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May 5, 2021 - No Comments!

6 Easy SEL Features for Remote Learning Products

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

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

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

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

How to Design SEL Features That Teachers Really Want

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

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

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

1. Develop a supportive content strategy

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

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

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

 

2. Design affirmative, warm UI

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

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

 

3. Anticipate teacher-student touchpoints

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

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

4. Improve onboarding experiences

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

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

5. Create synchronous activities for remote learning

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

 

6. Help students develop more agency over their learning

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

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

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

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

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February 22, 2021 - No Comments!

What’s the Future of edTech in the Classroom? Two Teachers Weigh In

From tech to teaching strategies, educators are doing their best to reach students in remote, hybrid, and in-person classroom environments. They still face unique challenges, including flagging student engagement online and accommodating special needs in remote environments.

We talked to two teachers who are members of Backpack Interactive's Teacher Council, Dannielle Rivera and Daniel Nero, to find out which digital tools are helping them effectively reach students, how their teaching plans continue to evolve, and the future of education technology in their classrooms.

Dannielle Rivera teaches 2nd grade in a public school in suburban Southern California. Daniel Nero is a fourth-year English teacher at a Title I high school in Las Vegas, Nevada. These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Integrating edTech into Remote Learning

How are you currently teaching? Hybrid? Remote only? How's it going?

Dannielle Rivera: I'm completely remote. I'm the grade level chair for my department. I created a Google website and told my teachers we were going to create tech tutorial videos so [students and parents] can access them on their own. The biggest feat [is] tech knowledge for parents and students. Now when parents watch [our tutorials], they're not messaging me like, "Oh, my gosh, I can't do this."

Daniel Nero: It's hybrid. Some of my students are in person, whereas I'm, as you can see, at home. But I could always jump into the building if I wanted to teach.

What was your remote teaching plan like last September? Which digital tools did you start out using?

DR: The first two weeks was just teaching the kids how to log on. I tried to premeditate those things. I made their Clever badges and attached them to pre-made folders. They're 7 and 8. As resilient as they are, I have to remind myself what is age-appropriate. To what extent can I push them?

At first, we were converting everything to digital worksheets. We would screenshot the page and make it a background on Google Slides. Then we switched over to Jamboard because on Google Slides, they couldn't annotate. We just had to learn over time.

DN: When I teach in person, there's a lot of paper, there's a lot of hands-on activities. And all of that disappeared when we switched over to remote learning. I had to digitize all of the texts that we're [reading].

A lot of the skills that we did on paper—like annotation, highlighting, taking notes, answering questions—all of that also became digitized, and I had a lot of trouble transferring those necessary skills to remote instruction because I had a hard time finding the tools to be able to do that.

I was using Google Docs, collaborative Google Slides, and Pear Deck, but I decided to cut back on a lot of these apps and try to make it as simple, consistent, and doable for the kids.

How has your remote teaching plan evolved?

DN: One thing that I brought into remote learning is socio-emotional learning. Because a lot of our kids right now are struggling, not only academically, but emotionally. A lot of things that happen at home are aggravated because they're stuck at home. I just wanted to check in on them and tie social-emotional learning to what we've read, or what has happened in the news.

Pairing Instructional Strategies for Remote Learning with Digital Tools

Which specific modes of teaching have you gravitated toward?

DR: For math, we use whole group instruction and independent instruction. Students are also given the opportunity to work collaboratively in small groups in Google Meet rooms. I've evolved to [using] Jamboard and the HoverCam. Jamboard is great, but there is just something about pencil and paper. They can either solve the problems and show their work digitally through Jamboard, or they can solve it on pencil and paper or whiteboard and a marker and take a picture of their work. After taking a picture, students then insert the image into their Jamboard assignment, which is linked to our Google Classroom.

Language arts is an orchestrated set of tasks and lessons, and we have a lot of moving pieces. It entails 1:1 assessments, whole group instruction, small group instruction, and group work through Google Meet rooms. Because we have kids that go to reading intervention groups or speech, we also have independent work.

DN: We mostly do synchronous instruction through Zoom. Regardless of whether the students are in person or not, they're on Zoom. On Fridays, we have one-on-one office hours, and students jump into the Zoom call based on [their needs]. Within the Zoom call we sometimes go into breakout rooms where we have small group instruction. So we're trying to mimic what we had in person, but in an online setting.

