All Posts in

July 9, 2021 - No Comments!

A Guide to Turning Your Successful Print Product into a Digital Learning Tool

Your company has a successful print product on its hands, and you're on the hunt for ways to turn that curriculum into a digital tool. 

On the surface, this seems like good business sense. You know how popular digital tools are with your users; plus, there are no shipping or warehousing costs when you move into edTech. A win-win!

But if you're used to dealing with print publications—or you've only ever built content platforms—you may be unsure of what to do next. 

Below, we outline what it takes to build a brand new edTech product based on content that's been previously published and vetted. 

This piece will also help you balance your internal and external stakeholders, from the C-Suite down to the original author or curriculum designer. Let's get started!

Building Your Digital Product Team

Before you can define what kind of learning tool will support your users' needs, you'll have to make sure all the right people are in the room.

Here's a quick break-down of the kinds of stakeholders you'll likely work with as you translate your print curriculum into a digital tool:

Author or Curriculum Designers

If you still have access to the original author or curriculum designers of your print product, all the better. 

The author is a special kind of stakeholder. But they're an integral part of understanding the print product's intended learning outcomes. 

Once you align those outcomes with the content of your new product, you'll be better positioned to support your users' needs throughout the design process.

Product planning prompt:

  • How do the print curriculum's learning outcomes align with what you already know about your user personas?

Internal Editorial or Content Team

Your editorial team maintains the author's standards as content is translated to a digital product. Is every word choice made within the product correct from the author's point of view? 

Translating your print curriculum into a new digital product means that you'll also need to develop new content that supports the user's experience. 

Your internal editorial or content team may also be responsible for working on UX content, in addition to supporting the author's original vision.

Product planning prompts:

  • Which tools does your content team need to structure content correctly and input content into the product? For example, this team may need meta tagging tools or XML capabilities, so content can flow directly into your UI.
  • How can you support the content team's workflow as they input content to your tool?

UX Team

In addition to designing the user experience of your new learning tool, your UX team needs to understand your print author's intentions on a fundamental level.

Without this knowledge, your UX team won't know how to translate the print product into a good digital experience. This means they'll have to conduct additional desk research by digging into books and classroom materials. 

Not only does this work bring the UX team up to speed on the author's work, but it also helps them better advocate for the user and their experience within your digital tool. 

The UX team can also bring your print author strategically into the design process. By facilitating brainstorming sessions or design thinking workshops with the original author, your UX team can help you collectively reimagine content for your new format.

Ultimately, your UX team builds a bridge between your author's ideas and how teachers use those ideas in the classroom. This way, teachers don't have to perform extensive research before using the curriculum in your digital tool. Your UX team has already done the legwork for them!

Product planning prompts:

  • How can I share discovery materials with the UX team so they understand the author's ideas? 
  • What can I do to help them balance the author's input with our need for user-centric design?

Development Team

Your development team is your guide to the digital content conversion process. 

With content architecture strategies like meta tagging, they can help you find the right structure for your new digital tool. They'll also help you spot technology opportunities for content delivery along the way.

Realistically, it can take weeks to identify and usefully tag hundreds or thousands of pieces of content. The earlier you can help your development team tee up this process, the better.

Product planning prompt:

  • How early in the process can I start this activity?
  • Do I have the right technology tools to support the dev team? (i.e. tagging plug-ins like WoodWing)

Managing Stakeholders While Defining Your New edTech Product

From the C-Suite to the author of your original curriculum, everyone has a stake in the development of your new learning tool. 

In order to effectively balance stakeholder input, begin by outlining the intention of the product itself. 

Are you trying to help students better understand a new math principle? Offer professional development for teachers? Decode phonics skills for early readers?

Whatever the big idea for your product happens to be, align your team on the product's purpose at the outset of the design process. 

With a shared idea of the product purpose in mind, you'll be able to brainstorm more creative solutions for content presentation and delivery. 

You'll be better positioned to deliver on the original author's intended learning outcomes in a brand new format, too.

Product planning prompts:

  • What's the "big idea" guiding your design and development process?
  • How flexible can you be in the way content is presented and delivered to teachers or students?
  • What opportunities do you see for making your content interactive? 
  • What opportunities do you see for presenting your content in a nonlinear sequence?

