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August 11, 2021 - No Comments!

5 of the Latest edTech Trends You Need to Know

The education landscape for Fall 2021 keeps shifting, and edTech trends will shape how teachers and students work in new hybrid classrooms. From immersive learning to subscription-based content, we're seeing edTech products that address increased needs for flexibility.

Even as changing edTech trends respond to the pandemic, we still believe that the best classroom technology amplifies a teacher's ability to help their students learn. To design better tools for the new demands facing teachers, edTech product owners can springboard off the cutting-edge thinking that happened in virtual classrooms all across the country in 2020.

No matter what kind of product you're working on, mastering these 5 pedagogically-driven edTech trends will help you stay ahead of the curve.

edTech Trend #1: Decentralized learning capabilities

For many years, using edTech products for decentralized learning was meant to support students living in rural areas. Students who experienced challenges getting to school needed new ways to connect with their teachers and classmates, and edTech tools provided one such solution.

Creating digital tools that make decentralized learning easier goes beyond changing edTech trends, however. These days, decentralized learning is a necessity. In the post-COVID era, we know powerful at-home learning tools are a common need for all students. As we saw at the onset of the pandemic, edTech products can be used outside the traditional classroom as an extension of teacher instruction.

Learning products have the potential to make decentralized learning easier and more powerful for users who want to work at their own pace. Even project-based learning can be accomplished through shared comments as users have time to complete tasks. This gives learners an edge as they complete tasks on their own time or during their most productive times of day.

edTech Trend #2: Baked-in social-emotional learning features

Okay, integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) features isn't exactly at the forefront of changing edTech trends. (As you know, it's a twenty-first century skill integral to how teachers approach learning today.) But SEL is also an important skill for students to develop after more than a year of social distancing. 

That's why it's time to stop isolating SEL features and start integrating them into digital learning tools—regardless of subject matter or content area. All learning products can address SEL using strategic features. Even if students use your product to improve their math or reading skills, they should also be asked to think about process skills and to communicate concepts to others. 

How will your product help students explain their thinking to a teacher or another student? How can you encourage communication through visual design in your next edTech product? After all, process communication doesn't just help build subject mastery. It requires empathy, which is at the heart of SEL.

edTech Trend #3: Social-emotional learning features for teachers

Products that incorporate SEL features give teachers more powerful tools, too.

When teachers evaluate SEL skills along with subject-area content, their feedback becomes even more meaningful for students. With a window into process skills, teachers are better able to understand how students think. They follow a student's process to the "right" or "wrong" answer. Assessment becomes about soft skills, including how a student communicates, rather than test scores.

Teachers and administrators are also on the hunt for digital ways to assess process skills and qualities like collaboration, tolerance, and empathy. How do you encourage students to be more accepting of others and celebrate differences? How do you encourage them to recognize their own emotional states and communicate with others effectively after a year of Zoom calls?

Students need the all-important relationship with their teachers to succeed in school. SEL features aimed at teachers strengthen those relationships.

edTech Trend #4: Digital tools that promote learner agency

The more students understand their role in the learning process, the more engaged, inquisitive, and curious they become. We want students to internalize that learning is not just something that happens with a textbook in a classroom. Learning happens all the time, and it depends on their personal goals.

Encourage learner agency in edTech product design through student data dashboards, feedback systems, and personal goal-setting systems. By encouraging students to set goals or choose projects that are meaningful to their development, you'll give students even more agency over their education..

This type of learner agency makes students feel more invested in their education, more delighted by the learning process, and more engaged with the helpful tools you've designed. The more engaged students are during at-home learning, the more positive their learning outcomes will be.

edTech Trend #5: Teacher professional development

It's easy to think of edTech as an industry that only provides solutions for K-12 learners. But edTech serves teachers and learners in higher education, corporate training, and adult education, too.

Adults approach education very differently from K-12 students, and changing edTech trends indicate that our industry is still learning what motivates adults to pursue educational goals. For instance, adults are more likely to be independent learners. They might not even need a traditional "teacher" to learn new information or skills.

Especially in professional settings, adult learners make conscious choices to study a specific subject or skill. Unlike K-12 learners, they're already motivated to study or complete a course module. They want to be sure that your product will help them achieve their intended goal.

From a product design standpoint, this mindset often shifts adults into more of a consumer role than K-12 learners. Depending on your product research, you might consider explaining the value of tasks or product features at point-of-access. This way, adult learners will understand the benefits of your product and continue engaging until they meet their goal.

Whether your next edTech product helps students identify learning goals or targets young professionals with career development content, integrate these 5 edTech trends to provide even more value to your customers. With these forward-thinking edTech design trends, you'll help teachers augment what's already happening in live classrooms and make at-home learning even more effective.

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July 28, 2021 - 1 comment.

UX in Education: Why UX Designers are the Learning Engineers of the Future

When it comes to designing UX in education, a generalist approach to product design and user experience simply doesn't cut it.

Learning products have very different requirements than consumer tech. They're used by teachers and students in school environments to achieve high-stakes outcomes. 

That's why it's even more important to base the UX of learning tools on research that reflects how students learn most effectively. By specializing in learning science, product design, and user research, UX designers in education are poised to become the learning engineers of the future.

What Makes UX in Education Different

A great UX designer in education understands how to reflect good pedagogy and learning science through the medium of a digital learning tool. edTech products must help students learn effectively, and UX designers play a special role in choosing the features that facilitate learning.

When UX designers have the right background in learning science, pedagogy, and product design, they create transformative learning products. This level of expertise is what makes UX designers the learning engineers of the future.