What activity, subject, practice have you found the most difficult to translate to remote learning?

DN: Discussions. I love to talk to students, especially if we're talking about the text that we're tackling. But because of remote learning, I feel like a lot of the students are very quiet, shy, or just not willing to participate. I truly miss discussions because I get to see the students' faces. I get to hear their voices. I get to hear their opinions. But in online settings, all I see are black screens sometimes.

Using edTech and SEL to Reach Struggling Students and Promote Self-Efficacy

What strategies or tools have you tried to reach students who are struggling with remote learning?

DR: Our special needs students are truly struggling. This is not the proper way of learning for them. My heart breaks for them. Because many of their parents have to work, the kids that are thriving are the kids who have a grandparent sitting with them.

While students are working on independent work, I open up another Google Meets room for students that are stuck or need help with a problem. This alleviates them from reaching their frustration level.

I've also adapted the lessons. When I try to meet with the parents of my struggling students, I really adjust their work. For example, if it takes four problems to complete an exit ticket or complete an assessment, I tell the parents, "You pick two."

I also like to focus on the social-emotional aspect. What should be the forefront of our concern is the social-emotional states of our students. That has to be a priority because if that is not in tune, then they can't do the academics.

DN: For the students who are struggling, or just about grade level, I put a lot of scaffolds in my lessons. Everything is scaffolded up to the assessment. I tell them that at the beginning of each class. "We're going to have this as the assessment today, and everything that you're going to do for the next hour, you're going to need to show me for your exit ticket."

How has remote learning fostered positive outcomes in your students?

DR: They're becoming more tech savvy. They've become more responsible in some ways, like taking ownership of their work. These are the kids that are succeeding. Obviously, a lot of things can become frustrating, so we've had our share of breakdowns. They've really had to learn how to self-regulate their emotions. I feel like their coping mechanisms have gotten better in times of struggle.

DN: Student accountability. On Pear Deck, I can see who is writing and who is not writing, and I would narrate on Zoom, "Awesome! Thanks, Ashley, for giving me your answer. I'm waiting on four more people to respond to this prompt." A lot of the students are also starting to become critics of their own writing. It's related to the students finding a way to sustain themselves in their writing and their reading. That makes me feel good. At least for me, that's my responsibility as a teacher. I'm there to guide them, but once they're ready to fly free, they can.

How edTech Product Designers Can Address Real Classroom Needs

As you consider returning to the classroom for full-time instruction, which elements from remote or hybrid learning would you continue to use?

DR: One of the things that I've learned is grace and being more gracious towards parents. I've always considered myself to communicate well with parents, but I feel like I've just learned how to talk to parents a little bit differently.

I would also take a lot of the tutorials that we do. Let's say a student is struggling, and a parent can't meet with me. I can record a screencast of a demo. I feel like you waste so much more time trying to coordinate or schedule meetings. You can definitely hold parent teacher conferences virtually. There are these families that bend over backwards to try to make it in the middle of the day when they can just pop on their phones and not have to deal with driving and stuff.

We are living in Google Classroom right now. And I'd definitely love to take that with me into the normal classroom. I was already using Google Classroom quite a bit, but now we have this archive of videos, so independent work in a classroom will look so different now. I feel like it will free me up to meet with small groups more.

DN: Consistency and the simplicity of my lessons. It's working right now, so it should work in the classroom with a printer and paper and all that stuff. I think it should be fun.

The strategy that I would hold on to even more is to just make sure that I put the students first. Sometimes I'll be doing my lesson, and the students are not responding or I'm having low participation, and I get frustrated as a teacher. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is our new normal right now, and we have no idea what's happening to our students on the inside or behind the screen, at home. So I just have to bring myself back down to reality. You don't know what's happening. And you have to give them that.

What's something that you wish one of your current learning products did that it doesn't currently do?

DR: I wish more of the products had SEL components ingrained into them. For example, when they're taking an assessment, iReady has them take a "brain break," like breathing exercises or stopping to do something active.

I wish more products had video tutorials for students and parents. I wish some of the programs had a live chat with customer service so I could solve problems faster.

I wish there was a way to set up my break out rooms in Google Meet, name them, and save the grouping settings. That way I wouldn't have to make new break out groups every single time.

DN: I would like to be able to link to a text in Pear Deck, so students could annotate that whole passage. Right now, I have to chunk the texts out into different slides. I also wish it had a student comment function. Only teachers can comment.

