Category: Digital Strategy

3 Ways Your edTech Products Can Improve Usability for Teachers Year-Round

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
October 18, 2023

Back-to-school is almost as busy for product teams as it is for teachers. 

If you’re tasked with shipping new features for your edTech products this school year, we have all the user research and design tips you need to make sure you’re spending your design and development budgets wisely.

Prioritizing onboarding flows, rostering integrations, and professional learning content will help you improve usability by reducing the number of administrative tasks teachers have at the beginning of the year.

That way, teachers can jump right in to using your product without getting overwhelmed or frustrated.

Here’s how to do it.

Prioritize onboarding flows in your edTech products for maximum ROI

As teachers return to school, they spend more time preparing their physical classrooms than learning the ins and outs of a new edTech product or feature.

That’s why you should prioritize simple onboarding flows for your teacher persona—especially if your edTech product launches for back-to-school.

Here are a few tactics supported by our recent user research report, How to Give Your Users Better Tools for Back to School. 

Let them skip the tour

We get it. Sometimes products are complicated and a tour of features isn’t just warranted—it’s actually important for use and engagement.

Still, give users the choice to skip the tour and come back later. This is a more common feature in commercial products that will only benefit your teacher persona. 

In all likelihood, teachers simply won’t have time during their first log on to complete a full product tour. 

Plus, forcing a busy user to complete an onboarding task like this can backfire—increasing frustration and making them less likely to integrate your tool into their day-to-day.

60% of teachers say time is their biggest need when it comes to back-to-school and using edTech products.
60% of teachers say time is their biggest need. Your edTech products can do more to help.

Get set up in a few clicks

Forget training videos, lengthy product tours, and multi-step set-up prompts. Teachers need to log in and jump right into their work.

Let users choose which type of tutorial will help them best at the moment, or whether they’d like a tutorial overview at all.

Simple one-step prompts, like “Do you want to learn more about rostering?” can be a life-saver.

Remember: the easier you make it for teachers to jump right into a user flow, the more likely they are to come back to your product and learn all the ins and outs later.

Just the highlights, please

When users are short on time, it’s up to your design team to help them quickly find the three or four features they need to use the product successfully.

Whether you highlight your rostering tool or add point-of-use reminders about key features, point teachers right to the tools they need most.

edTech products are competing for teachers' attention with new initiatives and other pressures.
edTech products are competing for teachers’ attention with new initiatives and other pressures.

Streamline student log-ins

While this isn’t strictly a teacher onboarding task, it’s integral to getting an entire classroom up and running in your learning tool.

Helping students get situated in an edTech product can take up a huge amount of classroom time.

Make it easier for teachers by:

  • Using QR codes for student logins
  • Adopting password variations by grade band to make logins more accessible, inclusive, and age-appropriate
  • Using a single sign-on integration for your entire suite of products

edTech products don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Opt for integrations, instead.

One of the top ways we see edTech companies churn through their design and development budgets is by trying to reinvent the wheel.

User research is the best way to avoid this pitfall. With a strong foundation in user research, for example, you can start from the baseline assumption that teachers already use a tool that automates their rosters. 

That makes rostering integrations not only important for easing common teacher pain points—but also an invaluable time saver.

Here are two design tips for designing more meaningful integrations with rostering tools:

Embrace OneRoster compliance

OneRoster is a standardized way to structure rostering data. 

This ensures compatibility between your learning tool and the other tools in a school district’s system, making it easier for teachers to manage changes to student data.

Meeting this need is a great investment of your UX budget, since it allows teachers to:

  • Auto populate forms
  • Sync student data across classrooms
  • Minimize manual editing
edTech products can alleviate teachers' most time-consuming tasks.
edTech products can alleviate teachers’ most time-consuming tasks.

Devote budget to email & gradebook integrations

If you’re already OneRoster compliant, the next areas to focus your budget are on email and gradebook integrations for ease-of-use.

Take Operoo, for example. This tool helps schools manage important student data found on “blue cards,” or the emergency contact cards that contain guardian contact information and student allergies. 

Having guardian contact information easy to hand is crucial for contacting family members quickly. However, Operoo doesn’t have email integration, which means teachers must copy and paste guardian information and go to another application to actually get in touch. 

An Operoo blue card has phone integrations already built-in.
An Operoo blue card has phone integrations already built-in.

