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February 17, 2020 - No Comments!

What Are You Selling? UX Solutions for SaaS in edTech

When it comes to designing software-as-a-service, or SaaS, it can be difficult to decide where your marketing site ends and your product begins.

How do you create clear boundaries between the free and paid features for your product through UX and visual design? How do you communicate to your user the value of your SaaS without giving away the farm?

It might be tempting to only give users a small taste of your product's full capability. After all, you don't want to attract a bunch of hangers-on who never convert to paying customers!

However, we've found that the more you "give away" before asking users to convert, the better engagement you'll have with your product. That's because most users want to see and experience the value of your product in their own lives before committing to a paid model.

This can be true in edTech, too. For example, you might have more opportunities to convince teachers that your video lessons have value in their classrooms if you don't paywall all of your video content immediately. By letting teachers use more than one video and build lessons around your content, you'll be more likely to convert teachers into paying customers. You'll also have a better chance of transforming them into advocates for your product.

But, as edTech products become more complex, the "freemium model" for SaaS only gets you so far. If you're developing a product for teachers that collects outcomes and data, you'll need to consider even more carefully where your product's marketing experience ends — and when you've given away too much.

What Are You Selling? UX Solutions for edTech SaaS

A user's sales experience with SaaS is closely tied to their understanding of the product's experience and design. How does your product look and feel? Is it more powerful or easier to use than the product they're currently using? Good UX and visual design helps users build trust with your brand, even as they begin evaluating whether your product will solve their most pressing pain points.

Before you can attract new users to your product, your product and sales team will have to identify the SaaS model that gives away just the right amount of content. Here are the three most common UX solutions for SaaS and how you can align your edTech product goals with the right one.

    1. The "Freemium" Model
      Works great for:       specialized course content
      There's a reason marketing departments love free trials — they work! High-quality free content teases visitors to integrate tools into their daily lives. Ultimately, you want the tool to be so valuable — and the content to be so effective — that your visitors convert into paying customers. For both free and paid subscriptions to thrive, your company must commit to continuously innovating you product. After all, attracting new potential customers gets harder as you go. Improving the free version of your edTech product will become just as important as developing the paid version when it comes to attracting and keeping new users. When our client SuperD!Ville launched their new site, we recommended including a "freemium" content area for new users. Their "Episodes" page now showcases a range of helpful video resources for teaching students social-emotional skills. One of the videos is free, and a subscription is required to access their other active learning tools. Even with access to limited content, SuperD!Ville users get a taste of how powerful the lessons are in their classrooms and begin to envision how they'll use additional, paid resources.

 

    1. Separate product and marketing sites
      Works great for:       long-term, complex solutions like curricula or student assessments
      It's not easy for educators to determine whether an entire curriculum will work in their classroom or school district if they only have access to a product for 30 days. What truly convinces administrators in this case isn't free access — it's efficacy data. The best way to present this data is often by creating a separate marketing site that targets the decision-making administrator or educator persona. On your marketing site, present case studies that illustrate real-world ways your product has made a difference. Discuss how the product can be integrated into what teachers are already using. Provide testimonials from users and build a community of champions. Each of these tactics will make a persuasive case for why an administrator should adopt a curriculum or a specific student assessment. Leverage the early UX research you conducted to fine-tune which product features and data will be most compelling to this persona.

 

    1. Integrated SaaS solution
      Works great for:       Data-driven tools, products with complexity and depth
      Integrated solutions give users a limited set of all features, but prompt users to unlock additional features by subscribing or paying a fee. From a marketing standpoint, you're showing off your best product features even as you help users learn how those features are integrated within the workflow of the product. Unlike other models, your conversion opportunity arrives at the most critical moment for your user — right when they want a deeper outcome or result from using the features of your product. Early in the planning and research process, you'll need to decide whether your product can be sold directly to teachers or school administrators. Are you providing an enterprise solution that has to be adopted at higher levels? Or are you providing individual teachers a powerful tool for their individual classroom?This may also affect the types of licenses your sales team will offer, as well as the different levels of features that could be unlocked within the product itself. Will you lead users strategically toward a rolled-up sale to gain access to a broader market? Foster collaboration between your UX team and the sales team early in the design process to create the best possible experience for your users.

