might be overly corporate or geared toward adult users. 

Students need to be visually engaged with compelling, age-appropriate designs. Once they're having fun, it's much easier to help them learn.

Typical kinds of user feedback: You may get positive feedback from teachers about visual design, even as they express hesitancy about what will engage their students. 

Comments like, "I like looking at this, but I don't know that the kids are going to react well to it," or, "I think this is geared more towards me," are common.

Actions to take: If your product has both student- and teacher-facing UI, consider how you might further customize the student view. 

Which visual elements can be changed to appeal to student users? Where can you infuse the student experience with delight? How do you show a visual relationship between the student and teacher interfaces without making the teacher interface too kidlike?

Challenge #4: Too Much Visual Noise
Sometimes we go for visual engagement and delight and overwhelm our users. If there are too many animations, alerts, or multiple navigational choices for your users to make, they might quit rather than engage at all.

Typical kinds of user feedback: Be on the lookout for signs of frustration during usability tests. Student users might express concerns like, "I don't know where to look." Meanwhile, teachers might come right out and say, "I know my kids or my parents would be frustrated and not know what to do."

 Actions to take: Conduct qualitative interviews and ask existing customers to identify the main task on the primary page of your site. Can they pinpoint the most important area of your app?

Based on the results of your interviews, re-organize the visual hierarchy of your page to emphasize the user's primary need or task. Then, conduct additional user testing to verify whether you've hit on the right solution.

User research and testing is your best tool for identifying specific product challenges and designing an innovative solution. The faster you deploy UX audits or schedule a focus group, the sooner you'll smooth out any rough edges in your UX. And the happier teachers, parents, and students will be to use and recommend your learning tool!

Are you trying to understand a mysterious dip in user engagement? Drop us a line and tell us how we can help!

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June 10, 2021 - No Comments!

Translating Teacher Suggestions into edTech Product Features

When you work in a specialized industry like edTech, you get comfortable with the lingo. Product owners and UX designers use terms like "adaptive" or "responsive" all the time, for example—and we know what we mean. (Products that use analytics or AI to respond to student activity, for starters.)

But when teachers use the term "adaptive" or "personalized" to describe edTech product features, they can often mean something quite different. Since there's no official Teacher-to-edTech Product Owner Dictionary (not yet, anyway!), it can be difficult to understand what teachers really want. 

Even if you've held incredible feedback sessions, misunderstandings can lead to lost time designing around real user challenges and other frustrations.

In order to make the most use out of your user testing, research, and feedback, here are three common responses we hear in conversations with users—and how you can translate them into product features teachers will actually want to use for their in-person and virtual classrooms.

When Grouping Features and Manual Updates Cause User Frustration

What a teacher says: "It's really frustrating to have to update my virtual class list or create groups manually."

What a product owner or designer might hear: "In order to do this, I'd have to re-evaluate the entire permissions system within our product, or re-consider how our rostering system is structured within the app."

What the teacher most likely means: "Automated grouping or classroom management features help me save time. If I can save the group I used last week, I don't have to spend as much time on tech set-up."

How to address the concern: If you're hearing these kinds of comments, take a step back. Boil the comment down to the specific problem, so you can work a solution out with your development team. 

This might even mean setting aside a proposed solution from a user, like, "I want grouping to happen automatically." Your user might actually be requesting something happen "automatically" because they want to save time. 

Once you understand the nature of your users' problems, you'll likely be able to come up with a time-saving solution that works. (And that won't require a massive overhaul on the back end.)

What Teachers Really Mean By "Differentiate"

What a teacher says: "I want something that differentiates for me." 

What a product owner or designer might hear: "We should work on our product's accessibility. Maybe in the next phase, we could roll out audio features or voice recognition."

What the teacher most likely means: "I wish this product could address content sequencing by finding the appropriate level of difficulty for each of my students." 

How to address the concern: Ensuring that your product uses voice recognition and other inclusive technology whenever possible is important. In fact, we always recommend building digital tools with accessibility in mind.

In a pedagogical context, however, to "differentiate" means to tailor instruction to meet individual needs. Teachers do this in the classroom all the time by grouping students, providing additional individual support, giving visual guides, revisiting topics, or trying different teaching modalities.

Differentiation is certainly related to student accessibility and personalized learning. But teachers who make comments about differentiation are most likely thinking about digital tools that use AI to adapt to a learners' needs. That could look like a content sequence that changes based on students' in-app performance or an additional content review based on student progress.