A simple upgrade would make the tool even more helpful for the teacher who use it every day.

Schoology, on the other hand, offers teachers one tool for managing their rosters, gradebook, and learning content. 

Because the data within the tool regularly syncs for the entire school, anyone who needs key information can retrieve it at any time. That’s the power of a great integration!

Professional learning works—when it’s bite-sized

Even though professional learning is important, it’s usually the last thing teachers have time for. Making sure your team understands this is crucial for design decision making.

Once your team understands this constraint, they can organize professional learning content in more effective ways, including:

  • Short videos optimized for mobile, so teachers can watch videos on their phones
  • Point-of-use calls to action for professional learning opportunities
  • Collections of content that can help teachers meet immediate goals

While teachers don’t necessarily have time to seek professional learning content out, they’re more likely to use it if you put it within reach—in a format that works best for them.

Understanding both teacher needs and edTech buying cycles can help you prioritize features more effectively throughout product development.The more you base your decision making on user research, the easier it’ll be to ensure that teachers can use your product quickly—even during the busiest times of the year.

Looking for user research to improve your edTech product features and boost usability? Check out our most recent findings—and get expert recommendations—for free.

 

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UX Strategy: How to Create More Inclusive and Effective Designs

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
June 30, 2023

As the first billion-dollar edTech product, Scholastic’s Read180 is often cited as one of the most successful digital learning tools of all time. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which bought the reading intervention app from Scholastic in 2017, understood this when they leveraged a strong UX strategy to build on Scholastic’s early successes.

In 2019, the company conducted user and market research, fine-tuned their strategic priorities, and delivered a high-impact tool with great learning content. This catapulted them to the top of the growing edTech industry—right as educators shifted to at-home learning at the beginning of the pandemic.

The success of a product like Read180 isn’t just about luck or timing. It’s also about well-matched business goals and user needs, all of which must be outlined in your product’s UX strategy. This guide will help you develop a successful strategy for your learning tool, so you can design the best edTech products—and the best learning experiences—for your users.

Table of Contents

  1. What is UX strategy?
  2. Why is strategy so important in edTech product development?
  3. Components of UX strategy
  4. How to translate product requirements into great educational experiences
  5. Measuring the effectiveness of your UX strategy
  6. How to improve the UX strategy of your edTech product
  7. The ROI of UX strategy

What is UX strategy?

User experience strategy is goal-driven UX design that balances research, business needs, and product requirements. Services like product ideation, market analysis, and user research can all fall under its umbrella.

In edTech, the UX strategy for a specific learning tool should ultimately help product owners translate business requirements into an engaging, usable experience for teachers and students. 

By using a human-centered design approach, your team will take into account both how people learn and how they interact with your product—two elements integral to the success of your learning tool.

Why is strategy so important in edTech?

Businesses that make decisions based on well-researched and reasoned strategies tend to minimize risks and thrive. Having a UX design strategy for your edTech product is no different.

A strategic approach to UX design ensures that your learning product is effective and easy to use, starting from the earliest stages of product development and planning. 

You can also use UX strategy to:

  • Validate that you’re building a tool customers want, that addresses a pain point, and that meets a defined user need
  • Lay the foundation for inclusive design practices, which will improve your overall UX
  • Present your learning content in the best way for your organization, especially if you have already invested millions in a print curriculum
  • Build user engagement because the product is fun and easy to use
  • Support the needs of your sales team by making it easier to sell a useful, attractive, and exciting tool.

A well-defined UX strategy ensures key product outcomes, including the effectiveness of your learning product and its likelihood of being adopted, used, and recommended by both teachers and learners. 

Components of UX strategy

Creating a new learning tool requires a strategic approach, so you and your team can feel certain about investing design resources in the right edTech product.

Based on market and user research, your UX strategy will collect:

  • Business or product goals and requirements
  • Tactics for achieving your goals
  • Recommendations for product features that meet both user needs and business requirements

By taking a user-centered approach to strategic product design, you’ll mitigate the risks of bringing a brand new edTech product on the market. You’ll also ensure that your learning tool is effective, easy to use, and ready for schools to adopt.

While every strategic engagement is unique, the basic building blocks of creating a UX strategy include some combination of stakeholder workshops, user research, and ideation.