 

User-centered approaches to edTech SaaS require a sophisticated approach to user research, product design, and marketing. The more your UX team collaborates with major stakeholders to identify the best experience for your users, the better your product's content, features, and sales experience will be.

 

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January 15, 2020 - No Comments!

User Testing: When Technology Insights Solve UX Problems

Systematic user testing is a key part of developing any user experience strategy. Everyone on your product team wants to solve pain points as quickly as possible, and you're eager to test whether you've created something that fulfills your user's expectations.

You also hope user research and testing will give you insights that your marketing team can use to appeal to future customers. From a marketing standpoint, this testing approach seems like a win-win. But it can also leave your UX team and technologist without the technical information they need to solve real problems and offer groundbreaking solutions. 

User testing is so much more than ticking a box on the road to product launch. When you design user testing prompts that move beyond functionality, your UX team can leverage testing insights to solve complicated user problems in new, intuitive, and innovative ways.

Here's how you can ensure that your researcher, technologist, and UX team employ user research to design more effective, user-centered products:

  1. Help your UXR specialist write questions that map to an actionable goal
    Before you get to the testing phase, work directly with your research technology specialist to develop questions that align with your technology and UX needs.
    Generate actionable goals related to product design or UX that you can map directly onto specific UXR questions. This will help you get a more accurate picture of how users will interact with your product. Actionable goals also give you a head start as you consider what to do with your research findings.    If you're developing a script, questions should center around the goal of the product rather than design elements or desired features. For example, you could ask teachers whether a product fits into their day, or whether they could use a product with a student sitting next to them. The answers to these questions will help you understand if you've met the big-picture goal of product design.

  2. Consider whether your UX problem is a technology problem
    We've all had an unexpected problem crop up during user testing. But what seems like a UX fix might instead be a technology fix. Is a user struggling because they don't have access to the right technology for the product? Will incorporating machine learning help a teacher quickly grade or assess large amounts of student data instead of having to do it manually?For example, when Backpack designs a new onboarding process for teachers and administrators, we consider whether it's appropriate for forms or data to auto-save throughout the process. Onboarding for a new product can take educators a long time, and automatically saving forms throughout the process often improves UX. However, from a technology standpoint, auto-save is a heavy lift! Without input from a technologist during the testing phase, it would be difficult to determine whether this "UX problem" could be solved efficiently on the backend.

    When UX teams and technologists work together, they're able to suggest solutions that address fundamental problems instead of expending their efforts re-designing a product's interface. Sometimes a UX problem really is a technology problem.

  3. Ensure that your UX team understands the user journey from a tech standpoint 
    In order to offer the best possible solutions, UX teams need to understand how users engage with technology. Which devices will the product be used on? Which parts of the product will get used on mobile? Who will maintain the product once it's sold? What kind of workflow does this user have? How fast is the product on the user's typical internet connection? How robust is the search function?Tech-related questions are easy to incorporate into user surveys at the beginning of the research process. Tech-driven user surveys will give your UX team all the relevant data they need to propose more effective solutions.

  4. Encourage collaboration during the solution phase
    Your UX and design teams should participate in recommendations for what happens with front-end development. Increased collaboration between technologists and UX designers makes it easier to determine whether a technological solution or an interface solution will help your users accomplish their goals best. Ultimately, you want your team to have more opportunities to explore broad, creative solutions to tricky user problems.

  5. Use accessibility as an additional tech and UX benchmark
    Designing and testing for accessibility adds expense to your bottom line, but the research and testing process contains opportunities to address accessibility without breaking the bank.For instance, a product's speed or its lightweight feel is an issue of equity. Old or poor quality hardware makes new digital products more difficult to use, but you'll still find outdated, sluggish computers in many school districts with low IT budgets.If you view accessibility as a technology issue, it's possible to incorporate the right questions into your user testing to ensure compliance—and design more accessible products in the long run.

How to Leverage User Testing to Develop an Innovative User Experience Strategy

For better or worse, you can't ask users to come up with big ideas about your product on their own.

Instead, you'll need to develop a strategic framework that takes user conversations and funnels them into user experience strategy and iteration.