How a New Digital Tool Transforms Your Company

2020 made everyone rethink the value of digital products. They're scalable, easier for your sales team to sell, and less expensive to host.

Remote learning has likely transformed your user journeys, too. Teachers are now well-versed in edTech, and they're on the hunt for remote learning-ready tools. Students are better than ever at collaborating within digital tools. Even parents have had practice helping their students log into digital tools from home.

In addition to transforming your typical user journeys, creating a new digital tool can also affect the rest of your publishing company. Because of the scale of this potential transformation, it's important to involve internal stakeholders early in the design process. 

For example, digital learning tools often introduce entirely new revenue models for companies that typically rely on print products. Will you roll out a subscription sales model for your new digital products? How will a new and potentially wider customer base affect your customer service needs?

When it comes down to it, you're not just transforming a print product into a digital learning tool. You're also transforming your marketing and sales teams, as well as your internal content and UX teams.

Product planning prompts:

  • Which marketing, sales, and other brand stakeholders can you invite into the discovery or product planning process?
  • Are you defining a new technology need for your company?
  • How will your marketing or sales models change to support this new product?
  • How will your customer service models change to support this new product?
  • What other large-scale implications do you see for your brand's mission or audience?

It takes a team effort to transform a beloved print product into a new edTech tool. With these product planning prompts, you'll be able to guide the digital transformation process from start to finish and spot technology opportunities along the way. You're ready to support the internal changes your company might need to make to market and sell an incredible new digital tool, too. Now it's time to take the edTech world by storm!

Are you converting your print content into a new edTech tool? Contact us to learn how we put teachers and students at the center of the digital conversion process.

June 16, 2021 - No Comments!

How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop for edTech Products

EdTech is in the middle of a major transitional moment, and the stakes for education have never been higher. 

To make matters even more complicated, we don't yet know the full impact the pandemic has had on both teachers and learners. From learning loss to the effects of social isolation, students may face an uphill battle in the classroom next year. 

Meanwhile, teachers' relationships to technology have changed. There's still so much more to learn about their professional needs and expectations when it comes to edTech.

Even as we're operating under plenty of unknowns for Fall 2021, product owners are anxious to address lessons from the pandemic. You want to move quickly, while schools and educational leaders are open to new, disruptive ideas about educational technology. 

Unfortunately, this pressure-cooker environment makes it difficult to innovate. But design thinking workshops can help you and your team change the way you think about the education vertical.

By creating a meaningful space to iterate, plan, and collaborate, these workshops align stakeholders across your team. Whether you'd like to develop new product features or establish more meaningful service processes, design thinking workshops lead to innovative solutions that will meet the challenges of this moment.

 

Collaborating with Stakeholders During the Workshop

Before you dive into the unique challenges and use cases of edTech personas, it's important to get the right people in the room and cultivate a sense of openness.

This likely means inviting a broad cross-section of stakeholders from your company to the design thinking workshop. Welcome representatives from sales, marketing, and content strategy to participate and share their perspectives. 

The broader your group is, the easier it will be to align every department on your goals for the product. Asking for up-down votes can be an easy way to get direction from stakeholders and find out what resonates early in the process.

Creating a relaxing, open atmosphere is also crucial. From a design perspective, open atmospheres allow team members to brainstorm and throw out ideas that might not work. But this sense of vulnerability can be important for addressing larger issues at the company, too.

For example, some teams have difficulty discussing equity, including diverse perspectives, or bringing in culturally relevant material to edTech products. By creating a welcoming, open atmosphere in your design thinking workshop, it will be easier to have these discussions and make diversity, equity, and inclusion a tangible part of your business or content plan.

How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop for edTech Teams

Unlike consumer products, edTech products have unique use cases and user dynamics. It's important to consider the needs of teachers and students from the very beginning of any design thinking workshop. 

With user research, market research, and other design and testing artifacts, you can create a shared baseline for your team to work from. Here's a few ideas to get you started:

  1. Consider your personas

edTech personas, including teachers, students, and administrators, have unique challenges in and out of the classroom. How will your product address or consider:

  • Equity and diversity
  • Families whose first language is not English
  • Issues around technology access and fluency
  • Classroom technology limitations

Hopefully your team has conducted initial user or market research on the areas that will impact your edTech product. The more your team understands your personas, the easier it will be to generate ideas for an edTech product that addresses the unique needs of your users.