Stakeholder workshops

During stakeholder workshops, your product and user experience teams will aim to align on the experience goals for your learning tool. How will you deliver a UX that is both on-mission and on-brand for the company, while meeting the needs of your users? 

Alignment on these goals, outcomes, and initial tactics is key to making progress on product ideation. Typically, stakeholder workshops take place during a UX discovery process.

An image of a stakeholder workshop in progress.
Stakeholder workshops are great tools for aligning on edTech product strategy and developing creative solutions that help users.

User research

Through client interviews, persona analysis, and market research, your UXR team members will validate user pain points, needs, and opportunities in the edTech marketplace. As your product team develops and prioritizes features for your learning tool, you’ll be able to ensure you’re on the right track.

Effective edTech personas outline user roles, needs, pain points, and motivations.
edTech personas reflect user research crucial to developing a strong UX strategy.

Additionally, the best way to make your edTech products more inclusive and effective is to adopt an inclusive mindset at the earliest stages of UXR. Inclusive UX design and research practices aren’t just the right thing to do—they’re smart business tactics. 

Inclusive design approaches, like the Universal Design framework, ensure that your product is effective for the widest group of teachers and learners. Plus, inclusivity is often a baseline requirement from schools or administrative buyers. 

Every research element, from user recruitment to survey methodology, makes an impact on the usability and accessibility of your product. When you build inclusivity into your strategic approach, your team will more effectively determine feature priorities and design edTech products genuinely representative of user needs.

Product ideation

Once your team has aligned on goals and conducted UXR, it’s time to start developing product ideas. Typically these early discussions are facilitated through design thinking workshops that prioritize decision making, so your team can move forward in the product design process.

An early product sketch demonstrating a possible UX strategy.
Even simple product sketches can help align stakeholders on your product’s direction and UX strategy.

You can use numerous methods to help stakeholders envision product ideas and align on the concepts that meet your UX strategy. These methods include:

Remember: your entire product team will need a strong understanding of product and user goals before you design wireframes that solve real creative challenges. Together, you’ll develop ideas for product features that more fully support your users, align with your existing learning content, and meet business requirements.

Product and design requirements

Last but not least, you’ll develop an outline of product and design requirements that reflects your strategic work. If this is a list your company already made based on business needs, don’t worry. There’s still time to conduct UXR to validate user needs and choose features that will both support your users and your business.

How to translate product requirements into great educational experiences

As UX designers in edTech, we all want to create learning tools that support teachers and students and lead to better learning outcomes.

Follow these 4 steps to balance UX strategy, learning content, and business requirements for a better learning tool—and get buy-in from other stakeholders.

1. Embrace user-centered design principles

Before you make assumptions about what your edTech product should be, back up and make sure you understand your users’ needs and preferences. 

If you’re only considering your company’s existing learning content or your business requirements, you’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

2. Find the delta between product requirements and user needs

Next, look for where business needs and user needs align. You can do this by:

  • Validating product requirements through user testing, including A/B tests
  • Validating that you’re designing the right product by highlighting key findings from your research.

This analytical work will mitigate the risks of investing in product design by helping you align your stakeholders on strategic next steps.

3. Translate your learning curriculum into a great UX

A great digital educational experience asks you to consider what the digital medium of an edTech product does well.

You’ll have to take into consideration user preference, needs, habits, and behaviors in the classroom, including how old your student users are, what kind of technology they use, and how much time they have to complete tasks.

Each of these environmental factors should affect your team’s vision for the product, and, ultimately, the product requirements. This will also help your product team anticipate future states and trends. 

It can also help your team choose common interface patterns to help learners understand content without a lot of UX copy. A great digital experience helps users intuitively click on a part of the experience, watch a video, or input text to a field.

4. Look for creative solutions to UX and UI design

Great UX and UI in edTech isn’t formulaic, even though design happens within business constraints and parameters. 

It takes time and talent to conceptualize and design creative, innovative solutions to real pain points. In fact, one of the value adds of hiring design experts in edTech is that they already know the UX and UI baselines for users and the edTech industry as a whole.

The early stages of UX strategy are the best time to discuss how your team will take business and product requirements and transform them with user-centered design.

After all, designing an incredible learner experience requires keeping your users top of mind—and helping other company stakeholders do the same.

Measuring the effectiveness of your UX strategy

Supporting learning outcomes and measuring product effectiveness are key to every successful edTech business strategy. But you can’t manage what you can’t measure!