Conversations that unpack user testing, overarching product goals, and technology solutions will allow your team to truly think about user experience strategy — not just generate a new wishlist of product features.

Here's how to stay on track as you prepare for user testing and delve into the results:

  • Do your homework. Once you've conducted desk research and preliminary strategic concept discussions with the product team, you'll go into interviews ready to consider what you learn through the lens of experience and expertise. 

  • Use deep listening techniques. When you use deep listening to get to the heart of a product, you uncover unexpected solutions that solve your user's problems in more innovative ways.

  • Reflect as a group. Gather stakeholders, the product team, developers, and your research technology specialist to reflect on what you learned throughout the user testing process. It's important to build in time at the end of user testing to listen. Multiple perspectives on user testing conversations often lead to "ah-ha" moments of clarity for everyone on the project.

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    Whether you're months away from generating user research questions or getting ready to observe users interact with your product, look for opportunities to listen, reflect, and collaborate on technology problems with the input of your UX team.

    Not only will you hit on more innovative, user-centered technology and design solutions, but you'll also create a stronger product that solves real problems for your users. That's the kind of product destined to make a difference—and tick all the boxes for your stakeholders.

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    January 14, 2020 - No Comments!

    How to Incorporate SEL into any edTech Product

    Over the past decade, the education world has embraced the idea that respect, social awareness, and relationship skills are integral to a student's success in school.

    These qualities are fundamental to a student's social-emotional learning, or SEL. After all, data shows that when a student doesn't have to worry about bullying or knows how to manage the pressure of taking a final exam, their ability to learn and retain new information improves.

    edTech has zeroed in on this trend, too. There are now a slew of digital products that offer SEL teaching strategies and improve students' SEL. But if we want to be truly inclusive edTech designers, we can incorporate SEL features into any product—not just ones that are designed specifically to teach social-emotional skills.

    This forward-thinking, equitable approach to product design bolsters student engagement, creates more effective learning tools, and addresses customer pain points in a more seamless way.

    SEL Design Strategies: How SEL Concepts Map onto Product Features

    According to The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, social-emotional learning can be defined by how a student develops the following attributes:

    • Self-awareness
    • Self-management
    • Social awareness
    • Relationship skills
    • And responsible decision-making

    Teachers incorporate classroom activities that promote student growth in these areas all the time, from peer feedback activities to group projects to reflection prompts. Crucially, curricular activities designed to bolster SEL aren't just taught in isolation. SEL strategies are often incorporated into lessons on any subject, from math to reading to life sciences.

    EdTech can draw on this framework, too. By using product features that promote collaboration, community-building, and creative problem-solving, we transform an edTech tool dedicated to subject-area content into a more comprehensive learning opportunity.

    SEL techniques deliver more robust outcomes from any edTech application, as well as higher engagement from students. But digital tools with SEL features do more than help students tackle and retain new concepts. These features promote growth through process skills, communication, and collaboration.

    For example, if you're designing a math or physics learning tool, consider incorporating ways for students to visualize, model, or sort data. By giving students multiple ways to analyze and solve a problem, you allow them to apply lesson content in broader contexts. They might even arrive at more unexpected—and brilliant—solutions.

    In addition to promoting process skills, products with SEL features have the ability to address how users feel about difficult subjects like math and reading. When we research, design, and test with SEL strategies in mind, our products become more understanding of students' needs—and more useful to the teachers and students we serve.

    Uncovering the Right SEL Features Through User Testing

    It's an edTech designer's job to understand the emotional mindset of their user, a process often clarified by user testing and research. When you conduct initial research on users, you learn crucial information about their pain points as they try to accomplish tasks within your software.

    This stage of the design process also offers opportunities to research and test the SEL components of your digital learning product. How do your users feel about math or reading in general? What's their preferred learning style? Can you uncover the way students think about math concepts? How might they communicate those concepts to someone like an instructor or a peer?

    By researching the emotional mindset of your users during product testing, you can more effectively pinpoint what motivates students to learn. You'll gain insights into a student's emotional stumbling blocks around a subject. You'll also learn more about how students communicate with one another and with their instructors.