Using Teacher Feedback to Shape the Future of Education Technology

From onboarding parents to anticipating student needs, teachers are working overtime to ensure that their students are mastering content and staying safe, healthy, and balanced.

When edTech products don't rise to meet teachers' demands for flexibility or SEL content, they find work-arounds and tailor solutions to the needs of their own classrooms.

Product owners can still do more to understand how teachers use and adapt their digital tools. By conducting additional UXR, testing products in real or remote classrooms, and drawing on the insights of the Backpack Interactive Teacher Council, your next edTech product can help teachers meet even more students where they are.

Want more insights on how our Teacher Council can help with your next edTech product? Let's talk!

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January 28, 2021 - No Comments!

How to Pivot Your edTech Product Directly to Consumers

As an edTech firm, you've already seen the push for learning products that work in the home. Does that mean it's time to adopt a new, business-to-consumer (B2C) strategy?

After all, you're used to designing products that help teachers facilitate a learning experience in the classroom. And you're used to marketing to administrators who want solutions their entire district can adopt.

The shift to a B2C strategy takes an entirely new mindset. In the direct-to-consumer model, you'll make or redesign learning products for an entirely new buyer—parents—that work in an entirely new environment—the home. This scenario opens up a new set of design questions, challenges, and rewards.

We're here to help you make the leap.

How COVID-19 Changed Traditional Classrooms and Classroom Technology

COVID-19 has underscored the importance of being able to learn anywhere—not just in a classroom setting. Thanks to remote learning, teachers have created greater continuity between technology used in the classroom and technology used in the home.

As a result, parents now understand they can have a more active role in their child's education. They'll take on that role as a more regular buyer and facilitator of edTech. Since students are now spending more time in front of screens, parents will want the hours their children devote to an app or a computer to be used for high-quality learning experiences.

With parents taking the lead in edTech consumption, the demand for highly engaging learning tools and digital experiences will only continue to grow. New digital experiences can even be student-led, or take place outside of a formal curriculum. While students won't necessarily engage with products that look and feel like school in the home, they can still learn from fun or engaging products.

Even as life returns to normal, these industry-wide shifts won't disappear any time soon. Traditional education publishers and edTech start-ups now have a good case for expanding their reach and putting high-quality content directly in front of consumers.

Here are three suggestions you can use to get started with your own pivot to the B2C market.

Lean on User Experience Research (UXR)

If teachers and students typically use your product in a school setting, you'll have to re-think your approach to both UXR and testing as you pivot to the consumer market.

We tend to think about schools as controlled environments, but individual homes are more of a wild card. Preparing to address this new environment should help you generate an entirely different set of questions about functionality, accessibility, and user needs. For example:

  • Are parents the buyer persona for your product?
  • Do they need their own portal?
  • How much onboarding support will a student need outside of a school environment to use your product effectively?
  • Will parents be the ones who provide that onboarding support?

In addition to researching and testing your product with both parents and kids, you'll have to cast a wider net in order to find the right number of subjects. Unlike testing products designed for a more formal educational environment, you won't have to rely as heavily on subject matter or teaching experts for feedback.

UserTesting.com and other virtual learning platforms can help you recruit the new types of users you're looking for. Use your company's networks to find as many people as you can without narrowing your field too drastically. You'll want to develop the right balance of both ethnic and geographic diversity to get the results that will be most helpful for your UXR process.

Address the Biggest edTech Concerns of Parents

Learning products have a completely different set of stakes in the home environment. Unlike teachers, parents aren't under the same amount of pressure to push kids across a finish line or encourage them to stick with a tool that challenges them.

Parents do, however, have a different set of emotional concerns than educators. From screen time to physiological well-being, parents have a heightened awareness of their child's relationship to technology in the home.

All parents hope their "student" user will stay engaged with a learning product for their own benefit. From a design standpoint, we encourage clients pivoting to the consumer market to embrace gameplay and problem-solving narratives. Consumer products can deliver rich gaming experiences that teachers wouldn't necessarily be interested in—or have time to incorporate into their curriculum. Consumer learning products can also incorporate fun activities with game mechanics, like DuoLingo, to keep students engaged as they learn new concepts.