When a digital tool "differentiates" content for individual learners, teachers have more time to focus on classroom instruction. Your digital tool has an opportunity to help busy teachers work more efficiently and effectively.

How to Interpret Teacher Requests for Automation

What a teacher says: "I hate having to sort through all my students to find out who finished an assignment and who hasn't."

What a product owner or designer might hear: "That sounds frustrating, but fixing this issue could mean re-designing our existing platform to provide up-to-date notifications. There will be major implications for the entire site!"

What the teacher most likely means: "I want to eliminate extra administrative work, like emailing students or checking in with parents when assignments are missing." 

How to address the concern: For teachers, reporting features are often not just about student performance but in-app usage. Are students using the tool at home? Have they completed all their assignments?

When you understand what teachers really want from reporting features, it's easier to set up the back end in order to prioritize real-time updates. Teacher-facing products can easily integrate code or AI to make teachers' lives easier. 

In order to automatically send reminders to students with missing assignments, for example, first work with your developers to create an analytics feature that updates in real time. User research can help your team determine when teachers would find notifications most useful, or when they might be overwhelming. Once you've come up with a solution, rapid prototype testing ensures that your new feature aligns with what teachers need. Have you accurately addressed their concerns?

No matter what type of user feedback you collect, user testing always reveals whether you've accurately translated teacher suggestions into useful edTech product features.  

Over the past year, teachers have come to expect more than ever from edTech products. Now that they understand edTech products can "differentiate" student content in real time or perform other high-level tasks, they'll express these needs in user interviews. 

They just might not use the same terms as edTech designers. They might even express an idea for a solution that sounds complicated on the surface—but that points to a problem that can be solved simply.

The more we all work to understand the shifting needs and user dynamics of teachers, the easier it will be to translate their generous comments, suggestions, and feedback on our products into the features they really want.

Are you still parsing through teacher feedback in order to roll out new features for your learning tool? Drop us a line and tell us how we can help!

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May 21, 2021 - No Comments!

How Good UX Design Provides a Safe edTech Environment for Online Student Interaction

We all saw how challenging it was for teachers to keep their students engaged during remote learning. If anything, it's made us rethink the role of edTech in supporting peer-to-peer learning interactions and building classroom communities within digital products. 

Maybe you've already been tasked with creating more opportunities for students to interact with their peers within your digital tools. Or maybe you're looking for new ways to incorporate social emotional learning (SEL) features into your existing products and need inspiration for the peer-to-peer aspect of collaboration tools. 

Whatever your user engagement goals might be for 2021, strong UX and design principles can help you make more valuable social interaction features for your users. 

By breaking down social interactions into smaller, more manageable units, you'll avoid the privacy challenges and legal constraints that large, open-ended platforms present. You'll also make it easier for teachers to manage and monitor online student interactions, all while keeping students who use your tools safe.

Helping Students Successfully Navigate Digital Interactions in edTech 

Educators value student-student collaboration tools because they offer ways to foster community in individual classrooms. These features also help students improve their SEL skills by working with their peers. But what happens when product owners want to introduce these same features to connect students from different classrooms—or different parts of the world?

Expanding your platform beyond individual classrooms will immediately bring privacy and safety issues to the forefront. If your goal is to support learning interactions between classrooms or create a large online community of student users, you must address state and federal privacy standards for students, as well as legal constraints around user-produced content. If best practices for building and maintaining social platforms aren't followed from the beginning of your design process, your platform runs the risk of enabling real harm. 

Even though this process presents design and safety challenges, it's possible to navigate these concerns safely. The digital platform DIY.org, for example, offers a strong model for connecting individual learners to a larger digital community. Student-generated content is shared with guardians via the DIY.org app. Family members then choose whether to share this content with the larger DIY community by signing a consent form; they even retain the ability to 'approve' each submission from their child. This added layer of informed consent mitigates privacy challenges and involves parents directly in the process of community engagement.

No matter how big your digital community is, the goal of any online learning tool with social features is to help students communicate with, and learn from, their peers. Whether your learning tool supplements in-person lessons or provides a digital space for students to collaborate remotely, safe, successful student interaction is the key to effective learning, high engagement, and product adoption.

 

How to Support Teachers Building Online Communities

As we build digital platforms and online communities in edTech, we must consider how well-equipped educators are to address online bullying, teach digital citizenship, and foster other forms of online community building. 

After all, without the support of busy educators, community-based products are less likely to be adopted and championed. Here are four ways you can support teachers on your digital platform—without adding to their heavy workload.

