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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 3, 2019 - No Comments!

EdTech Product Design: How Smart UX Saves $$ on Technology & Creates Efficiencies

We know that adding a UX or UI team into the mix at your company can be scary, even if you have lots of experience facilitating communication between developers and visual designers.

There's always the risk that your company's vision won't be articulated the way you want it to be. Sometimes it's even difficult to see where you went wrong until you're at the end of the process. By that point, however, you might have already run through your budget.

As costs add up, don't make the mistake of short-changing your UX team. It's tempting to save your budget for expensive elements like visual design and development. After all, the most common output tools of UX, like sitemaps and wireframes, are cheap and fast to build. But they also represent a culmination of your team's thinking, and that's a process worth investing in.

Below, we break down why failing to invest in UX can cost you in the long run — and which product planning tools can help you save on your bottom line.

The Case for Investing in a Strategy-Oriented UX Team

The more time and effort you put into developing UX, the more money your team will save in the long run. The strategy process includes developing detailed wireframes, prototype design, and user testing. These powerful tools help you build a better product and refine your goals.

But we know it's not always easy to convince your boss's boss that this process takes considerable time and investment. Here's how you can make a concrete case for investing in a strategy-oriented UX team:

  • Underinvestment never pays. Failing to invest in the product planning phase often results in bringing a less sophisticated product to market. Especially in edTech, learners expect slick, engaging products that take time and money to develop. An underdeveloped product leaves you at risk of getting clobbered by the competition.


  • Product planning results in fewer reworks. When you invest in UX strategy during the planning process, you're less likely to redesign product features in the future. Everyone on your team should understand what your product's key features are and how they support your product's overarching goals.


  • Projects with forward momentum keep your own team invested. Multiple reworks can demoralize your team and make them feel less invested in a product. Keep your team invested in the product's success by generating buy-in on your product's goals and features early in the planning process.


  • Detailed wireframes and interactive flows educate stakeholders. With the right tools, stakeholders can become even more sophisticated consumers of product strategy. Wireframes illustrate UX strategy in a tangible way, and interactive flows provide a top-level view of how personas move through your product. This key part of the planning process helps everyone in the room make better, stronger, more informed decisions.

4 edTech Product Planning Tools That Will Save You Money on UX

In addition to saving money on technology costs in the long run, product planning results in more powerful, engaging, and pedagogically sound edTech tools. Here are four product planning tools you can use to build a better edTech product from the get-go:

  1. Detailed user journeys

    Traditional UX research results in user journeys that detail a specific persona and how they think about completing tasks within your product. These user journeys map out a persona's mindset, their goals, and why their goals might differ from those of another persona.

    Spending the time on UX research and user journeys pays off — especially in an industry like edTech. edTech products require a specialist's insight into how students and teachers navigate software, as well as how they will use your learning tool in a school environment.

    For example, students often use Chromebooks to complete school projects, which will affect your product design. Or teachers might use your tools to complete real-time assessments, which means they'll need an interface that's fast and easy to use.

    The more user research you build into your product planning phase, the more detailed your user journeys — and your team's understanding of their varied environments — will be.


  2. Annotated wireframes

    Developers are great at thinking through what a design decision might mean for a user two clicks away in your product. Or they might see an opportunity to accomplish a task in a way that's more delightful for your user.

    Incorporate developer feedback into the design process by using tools like annotated wireframes. Annotated wireframes deliver developer questions on every screen or user flow, facilitating more interaction between UX and development teams early in the process.

    Use internal communication tools in an app like Marvel, which helps teams share product designs, prototypes, and product overlays, to encourage more conversation. In Zeplin App, your team can even move sketch files onto a shared workspace so developers have the ability to make notes.

    By facilitating collaboration early in the process, your team will figure out where the holes in your design are — and how to address them without expensive reworks.


  3. Interactive wireframes before the prototype phase

    Interactive wireframes create proof of concept and generate internal buy-in with your stakeholders. They're cheaper than trying to build a prototype from scratch, and they're more effective visual demonstrations of product design than a verbal or 2D presentation.

    If you're excited about your visual design and UX, consider using interactive wireframes to get your stakeholders on the same page as early as possible. This will make it even easier for you to move to the prototyping and testing phases without encountering unexpected pushback on design or product features.


  4. Robust project management software

    Billable hours rack up when design teams have to hunt for project details, scope, or company design assets. Eliminate confusing back-and-forths with robust project management software like Asana or Trello. Use these tools to give your design team easy access to all the pieces of the project they need, like logos and brand palettes, without eating into your work day.

The best way to protect your bottom line is to use robust tools that reflect the most recent iterations of your UX strategy. This helps your UX team communicate more directly and effectively with developers and keeps all of your stakeholders on the same page. By investing in the planning process, you'll also have more time to uncover unexpected, well-designed solutions that will delight your users every time they log in. And you can't put a price tag on that.

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October 1, 2019 - No Comments!