 

  1. Incorporate results from user testing

Observing users "in the wild," whether that's an in-person or virtual classroom, is crucial to unlocking the features of your edTech product. 

Do teachers use your product on an iPad, or share it on a smartboard? Do they need to toggle between presentation and use modes? What other details are specific to the classrooms of your particular users?

By helping all the stakeholders on your team understand these details, you'll build a better product. You'll also create the potential for stronger marketing materials and customer support.

 

  1. Understand the nuances of edTech use cases

Provide your workshop team with a framework to guide their creativity. The more they understand how your product is used, the easier it will be to develop creative solutions during the workshop.

For example, imagine you're developing new features for a reading product. We already know there are many ways to teach reading during the school day. These modes include small group and whole-class instruction, individual reading time, and at-home reading assignments. How would your product support each of these different teaching modes?

By helping your team to imagine the full user journey within your product, they'll be able to identify solutions that help teachers and students throughout their day.

 

3 Variations on a Design Thinking Workshop

Any good design thinking workshop needs goals. But you might be surprised how versatile the outputs for your workshop could be. 

Maybe your desired output will be a new product idea. You may even get as far as building a rapid prototype of a specific feature! If you've invited the sales team, you could even develop a new sales approach in a breakout room.

By making time for happy accidents, you can stay open and receptive to different types of output. Even if the end result is a little "messier," you might hit on something that meets your teams' goals in an unexpected, even innovative, way.

Here are three examples of workshops with different high-level goals and outputs. Which workshop model might fit your team's needs?

 

Workshop #1: Developing a new feature

High-level goal: Solving a specific problem, like developing a brand new feature for an existing product, or integrating social features into a digital learning tool. 

Potential Output: A feature set, rapid prototype, or flow chart.

By the end of a design thinking workshop with a narrow goal, you'll wind up with a great idea for your product. But don't be surprised if team members come up with additional solutions that add value. 

Stay open and encourage all team members to listen closely. You'll want to capture every solution and creative idea you hear, even if it doesn't address the goal of the workshop directly. You can always come back to these ideas later.

 

Workshop #2: Dreaming up a new product

High-level goal: Transforming existing source material, like a print math curriculum, into a digital product that engages students.

Output: A new sales or service design that helps your team organize around your new product and the resulting relationships to your customers. For example, how will your sales team engage differently with school leaders to promote this product? 

This type of output will likely raise larger questions, too. Do you have the ability to change your vision for sales internally? Or do you need to work with an outside organization for additional support as you transition to a new sales model?

 

Workshop #3: Seizing a market opportunity 

High-level goal: Address how the shift from leveled reading to decoding reading will affect your company's goals for the future.

Output: Undetermined. For this kind of design thinking workshop, you'll likely go into the meeting without a specific output in mind. 

It's best to stay open to all the solutions you hear throughout the day, whether that's designing a new product or pulling an old one off the shelf. You might even need to queue up another design thinking workshop!

Whether you're brainstorming ways to fill a gap in the market or developing specific features, design thinking workshops are versatile enough to help you make progress on a variety of product- and business-related goals.

In order to stay relevant to the teachers and learners who depend on your products, keep making time for creative touchpoints with your team. We'll continue to see massive changes in edTech, and design thinking workshops can help you respond to those shifts. You might even be able to stay ahead of them!

Now's the time to integrate design thinking workshops systematically into your workflow. Contact us to learn more about holding a workshop at your company!

May 14, 2021 - No Comments!

Two Ways to Support User Journeys in edTech Products

As we begin to apply lessons from remote learning to new product roll-outs, edTech product owners have a unique opportunity to evaluate how user journeys have changed. With a more nuanced understanding of users' new learning environments, you'll be able to design products that support your users' day-to-day experiences in post-pandemic classrooms. 

User feedback throughout remote learning has also clarified the technological needs of teachers and learners. The increased use of digital learning tools has made all of our users more sophisticated, discerning, and engaged edTech consumers. Redesigns for existing tools must meet this new set of demands and expectations.

Buckle up! Everything in edTech is about to change.

Why the Pandemic Changed edTech User Journeys

The pandemic changed the trajectory of edTech user journeys in ways big and small. 