With the rise of remote learning, parents also want their child's social-emotional learning (SEL) to stay on track. By placing a greater emphasis on the social aspect of your game or product, you can build community, even among young users. In school environments, the community component of edTech products is automatically safe and controlled. While this can be a challenge to address in consumer eTech products, building safe communities ultimately helps with SEL growth and addresses fundamental parent concerns about technology in the home.

Involve Marketing Stakeholders in edTech Product Design

From a marketing perspective, pivoting your edTech product from a B2B to B2C model could be a significant challenge. As an edTech company, you likely market directly to educators and administrators, which means you don't already have strong consumer marketing channels in place.

That doesn't mean your pivot won't work—just that you need to develop a different strategy to ensure your pivot is a successful one!

If you're considering marketing directly to consumers, it's important to involve your marketing stakeholders from the beginning stages of product design. Strong UX designers can provide your marketing team with basic guidance about how to reach parents, rather than an educator or administrator, with the right values-based language.

Parents need reassurance that their child will enjoy and engage with your product. After all, even when you're marketing edTech products directly to consumers, you're still selling a learning tool designed for skill development, rather than pure entertainment. By participating in early design meetings, your marketing team can think through parent needs and expectations as your product's features come to life.

Through competitive research and experience in the field, your designers might also suggest consumer companies that could make a good fit for distribution partnerships. You may want to bring in a consumer marketing company as a consultancy for even more rigorous support. Whatever route you take, the sooner you involve marketing stakeholders in the design process, the sooner your new B2C marketing and distribution strategy can take shape.

By embracing user experience research, cultivating a deeper understanding of your parent persona, and collaborating with your marketing team, you'll be able to pivot your product from B2B to B2C with ease. Now that edTech has changed for good, your company will also be ready to address the ongoing challenges of remote and hybrid learning with engaging, high-quality learning content. Learning can happen anywhere—but only if you design the right tools to facilitate it.

Want to talk more about the UX solutions that can help your edTech product take off in the consumer market? Contact us!

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January 19, 2021 - No Comments!

How to Integrate Your Development Team into the Creative Process

As remote learning becomes the norm, your UX design and development teams need to be even more thoughtful about how teachers use technology to reach their students.

From making it clear to teachers which of their screens is being shared during a Zoom lesson to providing innovative features for SEL growth and peer learning, our tech and design collaborations matter to the users who depend on our products.

Backpack Interactive is lucky enough to collaborate with incredible development teams. Our special creative partnerships with developers shape the work we've done with national brands, including Scholastic and Lego, and inform our approach to agile development.

With our insights from decades-long collaborations, you can infuse more creativity into your UX design and development collaborations and make better products from the ground up.

Ease Workflow Issues through Agile Development Practices

Agile development practices help you coordinate your design and development teams and work backwards from an objective or deadline. But staying flexible throughout this process also helps your entire team come up with creative approaches to design challenges.

For design teams, it's important to work closely with clients and stakeholders to define the problem or experience. The better you understand a design challenge conceptually, the easier it will be to clarify your project parameters with a development team and start riffing on potential solutions.

As design and technology needs are defined along the way, the end product becomes clearer. Ideally, this collaboration is what creates the best possible version of the product you were hired to build.

That's why working backwards is so important. You'll be able to think proactively about your timeline and develop solutions that fit the parameters of your deadline. Both you and your development team should work together to determine what an iterative road to a major feature goal looks like.

You might be surprised by what solutions jump out at you during these collaborations. Some feature ideas or solutions might not even be part of the original brief. Even so, they could support user needs or client business goals in new, innovative, and more efficient ways.

This process takes time—and mutual trust. Now that we're all working remotely, it's more important than ever to give collaborations between design and development teams more breathing room. If you're tightly scheduling meetings and sprints or making detailed agendas, you'll have less time for creative thinking and problem solving.

Identify More Technology Opportunities with Annotated Wireframes

Developers have plenty of know-how. But if your designers simply deliver their vision without considering the perspective of the development team, everyone misses out on technology opportunities.

Annotated wireframes are the best way to involve your development team throughout the process. Developers can make annotations on wireframes to discuss the functionality and feasibility of your team's UX solutions, so you're all thinking a few steps ahead. This is also the perfect system for developers to test edge cases or specific user cases and search for solutions early in the process.

Done well, annotated wireframes also provide a formally documented design and technology conversation that outlines solutions to real problems. Not every design project treats wireframes as an opportunity for collaboration. For this reason, it's important that both sides stay open to change throughout this process. Ultimately, a flexible conversation will produce better, more creative solutions to both design and technology challenges.