    These interactions are also valuable to capture in testing environments because they help UX teams understand the complex mechanics behind collaborative group projects. Your UX team will be better positioned to design reflective or multi-step workflows that facilitate group learning in a digital format.

    The more you learn about emotional mindsets and group dynamics during the testing process, the easier it will be to incorporate meaningful SEL features into your product. No matter what subject area your product happens to be in, SEL features immediately add value to students and instructors alike.

    Learning tools that provide SEL strategies for students build engagement, efficacy, and delight in learning. They also give teachers a better understanding of how their students explain complex ideas and process complicated tasks.

    Wondering how to translate SEL concepts into effective product features that students and teachers will love? We've got you covered.

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    December 19, 2019 - No Comments!

    7 Best Practices for Testing Digital Products in Schools

    User testing is exciting. You finally get to see your edTech product at work as 25 little people in a classroom begin pushing all the buttons on your product at once.

    Testing digital products in schools also presents a number of challenges for product designers.

    For example, there might not be enough time in your schedule—or enough wiggle room in your budget—to make substantive changes.

    Or the questions developed by your UX team might gently color a user's experience of your product, giving you inaccurate data about how new users engage with each feature.

    Set your team up for success by thinking through user testing in schools from the very beginning of the process. Here's how we design user testing to get to the heart of your users in their every-day environment.

    User Testing in Schools: Getting to the Heart of Your Users in their Environment

    1. Develop the right mindset. You've already tested your prototypes. You've iterated your product along the way. You've even road-tested it with users. By the time you're ready to test in schools, you might think there are no surprises left. But that's where your mindset can shift. The point of user testing is to discover the many unexpected ways users will interact with your product. It's important to remain open-minded to the possibility of change, even late in the game. After all, small changes in your UX can create a much better experience for your users.


    2. Build design changes into your schedule and budget. To get the most value out of testing, incorporate design changes into your schedule and budget. Be clear with your team about the differences between cosmetic changes that won't impact a product's success and changes that will make a lasting, positive impact on your user's experience. Use all the feedback you receive from testing to improve your product's UX in substantive ways.


    3. Choose a true sample of users.Testing reveals how the average user learns to engage with your product in real time. For the data to be most effective, strike a balance between testing internal and external users. Internal users will give you important insights into how the product should work in an ideal world. External users, especially those who aren't tech savvy, reveal what might be confusing or unexpected about your product.


    4. Identify specific microflows that are essential to the product. At this point, it's probably been awhile since you thought about how students and teachers log in to your product. Or how teachers create a new class. Or how students engage with their peers on your platform. Think through the microflows that are most meaningful in each user journey and focus your attention there during testing. What did students have difficulty doing? What features confused or excited them?


    5. Concentrate on functionality. Help your users focus on functionality by incorporating clickable wireframes and other prototyping into your testing process. Wireframes eliminate any potential distractions created by visual design and allow users to really think about how a product works. Screensharing and heatmapping tools also help you see where users are directing their mouse. Are they wandering around on screen? Skipping over the login button because they expect it to be located in a different corner of their monitor? Be open to changing visual designs based on what you see after testing functionality first.


    6. Design open-ended questions. If you "lead the witness" in user testing, you're not going to get a real answer about your product. Open-ended questions allow you to dig into responses and discover whether users are getting what they should out of your product.


    7. Understand — and prepare for — the school environment. It's good practice for both product owners and the UX team to be in the room when users test products. This is especially true in school environments, which might have outdated hardware or bad internet connections. These hurdles are easy to forget in the comforts of your own office. The technology available in schools will also affect your testing outcomes. Make your product as lightweight as possible and scale it for the ChromeBook, which is commonly used in schools. Observe how the school environment impacts the ways your users interact with the product. Were there any unexpected stumbling blocks that might impact your UX or UI?


    Done right, user testing reveals how your product will help students learn a new concept or guide teachers to create detailed reports about their classrooms. This crucial process also reveals where you can still improve the UX and UI in meaningful ways for your users.

    Time and again, we've seen how a thoughtful, data-driven user testing process affects final product design in surprising ways. With these best practices in place, you'll be ready to tackle user testing for any edTech product and give your users exactly what they need.