School schedules are more flexible than ever, and students have far more choice about how they complete projects. Educators are also more sophisticated about how they approach classroom tasks and digital learning, including how they combine technologies to facilitate that learning. 

This means that the universe surrounding your product has fundamentally changed, too. Educators are no longer using individual edTech products in isolated ways. Your edTech product is, in all likelihood, being used in concert with many other products, making integration a key need. If your product is a platform built for school use, user relationships to your product look more like a B2C model than they ever have in the past.

The relevance of future edTech products depends on how well product owners navigate these major shifts in the user journey, from learning environments to individual user needs. In light of these changes, Fall 2021 is the perfect time to refresh your approach to conducting user research and challenge the typical assumptions you start with in edTech product development. 

Here are two areas where we think product owners should revisit user research ahead of Fall 2021 product roll-outs:

Embedding Project-Based Learning Features into Your Learning Tools

We know that student collaboration and project-based learning have an outsized impact on learning outcomes. But the rise of remote learning demonstrated why educators need product owners to embed these approaches directly into their digital learning tools.

Re-thinking the UX design of your collaboration tools in this way requires digging back into your learning content. This could mean re-examining tried-and-true content or lessons already vetted by subject-matter experts. It could also mean re-evaluating user flow and changing how your content is delivered, from teacher-student facilitation to peer learning models. 

When you've already built and tested content designed for one method, it's no small feat to re-imagine it within a different context and for different users. Good UX design teams can look at teacher-student content and help product owners translate it into content that works more effectively for flipped classrooms or peer-to-peer learning environments. 

Although this might seem like an expensive investment, developing better UX for peer learning drives both student and teacher engagement. And as the edTech market becomes more crowded, it's even more important to build meaningful digital learning experiences that extend beyond digital workbooks, virtual lectures, and online quizzes.

Your new approach to peer learning environments can also be quickly validated with lightweight user research and rapid prototyping. Whether you're building project-based learning features, asynchronous online grouping and collaboration tools, or embedding SEL tools into existing content, rapidly building and testing features is an inexpensive way to test new approaches to delivering tried-and-true content. 

With a targeted, lean UXR strategy, you'll ensure that your peer-peer content not only works in a digital format but also meets the needs of future classrooms.

Addressing New edTech User Expectations with Short-Form Content 

It's no coincidence that educational TikTok posts and YouTube channels became ever more popular during the pandemic. Short-form learning content engages users in their curiosity, shapes their expectations about content, and broadens the concept of who a learner is, how they learn, and when they engage with content.

YouTube Channel "The Sci Show" offers easy-to-digest science  content for teens.

Product owners can apply these lessons to digital tools by producing high-quality, short-form learning content of their own. Short-form digital learning content addresses new user expectations while providing multiple engaging pathways to learning. From a production standpoint, short-form learning content is also easier to produce and repurpose for other channels, including just-in-time support for both teachers and students.

If you know that short-form content will drive future products, you should be prepared for how this decision will affect your UX and design strategy. From solutions for search to more personalized dashboards, your learning content should be highly personalized to the user’s journey and easy to browse. 

The more targeted each piece of content is, the more you'll be able to surprise and delight your user with UX and design decisions that support their needs and interests. As industry leaders like Khan Academy have demonstrated, short-form content is ideal for supporting students who need additional support. Videos and other learning aids are capable of breaking down complex concepts into foundational steps. Teachers can supplement their existing instruction plans with high-quality, short-form content and create targeted interventions more quickly. 

In student-facing products, learners think creatively, stay engaged, and exercise additional agency by choosing the types of content that appeal to them. Because digital learning tools are also able to gather data about learner interactions, students can receive content suggestions that personalize their user flow.

Additionally, educators themselves are likely to consume video content on their phones or in between other tasks, a finding supported by our existing user research. These viewing habits make short-form learning content an ideal component of teacher-facing products that offer professional learning, too.

We're at a unique turning point in the edTech industry, and we're never going back to old ways of thinking about digital content or designing digital tools. As you reimagine your user journeys, consider how these shifts are likely to affect your approach to learning content in new and existing products. 

Whether you create new, short-form content or shift teacher-student content toward a peer learning model, your UX team can help you find and test the best solutions for your users.

Are you thinking about making a change for Fall 2021? Contact us today to discuss how new user journeys have shifted your product and feature priorities.

April 30, 2021 - No Comments!