Once your design team and your development team have mastered the fundamentals of teamwork, both teams are freed up to be more creative. The best collaborations lead to innovative or human-centered products by anticipating sticking points and building a stronger product from the ground up.

Roll Out a Proof-of-Concept to Test the Viability of Your UX and Technology

By nature, proofs-of-concept are quick, lightweight ways to demonstrate your proposed solution to a specific design challenge. They ensure your approach will work and deliver on the feel of the product. Done well, they can speed stakeholder buy-in or approval.

A proof-of-concept can even be small—a piece of code that helps designers test out what an experience would be like for the user. Does animation between screens solve a visual transition issue? Can you design a reactive behavior into the experience to help a user understand their next step? (Think log-in fields that shake when a user mis-remembers their password.)

Working with your development team to build and test a proof-of-concept is especially important right now. We don't know how learning tools designed for the classroom will translate to remote learning environments. This means we need to test out new ideas even more quickly By staying open to new, creative solutions, we'll meet the needs of teachers and students as they navigate working and learning from home.

We know that not every development team wants to participate in a partnership with UX designers. For development teams, iteration is more often about adhering to specific parameters rather than trying to solve unique design problems.

However, if you only focus on a project's design and technology parameters, you might not create the best possible product. It's important to stay open to the possibility that the product can get better along the way.

Working this way also requires a lot of trust between the client, your design and UX teams, and your development team. But if everyone accepts that the product can get better along the way, you'll create break-through moments where every member of the team can showcase their creative abilities.

For Backpack Interactive, proof-of-concept designs are one of the most exciting ways to create those break-through moments. They help us find more viable solutions that meet the needs of our users. They also shine a spotlight on the creative thinking of our development collaborators.

How to Stand Up a Stellar Digital Experience in 6 Weeks Flat: A LEGO Case Study

LEGO: Passport to Mars is a suite of interactive educational games designed to teach children ages 7 to 10 about space travel and teamwork. It also offers a postcard generator, so children can create and send messages featuring their LEGO models to friends and family.

Our biggest design challenge was to help children learn complex ideas through story and gameplay, all while delivering on visual presentation. To meet the tight deadline, we knew we had to work in an agile, collaborative partnership with one of our favorite development teams—the folks at Atomic.

Delivering on Delight—without a Database

In order to focus on storytelling, we spent several days storyboarding activities for gameplay rather than developing wireframes. Because we provided our development team with fewer technical specifications at the outset of the project, they wrote more creative code that addressed functionality and sequencing in unique ways. For example, they came up with playful solutions for syncing up animation to audio, and we adapted our visual designs to better fit their suggestions.

Collaboration with the Atomic team throughout this process was crucial. Early in the process, we discovered there wasn't enough time to properly implement a database on the back end. To compensate, we designed individual postcards by creating artwork for every possible outcome a child might choose. This way, we were still able to provide a customizable postcard experience, even if the images couldn't be generated dynamically on the back end. This solution worked solely because we collaborated in lockstep with our development team. Atomic helped us develop strong organizing solutions for the project's graphic assets. They also created prototypes to ensure our design work-around would be successful.

The Technological Challenge of Rendering AR in a Browser Environment

Our next design and technology challenge arose when trying to render augmented reality (AR) in a browser environment rather than app. The intent was to design a great experience for children who might just be learning what AR is and how it works. In LEGO: Passport to Mars, this means that some children can scan their LEGO model and experience it in a virtual environment. Children without their own LEGO models experience animated versions that are just as fun to look at and explore.

From a technological standpoint, few open source options for browser-based AR existed. To work around this technical constraint, we hired a 3D animator to develop a proof-of-concept. Our animator brought a LEGO rocket model to life with billowing smoke and created a LEGO lunar buggy that picks up equipment and places it in a cargo bed. Both UX and visual design had to work backwards to address the technology limitations around AR and accomplish the goal by only using the tech our teams had access to.

Working this way can be both challenging and productive. As a design team, we were deeply involved in the technology decisions behind LEGO: Passport to Mars. This collaboration made the final experience stronger, more functional, and more fun. When design and development teams work in environments of mutual trust and creativity, great things happen.

Want to work collaboratively with a design team to solve technology issues in your next product? Contact us!