If you have a strong UX team, you're already on the path to creating a team of unstoppable learning engineers. Here's what you can do to help them specialize:

Key Qualities for Design Teams Working on UX in Education

Incorporating research findings from learning science into your edTech product makes your product stronger, more effective, and more appealing to educators. It also means you aren't chasing the latest trends in edTech. You're building a product based on research that works.

But the decision to incorporate learning science into your next edTech product isn't a small one. It gets to the very heart of your UX planning process and will affect both your content and feature design decisions. 

For example, a designer creating a digital math product might build into its interface an overview that references outcomes from previous lessons. This reflective learning technique gives students a context for the next math concept they'll learn. It also helps them build connections between past lessons and new ones. If students are given opportunities to reflect on concepts they've already mastered, they learn new concepts even more quickly.

When it comes to designing UX in education, your team must develop specialized skills to incorporate learning science into product design. Here are three key qualities you can encourage your team to develop as they become experts about UX in education:

  1. Subject-matter expertise: Depending on the type of edTech product you're designing, your UX team will likely need to conduct research on the topic or content area.

    If your product's goal is to encourage reading in young students, for example, they'll need to study up on the mechanics of early reading in order to reflect this technical knowledge in UX design. Talk to reading specialists or pick up a copy of The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel Schwartz in order to dive deep.
  2. User-centered research: Ensure that your UX team understands the specific user for your edTech product. Will the product be used primarily by teachers and administrators? Or by students trying to learn a specific skill?

    Desk research, focus groups, and interviews can help your team uncover user needs and pain points, or highlight specific environmental challenges. The way a product is used can also give your team ideas about which scientific techniques might be most effective for your users. Will a teacher ask students to remember historical facts? Use a system of contextualization and staggered repetition. More on this below.
  3. Creative problem-solving: In order to apply a creative new solution to a common learning challenge, your UX team needs a firm understanding of the problem.

    Leverage all your product research and apply it throughout the iteration process. The more research you conduct, the easier it will be for your team to come up with creative solutions that will delight your users.

If you're designing an edTech product with a UX team that needs more time to research, test, and iterate, you can be an advocate for learning science in the early stages of product design.

Once you create a culture of research-driven problem-solving on your UX team, you're ready to leverage real learning science in the design features of your product.

3 Common Learning Science Principles to Help Your Design Team Master UX in Education

As your UX team becomes more familiar with the pedagogical requirements of a learning tool, they'll be able to reimagine and package important lessons with even more powerful design.

Learning tools that leverage learning science and good UX ultimately help learners master new concepts more easily. They also help teachers facilitate learning in the classroom with cutting-edge technology.

For instance, your edTech product might use "just-in-time telling" to help students learn new math skills, rather than replicate a workbook or a set of drills. Or it might give learners a chance to set their own goals and become more involved in their own learning.

Steer your product away from "interactive workbook syndrome" and embrace more meaningful UX in education. These three common principles from learning science can help your design team build even better products:

  1. Elaboration
    Elaboration is a method for helping learners retain new information. By encouraging learners to associate new information with knowledge they've stored in their long term memory, learning engineers—and UX designers—help learners "encode" new information. These associations create a familiar context for the new idea, allowing learners to recall new information more easily.

    How to Use Elaboration in UX Design/Learning Engineering:
    Designers can create more playful interfaces for new information, including familiar contexts, characters, and interactive patterns that draw from the real world.

    Relevant cultural references or even familiar gameplay can help learners contextualize new information, too. This approach works for teachers, as well, especially if you're designing a professional development (PD) component in your software.

    PD components in edTech can be more than big, impersonal databases of training videos and downloadable PDFs. Consider how a carefully structured learning sequence might help your team leverage the same learning science techniques you've used successfully in student-facing products.
  2. Learner Agency and Self-Efficacy
    Empowering a learner to acquire knowledge and skills is a proven-effective teaching technique. Self-efficacy is at the heart of some of the most powerful learning skills, including growth mindset and grit. Even for software, it's much easier to teach a student who is more interested in learning than in performing. This type of student is more likely to stick with tasks even as they get more difficult.

    How to Use Learner Agency in UX Design/Learning Engineering:
    Give users control over feedback systems within your product. Maybe that looks like allowing a learner to set their own reading goals or choose their own rewards.

    With just a few questions and selectors, you can help young learners decide for themselves how often they want to read or what kind of reward they want for reaching the next level of a skills-based product.

    It seems simple, but this technique immediately shifts the user's mindset from performing for a teacher to thinking about their role in the learning process. How much time do they think they'll need to reach their reading goal? What is reaching that goal worth to them?
  3. Just-In-Time Telling
    Allow users to try out an experience and succeed—or fail—before providing them with background information and 'correct' answers. The experience of learning helps your users understand a concept in real time.

    With that experience behind them, your users will be able to incorporate information about a new concept or skill more effectively. They get the information about the new concept just in time to be useful and memorable as they build on what they already know.

    How to Use Just-In-Time Telling in UX Design/Learning Engineering: Incorporate demonstrations, experiments, and games into your product that give users a foundation for new concepts. This should be done without asking your users to read lots of new content or get bogged down in explainers.

    Through interacting with your product, users will be able to tell whether or not they understand a new idea—or if there's something that doesn't quite click.

    If you let users explore before explaining what's happening or introducing something new, your users will develop a broader context for learning that brand new concept. This gives your product an opportunity to explain the concept later in a more sophisticated way and helps your users learn even more effectively.

By combining the principles of learning science, user research, and good design, UX teams in education create more effective edTech products with a longer shelf life.

As the "learning engineers" of the future, UX designers are poised to take learning science out of the laboratory and put more powerful edTech tools in the hands of the teachers and students who need them most.

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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.

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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!