 

  1. Develop Simple Monitoring Features

Especially in secondary education environments, teachers need easy administrative tools for reviewing and approving student content before publishing it to the entire class. This might even look like lightly monitored AI chat to streamline a teacher's initial screening.

In higher education, students are able to self-monitor more effectively. When students are able to flag comments or use up- and down-voting features, instructors quickly become aware of problematic content or positive classroom trends. 

 

  1. Incorporate Digital Citizenship Learning Content

Even in closely monitored environments, students need constant reminders of positive online behavior. By developing professional content for teachers about digital citizenship, we can support them as they model positive behavior for their students. 

But digital citizenship is about more than giving teachers tools to avoid bad student behavior. It's also about helping students become supportive members of an online classroom. The more teacher-facing content your product provides to help teachers develop positive online environments, the more useful your product will be.

 

  1. Offer Detailed Student Reporting

When teachers can see more detailed information about student participation, it's easier for them to understand classroom trends. Reports that identify forms of student engagement, from commenting habits to trending topics, give teachers tools to stage behavioral interventions, praise hard work, or simply further engage their class.

 

  1. Anticipate Educator Needs for SEL Features

In addition to designing subject-matter content or sequencing tools, consider how your product helps teachers address the SEL growth of their students. 

Teachers may wish to build in reflective prompts about process or collect student feedback that addresses community dynamics. They may even wish to pose questions to students and track student reactions. Prompts like "How are you feeling today?" or "How do you feel about this assignment?" can help students reflect on their emotional states and ask for support as needed.

Successful UX Design for Digital Student Communities 

In addition to supporting teachers through good UX, your product can make it easier for students to engage successfully with their peers. 

From profiles to trending topics, here are four best practices to keep in mind as you develop features for student learning communities within your next product.

 

  1. Design More Effective Student Profiles

Build a student profile for each participant. This profile should include more than the student's name or student ID number. Consider mechanisms that create and track reputation, as well. 

As student users build their reputation within your platform, they'll become more thoughtful about their online social interactions. When individual student interactions are tracked and logged, it's easier for educators to hold students accountable for their behavior. It's easier for students to self-monitor their behavior, too. 

 

  1. Develop Badges and Credentials

Reputation building is about more than preventing bad behavior online. Whether you use badges or other forms of credentialing, the "public" celebration of student achievement makes a positive reputation something to be proud of.

Credentialing also creates peer "experts" on your platform. Students can help one another in peer-to-peer online learning environments, or teachers can identify student leaders and group their classrooms more easily.

 

  1. Encourage User Feedback 

In order to safely build evidence of student participation in your digital community, encourage student feedback and ratings. We see these models work effectively in consumer products all the time, whether that's Netflix's most popular shows or the trending topics sidebar on Twitter. 

In an edTech context, student agency directly affects community building. From the most popular science projects to the best middle-grade reads, students find meaning in what their peers are learning and enjoying. 

Showing how these trends change in different contexts offers additional learning opportunities, too. Students will find new levels of meaning in discovering how the popular science project in their class compares to the most popular project in their school—or even their country.

Whether you show teachers that 20 students gave a digital book four stars or show students trending topics and projects across your platform, digital trends offer a safe and exciting way to build community for young learners.

 

  1. Offer a Range of Media Responses

Gone are the days of requiring 500-word student reflections. Digital media-savvy students may be able to communicate just as effectively through photography, video, or audio responses. 

Whether students shoot a commercial on their iPhone, build a diorama, or create a podcast, your product can reflect the legitimacy of multimedia responses for both teachers and students.

The most successful digital communities foster student engagement and set students up to learn from interactions with their peers. By anticipating how to better support the needs of both teachers and students in these interactions, you'll ensure a safer classroom environment for everyone, while streamlining the administrative burden for educators. 

You'll also help students become better digital citizens—skills they'll need to succeed in online environments far into the future. After more than a year of remote learning and working, that's a win-win.

Are you building interactive features into your student-facing products for Fall 2021? Contact us today to discuss how good UX design creates better digital environments for teachers and students.

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May 5, 2021 - No Comments!

6 Easy SEL Features for Remote Learning Products

When you think about online products with SEL features, what comes to mind? Most likely, you picture a popular mindfulness tool, like the Headspace app, or an edTech tool like BrainPOP. (In our user surveys, teachers never fail to mention the online platform's ever-popular "brain breaks.")