How Competitive Audits and Analysis Ensure User-Centered edTech Products

You're ready to develop a new digital learning tool, and you've pulled inspiration for your product vision from consumer platforms and edTech alike. But will your feature ideas really support the needs of edTech users?

User surveys can help you uncover some answers, but competitive audits, or competitor analysis, provide an even fuller picture of the edTech marketplace. A competitive audit offers feature-by-feature comparisons of related products, as well as strategic suggestions for improving your own features throughout the design process. 

By identifying specific user challenges with competitors' products, you can refine your strategic priorities, avoid common pain points, and ensure that your new product will be better than what's already on the market. 

Done well, competitive analysis also puts edTech users back at the center of product design. After all, when you hire a UX firm that specializes in edTech, you work with designers who can translate good UX practices into good UI design for teachers and learners. 

Here's how Backpack Interactive uses competitive audits to give clients unique insight into edTech personas and help them develop must-have product features.

Analyze Your edTech Personas and User Groups

From a strategic standpoint, competitive audits provide complimentary support for persona development. With targeted analysis, this deliverable has the power to inform strategic design decisions from start to finish. Armed with stronger information about your competitors and users, you'll build a product that meets the needs of the teachers and learners you support.

During Backpack's competitive audit process, we focus on products that address the needs of users similar to your product's target audience. We dive deep on your user groups to guide the audit process, including secondary or tertiary users that are often forgotten. 

Consider your most recent product with a teacher-facing dashboard. It likely has many options for reporting to school administrators or parents. That feature alone has directly shaped your product personas and user groups—even if these users emerged late in the design process. That's right—even if admins and parents don't use your product, they're still an important user group to consider from the get-go. 

When we identify these user groups during a competitive audit, you and your stakeholders develop an even more nuanced understanding of user needs. This analytical process directly supports product design by making it easier to strategically align your stakeholders on the best user-centered design decisions for your product.

Examine Common UX Patterns through an edTech Lens

edTech products are inherently different from digital tools designed for consumers because schools and learning materials produce unique user dynamics. Common features are dictated by the way teachers interact with students, or how learners master new concepts. For these reasons, relying solely on visual design or appeal to guide strategic decision making in edTech is often a fatal mistake. 

Even if an idea looks good on paper, it won't necessarily address the needs or use cases of students, teachers, and administrators. It's important for every stakeholder involved in your project to understand why a UX pattern in consumer tech—like a Spotify library, for example—might not work in the context of a learning environment. Even if there's initial excitement around a common UX pattern in the consumer world, competitive audits are a great tool for ensuring alignment on the best UX patterns for your edTech product.

During Backpack's competitive audit process, we only consider how digital products are used in the context of learning environments. Even if we analyze products that support learners outside of traditional classroom settings, we prioritize the UX of teaching and learning above other interactions. After all, your products must work for edTech users within learning environments in order to be adopted and widely used. 

So don't just conduct a competitive audit and put it back on the shelf. Refer to your competitor analysis and recommendations throughout the design process. This will help your stakeholders align on user needs and feature priorities, so you can make a real impact on the teachers and learners who use your tools. 

How to Evaluate the UX of Common edTech Features

By examining UX patterns common to edTech products, a competitive audit highlights specific user needs, provides more context about users' learning environments, and helps you avoid costly design decisions.

From dashboards to rostering features, here are the three edTech-specific features we analyze again and again. Finding the right UX solutions for these features will inform everything from your user journey to design direction. Let's dive in.

Student- and Teacher-Facing Dashboards

One of the biggest decisions you make as a product owner is how you'll differentiate the UX and visual design of your student- and teacher-facing dashboards. Is student content accessible to students who can't yet read? Is teacher content easy to export into a professional report, so they can share findings with parents and administrators?

In order to gain a competitive edge, examine how comparable brands and products address the needs of their student and teacher users. Which UX choices help their users navigate and understand relevant data? How do their visual design choices reflect an understanding of a student's grade level or a teacher's day-to-day environment?

The more you distinguish the user experience of student- and teacher-facing dashboards with both UX and visual design decisions, the easier it will be for users to engage with your learning content and advocate for adoption.

Login Patterns

No matter what kind of edTech product you're building, examining login patterns during the competitive audit accelerates critical decision-making. Should students have a unique login or use a QR code for more accessibility? What about SSO integration? How will teachers manage or administer this process?