As you align with your stakeholders, develop and test product ideas, and design your learning tool, establish realistic ways to measure your UX strategy.

If your product team has conducted enough research to address a gap in the market and meet a demonstrated user need, you’re likely on the right track. 

But there are specific qualitative and quantitative methods you can use to measure current performance and make improvements to your learning tool as needed.

Qualitative KPIs

Don’t discount the importance of qualitative feedback or changes in user behavior once your edTech product launches. The following KPIs are important to track to measure the impact of your UX strategy:

  • Insights from your customer success team. Customer success can provide incredible insights into user experience and even help to identify missing features. If you’re tracking these insights from the beginning, it becomes easier to solve problems or challenges in UX and UI design by making strategic pivots.
  • Feedback from teachers and administrators about their student users. Student users can be vocal advocates for edTech products. Whether kids love your learning tool or simply tolerate it, it’s important to discover what learners really think about the experience—and why.
  • Changes in user behavior. Users can behave in unpredictable ways—they may even use features differently than you intended or skip out on priority features altogether. The better you understand changes in user behavior, the easier it will be to adjust your UX strategy to achieve better outcomes for teachers and students.

Quantitative KPIs

In addition to tracking more qualitative forms of feedback, there are key performance indicators you can measure to track the performance of your edTech product. These include:

  • Product sign-ups
  • A growing user base
  • Sales and/or adoption rates
  • Engagement numbers, like:
    • Time on task
    • Task completion rates

The best way to measure user engagement is by conducting user flow testing throughout an iterative design process, including after your learning tool launches. 

In particular, engagement numbers reveal a lot about the success of your UX strategy. For example, you may wish to answer questions like:

  • How much time are students reading within your app? 
  • Are users actually watching the help videos you developed for math problems? 
  • How many users drop off early during your science video curriculum?
  • Are teachers only using your tool for a few months, then no longer logging in?

Together with your qualitative KPIs, you can use quantitative data from user flow testing and existing product data to fine-tune the strategy of your learning experience. 

The more your team integrates this practice into your product workflow, the better learning outcomes your tool will have—and the better your product engagement rates will be!

How to improve the UX strategy of your edTech product

Once you begin measuring the qualitative and quantitative KPIs we outlined above, you can easily identify feature modifications, onboarding tactics, and other strategic UX design priorities to improve the overall strategy of your learning tool.

If you’re stuck, however, here are three places you can always start to improve the overall quality of your edTech product:

  1. Validate that you’ve designed the right features.
    It’s easy to get stuck thinking that small feature improvements will get your product back on track. But if there’s a bigger market fit problem, it’s better to identify it quickly by validating the basics.

    Conduct UXR to determine whether the features in your learning tool meet users’ needs and expectations. Do both teachers and students understand the value of your tool?
  2. Design better onboarding.
    edTech products have complex user flows, which makes product onboarding all the more important. If users are dropping off early in their journey, it may be because your onboarding features didn’t help them understand the benefits of using your learning tool.
  3. Create greater visibility around priority features.
    Testing users in a highly controlled environment can create a kind of “false positive” when it comes to feature design. After all, when UX designers provide additional context and support during your user tests to check for task completion or understanding, tested users automatically have more information than a user coming in completely cold. If you have priority features that simply aren’t being used, it could be that these features need more visibility within the UX & UI of your tool.

With additional UX research and testing, you can determine which of these three areas are throwing your users for a loop—and how to design improvements to your overall product strategy.

The ROI of UX Strategy

Ultimately, defining the strategy for your user experience delivers a big return on investment. Strategic work aligns stakeholders on requirements and feature priorities, mitigates risk, and accelerates your design and development timelines. 

Beyond shaping the user interface of an individual product, UX strategy adds value to your entire organization. You can integrate the foundational tactics and recommendations of a great UX strategy into every element of your business, from technology decisions to market research to customer support teams.

The result? A company that supports the needs of teachers, students, and schools at every level—including well-designed, effective, and inclusive learning tools people love to use.

Do you need help developing a strong UX strategy for your learning tool? Let’s work together! Contact us below.

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Why UX Design Strategy Is Important for the Success of Your edTech Product

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
May 31, 2023

You already know that deep discovery into the needs of teachers and students sets your edTech product up for success. But how do you get from UX discovery to a full-fledged design strategy?