While mindfulness techniques and technology breaks certainly help students develop SEL skills at home, teachers use the term "social emotional learning" differently than most product designers. For educators, incorporating SEL into the classroom means helping students build the social and emotional skills they need to participate successfully in learning environments. This covers a wide range of abilities, including developing strong communication skills, setting individual goals, and taking responsibility for one's actions.

Right now, edTech product owners have a unique opportunity to change their approach to online SEL and better serve the needs of teachers. In fact, your student-facing products already have many features or examples of UX text where you can support SEL growth right away.

Don't retrofit SEL into your product or roll it out in the next phase. Save yourself time, money, and hassle by designing with an SEL mindset from the beginning. You'll win over teachers who already support your product, and make a more valuable tool.

How to Design SEL Features That Teachers Really Want

While some UX solutions for SEL features take longer to design and execute, other design and copy changes are easy to implement in the short term. 

Whether you design subject-specific or content-specific apps, incorporating SEL features should be top of mind as you build. You'll be rewarded with higher levels of user satisfaction and more teacher buy-in for your product.

Here are six meaningful ways you can address SEL growth in your products today.

1. Develop a supportive content strategy

Voice and tone can make or break your product—especially in edTech. If your content team hasn't mindfully considered how you communicate potential error cases to younger students, you may even cause unintentional harm. 

For example, overly technical error messages might indicate to an L2 student that their language choices are wrong, even when they aren't. Similarly, unclear directions or directions written for a more advanced reading comprehension level could overwhelm or discourage young students.

In addition to writing more mindful error notifications, consider how teachers communicate with their students. How can UX copywriting reinforce a student's growth mindset in every interaction? Every product touchpoint, from activity directions to highlighting incorrect quiz answers, is an opportunity to provide students with positive reinforcement.

 

2. Design affirmative, warm UI

edTech is only now starting to move away from cold, industrial visual design. Whether you're showcasing student achievements or showing students how far they've progressed through your experience, your UI should be friendly, authentic, and genuine.

In addition to color and design, consider incorporating imagery that channels emotion, complements positive UX copy choices, and reinforces a student user's efforts and achievements. Non-verbal cues, like animating a smiling character after a student completes a task, are strong signals to students that they're on the right path in your experience. These small UI decisions model the link between perseverance, effort, and progress, helping learners develop critical social-emotional skills.

 

3. Anticipate teacher-student touchpoints

In order to help students build self-awareness and self-management skills, teachers often begin their days with an emotional touch base. They also use verbal or non-verbal cues throughout class to help students become more aware of their feelings. By incorporating similar cues and touchpoints into digital learning tools, you can support SEL growth in edTech, too.

Non-verbal cues are especially helpful for students who have difficulty reading emotions. When apps include visual cues that emulate human contact, students see appropriate emotional models for sadness, frustration, and happiness. This tactic is at work in plenty of consumer products already—just think about how happy that DuoLingo owl is when you go on a streak!

4. Improve onboarding experiences

Teachers often onboard students to new products as they learn about the product themselves. When digital tools anticipate the needs of students during the onboarding process, it takes the burden off of teachers and eliminates student frustration or confusion.

If you're designing a product meant for young learners, consider using a visual overlay to help students focus on the most important task on each screen. You might even incorporate a voice-over to provide sequential narration, or use visual cues that follow a student as they move through the experience at their own pace. These UX and UI strategies provide immediate feedback for learners and reinforce their successes throughout the experience.

5. Create synchronous activities for remote learning

Now that so many students and teachers must learn remotely, planning synchronous activities helps create a collective classroom experience. Whether your product collects up-votes in real time or provides space for student-created content, you'll give students more opportunities to develop their social skills in remote environments. Even if we return to the classroom full time, teachers appreciate the added flexibility of being able to shift between synchronous and asynchronous activities in digital tools.

 

6. Help students develop more agency over their learning

Learner agency and decision-making is a crucial component of SEL growth. Product owners can support this by providing students more opportunities to take charge of their digital learning experiences. This might look like giving students the chance to set their own goals within an app or offering a wider range of genres or topics to choose from in a digital reading platform.

From affirmation and error messages to onboarding experiences, you're already building a digital tool with opportunities to strengthen student SEL skills online. Why wait to roll out SEL features in the next design phase? 

Incorporating a growth mindset into your digital tools pays off immediately. When you incorporate SEL features into remote learning tools, you support the needs of real student users—and make it even easier for teachers to adopt your tool in their classroom.

Are you developing SEL features for your new product? Contact us today to find out how we can help.