The edTech Designer’s Creativity Toolkit: Deep Listening

"Deep listening" is a process of engaged inquiry and openness crucial to design work. When you truly listen to clients — including everything they're not saying — you'll find yourself asking better questions and reading between the lines as you move through the design process.

Without embracing deep listening early in the product planning process, you might struggle to refine your edTech product, add too many design features that confuse your users, or roll out a product that lacks a sound pedagogical basis.

With all your deep listening cylinders firing, however, your road from concept to beta testing will be much smoother — and your users will delight in the simple, elegant solution you've designed.

Keeping this in mind, here's how to approach deep listening in your own product planning meetings:

    • Hear everything. You'll generate dozens of details about your product, and it's a design team's job to listen closely to your goals. Designers need to understand what your edTech product should do and what your users need to accomplish or learn. Your design team often provides the fresh perspective you need to unlock or refine the purpose of your product.

    • Ask the right questions. Whether you need to get into the mindset of your users or simply unpack your product's goal, it's important that your design team asks the questions that showcase the learning experience your product will provide students. Knowing the right questions to ask will likely stem from your design team's years of experience in education and product design.

    • Stay open to unexpected solutions. Just because a design team has already built a similar product doesn't mean they already have the best solution at hand. Stay open-minded to alternative designs, so you can hit on the best solution for your users.

When you stay open and curious throughout the design process, you'll generate more helpful information: better questions, more nuanced solutions, and more effective learning tools that get to the heart of your product and the users who will adopt it in the classroom.

Ultimately, the deliberate process of deep listening is designed to help you make decisions that will better serve all of your users, from the administrators who make purchasing decisions to the students trying to bolster their reading skills.

Case Study: Get to the Heart of Your Users with Design-Thinking Workshops and Deep Listening

Design-thinking workshops are important opportunities to practice deep listening at the early stages of the design process. If you're still discovering your user personas and designing their pathways through your product, deep listening can help you get to the heart of what your users value and how they'll engage with your product.

For example, in a design-thinking workshop for Hats & Ladders, an edTech company with an innovative mobile career education platform, we focused intently on who the app's users were and how each of their personas experienced the app.

Through the process of deep listening, it became apparent how each of their user personas approach the app's content differently. An "unmotivated" student might not take the same pathway as an "overachiever," for example, while an "undecided" student might take yet another pathway to uncover the career that's right for them.

By listening to how the client framed who their users were, we were able to develop strong user stories and user pathways. It mattered how we asked questions — and how we listened to the client's answers.

Ultimately, this process resulted in a completely restructured app that appealed more strongly to high school users. We made building a user's profile central to the experience of playing the in-app game. This allows teens to engage with the app's content while explaining their identity in meaningful ways to other users — and to themselves.

Without staying open-minded throughout this process of deep listening and inquiry, we wouldn't have uncovered such meaningful information about Hats & Ladders's user personas.

And without thinking at length about their high school users in particular, we wouldn't have hit on a design solution that appealed so strongly to teens or broadened the audience for the app.

More often than not, deep listening results in more informed — and more effective — product design.

How Deep Listening Leads to Better edTech Design

Asking the right questions — and listening deeply to the answers — is all about discarding your assumptions. Be open to thinking through why certain design decisions are being made, how these decisions apply to each of your users, and how the end results might be different than what you thought at the beginning of the process.

If you're leading product planning meetings, consider making openness your primary goal. Open-ended questions help you stay mindful of any baggage you might be bringing from your last project, while listening deeply to answers from your team will help you stay open to the unique challenges of a new project as you uncover its personality.

Every edTech product is different, but I have a simple set of open-ended questions in my designer toolkit that I return to again and again throughout the product planning process. These questions will help you throughout your design process, too.

Here are three questions that help me listen more deeply:

  1. How much interaction will your user need in order to engage with your product? This question gets to the heart of how different user personas are in edTech, as well as the assumptions you and your team might be making about these personas. For example, students might be sophisticated users of design, but teachers aren't always as comfortable or well-versed. It's also important to understand the different needs of your users. Where are they using the product? How much time do they have to spend on it? How much familiarity will they have with a product like yours? What are their pain points, and what are their expectations? How do you explain something visually to each of these users? These early decisions in the design process profoundly shape the experience of your user, which is why it's so important to ask open-ended questions and listen deeply to the answers.

  2. How do we avoid visual overload to make the product easy to use? This question helps design teams unpack which features are necessary and which can be simplified for ease of use. After all, edTech users don't have a lot of time. If your product can't be used quickly and intuitively, then it won't get used at all. The learning or administrative experience also has to be beneficial for your product to be successful. Sometimes, visual complexity can get in the way of that goal. Without posing this question at the beginning of the design process, you might lose sight of this goal as you introduce exciting new features for your user.