It's important to get these decisions right. As remote learning has shown us, a frictionless login experience is crucial to the adoption and engagement of your product. Especially in edTech, users interact with your product long before they ever reach a login screen. 

Consider a student-facing product administered by a teacher, like Class Dojo. Teachers send QR codes for student logins to family members, so students can log in on their own. With other products, family members might facilitate the login for their child. 

If the login process becomes too complicated at any of these touch points, you'll lose users along the way—and make it almost impossible for teachers to truly integrate your product into their toolkit.

Rostering Features

User management is a challenge in any industry. In the education sector, however, concerns about privacy, data sharing, and permissions are especially high. 

A competitive audit that examines rostering and other user management features will help you stay ahead of the curve. This area of product design changes quickly, and without a thorough competitive audit, you might roll out a time-consuming, expensive build that fails to meet the up-to-date user expectations. 

Product integration with tools like Google Classroom should also stay top of mind during your research. Can teachers automatically add students to their class? Must they do so manually, or can they upload students in large batches? Who manages the process and how flexible are these permissions?

Every school system has a different approach to user management and permissions, and competitive audits provide strategic pathways for working through these issues. By making your products more customizable, you'll anticipate shifting user needs and "future-proof" user management features. 

From individual user permissions to product integrations, customization and flexibility makes your product easier for teachers and administrators to both use and adopt. 

How Competitive Analysis Identified a Crucial Market Gap for Heinemann Publishing's Listening to Learn Platform

Listening to Learn Labs provides interactive video support for teachers wishing to practice assessment interview techniques.

When Heinemann Publishing decided to launch a new platform dedicated to helping math teachers improve their assessment techniques, they hired Backpack Interactive to help them better understand the competitive market. The publisher's vision for its new platform, Listening to Learn, was to introduce an entirely new way for teachers to learn more about math instruction. 

We immediately wanted to know more. How had competitors provided professional development within assessment tools in the past? Was there currently an existing product that tied professional development and student assessment software into a single, teacher-facing product? How would such a product be received? And what types of support and training would teachers need to use such a product effectively?

Before diving into competitive market analysis, Backpack Interactive went back to basics. We conducted an extensive user survey with existing Heinneman customers. Our goal was to understand the challenges these customers experienced while conducting math assessments. We also identified other major players in the field, established more detailed use cases for the assessment tool, and measured customer satisfaction with a related legacy product from the same author.

After watching a video of a student, instructors determine how the student reasoned out a math problem. Every response is supported with subject matter expertise.

But something exciting and unexpected stuck out in user survey responses. Many educators indicated that they hadn't received regular professional development on assessment best practices. At most, they attended an annual training. Even if teachers received training in assessment data analysis, they indicated a need for more regular support. Ideally, they would be able to access this support as challenges arose with conducting an assessment or analyzing the results.

Identifying this critical market gap directly impacted the design strategy for product updates in Listening to Learn. Armed with a competitive analysis, we considered how best to support teachers in their professional learning around assessments.

 

In addition to interview support, Listening to Learn provides annotated guidance on student reasoning and problem-solving strategies. These annotations help instructors identify the strategies students use to solve math problems.

We knew that professional development content had to be easy to locate within the product. It would be even better if we were able to integrate subject matter expertise into the structure of the product itself. By making professional learning content more accessible, we were also able to design a product that supported teachers of all ages and technical abilities.

In early ideation conversations, we referred to this analysis regularly to ensure stakeholder buy-in and guide strategic decision-making. We worked with the Heinemann team to develop rich, self-paced, interactive product features that helped teachers engage deeply with professional learning and support. Ultimately, competitive analysis and the resulting recommendations helped Heinemann's stakeholders align around feature priorities, user interactions, and product navigation to create a digital tool that innovatively addresses a real user need.

Whether you're rolling out product updates or designing a digital tool from scratch, competitive audits conducted by an edTech UX specialist give you an edge. Together with your UX team, you can use audit findings to refine your personas, examine features specific to edTech, and align your stakeholders. After all, the better you understand which features teachers and students need to succeed in the classroom, the faster your product will be adopted by teachers and administrators alike.

Are you ready to see what your competition is up to? Contact us about our research services, or to begin the discovery process today.