UX design strategy is important for aligning your stakeholders and creating solutions that meet the needs of your users. It also keeps your project on track and mitigates the risks of product design. That way, you won’t waste time or budget designing solutions that don’t work.

What’s more, product teams that design learning tools strategically possess a key differentiator in the edTech industry. Because of their strategic efforts, they create engaging, effective tools that users love and vouch for. Who doesn’t want that?

Below, you’ll learn more about why UX strategy is crucial to the success of your edTech product and how to create a strategic summary to align everyone on your team. Let’s dive in!

The difference between UX design strategy and UXR

User experience research (UXR) is a foundational starting point for all edTech product strategy. Through qualitative interviews and quantitative analysis, your team will vet assumptions about the needs, pain points, and behaviors of teachers and learners.

After conducting interviews or testing user flows, however, you’ll be left with questions about how to solve for those specific needs. UX design strategy answers these questions, synthesizes them, and allows you to design creative solutions to support your users.

In my experience, UX design strategy results in two important outcomes—both of which impact your edTech product development timeline:

  1. You’re better able to identify areas of complexity within your learning tool, including where your designers will need more time to iterate.
  2. You can pinpoint areas of innovation that may need to be tested multiple times with your users, since these features or user flows may not follow typical UX patterns.

And this is all before you even begin talking about visual design or UI!

Ultimately, while UXR and design strategy are closely related, they represent two different phases of the edTech discovery process. Both phases are important moments to align with your stakeholders, so you can design a learning tool that’s effective in the classroom—and that drives revenue.

Why is UX design strategy important?

By investing in edTech product discovery and UXR, your team will develop a strong UX design strategy that outlines how to solve specific user challenges with creative solutions. 

With a tight plan in place, everyone on the team can make stronger design decisions in each iteration. You’ll hopefully see the outcomes of these decisions in early user testing. Unpredictable results at this stage are typically a consequence of design decisions that are unsupported by strategy.

And that’s why it’s crucial for your entire team, including all your stakeholders, to align on your user research findings and strategic recommendations. From this point on, UX design strategy determines the solutions you deliver. 

Creating solutions that deviate from your strategy creates tremendous risk. Risks include budget increases, longer timelines, or solutions that don’t meet the needs of teachers and students.

Ultimately, UX design strategy represents your edTech product’s stakeholder alignment moment. When you sign off on research and strategy, you’re aligning on the best path forward based on what you discovered (UXR) and your plan to address it (strategy).

How to focus your strategy and align stakeholders

In order to focus your UX design strategy on the efforts that will have the greatest impact, it’s important to ask your project stakeholders targeted questions about the path forward.

Remember: both stakeholders and users have minimal time. By focusing on questions that will result in an action item for a UX priority, you’ll be able to move forward with greater efficiency.

Here are several questions I’ve always found helpful for developing a UX design strategy to share with stakeholders:

  • What is the best UX tool to put in front of users and why? What level of fidelity will help us get the answers we need?
  • Who are the priority users we want to test these artifacts with?
  • What are the key features to test and why?
  • What pieces of the experience do we need to put in front of stakeholders to get consensus?
  • How do we balance using common UX patterns with innovative ideas?
  • Which approaches to design will engage learners most?

Answers to these questions will help you develop a clear strategic summary for aligning your entire team. This way, as you develop design and UX solutions, you can compare them to this summary and check for alignment. 

Because a strategic summary becomes your “north star” for both UX and UI design, you’ll develop an edTech product that meets your strategic product and user goals.

The benefits of hiring an external team to support your strategy

When you’re too close to the business or user problems you want to solve, it can be challenging to develop a proper UX design strategy for your edTech product. 

I’ve seen organizations struggle time and again with developing the perspective they need to identify and design the best solutions for the teachers and learners who use their tools. 

This makes sense, too. All teams are deeply invested in their own processes, products, and users. And it’s easy to default to “the way things are usually done.” It’s human nature!

That’s why outsourcing your UX design and strategy is such a great opportunity. You’ll gain the perspective of a design team that’s worked on many different solutions for many different companies.

You’ll also benefit from bringing in a specialized team. Because of their high levels of expertise, specialized UX teams deliver a higher return on investment. This is especially true in a complex, nuanced field like edTech.