  3. How do we organize content in a rich, meaningful way? This question helps design teams tap into the pedagogical goals of your product. Remember: edTech products are unique. In order to be successful, they need to lead students through a meaningful learning experience or help administrators do their jobs more effectively and with a more robust set of tools. How you organize your content should reflect the depth of these user experiences without introducing too many barriers, over-complicating your user interface, or causing information overload.

Remember to take the time to reflect on what you heard and put it through the filter of your expertise. The decisions you make in early planning affect the organization of your product later on, and it's crucial that you and your team understand the big picture right out of the gate.

Openness coupled with "deep listening" will help you discover exactly what your edTech product should look and feel like. You'll likely go back to these questions again and again as you refine your user personas and the goal of your product in order to give your users the best possible learning experience.

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September 19, 2019 - No Comments!

How to Design the Best Data Dashboard in edTech

With more complex edTech tools comes an influx of student performance data and new standards for teaching and learning tools. While data can be an extremely powerful tool for educators, training teachers to use complicated edTech products can be cost prohibitive and inefficient for both software companies and school districts.

Even more complicated? Proving the efficacy of your edTech product in the classroom is on you — and if your users can't access or understand this data, too, they won't be convinced that your product offers a good solution.

Thankfully, you can reduce or eliminate many of these obstacles by designing better, more functional data dashboards. These design improvements will go a long way toward convincing your clients and their users that edTech tools help teachers do their jobs even more effectively.

The gap between edTech designers and their users was never more apparent to me than when I left SXSW EDU earlier this year, mulling over a lively panel on the topic of data-driven learning. When panelist Josh Dormont, the director of product development for the NYC Department of Education, revealed how hesitant teachers and teachers' unions have been to embrace data-driven teaching tools, I wasn't necessarily surprised. I understand the objections and fears teachers have about how data could potentially be weaponized by administrators or misinterpreted when reviewed out of context.

After all, an influx of data can be a powerful tool — or a source of anxiety for your users. That's why it's so important to make data dashboard design a priority as you plan your next edTech product. Here's what you can do to make it even easier for teachers, administrators, and parents to use robust, data-driven edTech tools:

What Makes an edTech Tool Effective?

New educational technology transforms learning in schools and homes, and it also generates tons of student performance data. In order to be successful, these new products must also enable teachers and administrators to easily track, monitor, and react to performance data. Otherwise, teachers are left drowning in data that isn't actionable, and they miss out on significant takeaways about their students' performance.

Each new edTech product is also judged by how effective it is. When considering a new edTech product, school administrators and other key stakeholders look for a few key measures of efficacy before they make an investment:

    • The product improves assessed learning outcomes, i.e., "hard" data. Straightforward, before-and-after data that shows how students have improved over time is the baseline for most buyer decisions. This is true even for products that have "softer" learning goals or outcomes, like those tied to social and emotional learning.

 

    • The product improves observed learning outcomes, i.e., "soft" data. In the crowded world of edTech solutions, positive observed outcomes have become a powerful differentiator for many products. Sure, the numbers show the product works, but what do real teachers say? These observations could be as complex as expert-driven testimonials or as simple as social reviews. Finding ways to track and display observed learning outcomes in meaningful data visualizations can be a powerful addition to your product's data dashboard.

 

  • The product demonstrates high engagement with users. How frequently the product is used, and for how long, matters a great deal to administrative stakeholders. These personas also consider which elements of a product users engage with. Are students only playing games? Are teachers actually using the product for its intended purpose? As you develop your data dashboard, be sure to make it easy for the right user to track and access the engagement data they need to determine whether the product is working for them.
  • It meets internal benchmarks of teacher satisfaction. If you build in simple systems for teachers to submit feedback about their experiences using your product, you can use this data to improve the next version of your product. Teacher satisfaction data is often a key indicator for administrators who make purchasing decisions for their district.

When you design with data visualization in mind, not only will you find more opportunities in the UX and UI to make your product more effective, but you'll also demonstrate to clients and their users that you truly understand the challenges they face in the classroom.

Well-designed data dashboards make it easier for students to track their progress, for teachers to assess student performance, and for administrators to make purchasing decisions. It's up to edTech designers to make these visualizations easy to understand and even more powerful to engage with.

Your Data Dashboard Designer Checklist

Well-designed data dashboards offer the simplest and most elegant solutions for user insights. In one place, users can see how their product or system is performing, whether that's within a single classroom or across an entire grade, school, or district.

Providing school administrators, teachers, and parents with robust, actionable tools for assessing student data is key to ensuring your edTech product will be utilized thoughtfully both in and out of the classroom. Students need their own data feedback systems, too, whether that's a series of prompts that encourages them to engage more deeply with your product or a dashboard that shows how their performance measures against the goals they've set for themselves.

After years of creating and testing data dashboards for each of these audiences, we've distilled our best practices for creating a killer data dashboard. Follow our Data Dashboard Designer Checklist to help educators make better, more informed decisions and take immediate action based on the data collected by your product.