After all, UX design grounded in UXR and strategic thinking is infinitely more valuable than making minor product  improvements for performance. (Of course, a good UX team can do that kind of work, too.)

The ROI of UX design strategy

As edTech becomes more competitive, taking the time to lay the foundations of UX design strategy will help your team:

  • Identify the user challenge or market problem you’re trying to solve with more precision
  • Generate the right solutions to address these problems, ensuring the ideas for your product fit the market
  • Continue to iterate and solve problems more efficiently 
  • Focus on the design and experience solutions that best center the needs of teachers and students

The results are worth it. After all, if you build something that’s slightly wrong and iterate from there, the gap between the optimal solution and your users’ needs and expectations will only widen over time. That’s a recipe for disaster!

A great UX design strategy drives greater adoption rates and increases revenue, all while keeping your design and engineering team on track during the product build. By prioritizing the needs of your users, you’ll mitigate risks, choose the right solutions, and find the most efficient ways forward in your project timeline.

 

Ultimately, your team’s ability to strategically tackle design challenges is the differentiator between your edTech product and another learning tool. It’s also the difference between engaging with a user base that likes your product—and a user base that loves your product. Why wouldn’t you want to invest your dollars in getting that equation right?

Learn more about how our UX design strategy services can support the needs of teachers and learners.

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How to Leverage Design Thinking in Education Products for Better Learning Outcomes

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
May 12, 2023

As edTech product designers, we have a unique window into empathizing with the teachers and students who use our tools. The design thinking approaches we use to solve problems already appear in classrooms under different names. 

We can leverage design thinking principles in education to build more effective edTech tools, achieve better learning outcomes in our products, and make our products even more engaging. 

Below, you’ll learn what design thinking is, how the approach looks in the field of education, and which edTech features and user flows support design thinking in the classroom.

Let’s dive in!

What does design thinking in education and edTech look like?

According to Ideo, a leader in human-centered design, design thinking is an iterative process of:

  • Asking questions
  • Gathering inspiration
  • Generating ideas
  • Making ideas tangible
  • Testing
  • And sharing your findings

Central to this process is the importance of empathizing with your audience or the users of your tool. From a place of empathy, designers can ask stronger questions, develop more creative ideas, test out their solutions, and continue to make improvements.

Design thinking also happens to dovetail with the way many teachers approach education. For example, you’ll find the cycle of hypothesize→experiment→report in a science class, and the process of draft→incorporate feedback→revise in most English Language Arts classes. 

Because design thinking is closely aligned with project-based classroom practices, your learning tools can support both teachers and students in ways that feel both recognizable and growth-oriented.

Why design thinking approaches in education support SEL skills

Design thinking practices are inherently social. After all, you can’t empathize with users without learning more about them, and you can’t test out ideas without engaging others in the feedback process.

This collaborative approach is also integral to social emotional learning (SEL). Skills like empathy, communication, and teamwork are key to positive social outcomes for all students. Like design thinking approaches to education, SEL frameworks give students a chance to practice these vital skills.

In order to empathize in the context of an ELA project, for example, students must recognize that they’re writing for an audience with particular needs—for context, explanation, and argument. As they share drafts with their peers, students also learn how to collaborate with others and integrate feedback.

Quite simply, design thinking approaches to education and supporting students’ SEL skills go hand in hand.

Since the start of the pandemic, finding ways to improve students’ SEL has become ever more important. edTech product owners and designers can better address this need by integrating design thinking principles into learning tools. 

More on this below!

4 ways to create better edTech products using design thinking

Done right, edTech products can leverage design thinking in a way that doesn’t just feel like a buzzy grab for professional development dollars or a meaningless trend in education circles.

Instead, consider design thinking approaches at the earliest stages of UX strategy to maximize your product’s impact. Here are 4 ways to incorporate design thinking in education products to support the needs of teachers and students:

1. Build supportive teacher-facing prompts and templates

Because a design thinking mindset is already integral to how many educators teach, then edTech products that reflect this mindset back to users will feel relevant and exciting.

Product designers and content engineers can achieve this by:

  • Giving teachers prompts and tools for designing lessons or projects based in design thinking
  • Building wizards that help teachers customize and distribute design thinking-based projects
  • Providing just-in-time professional development that demonstrates how to extend lessons with design thinking principles

In addition to being powerful time-savers, these UX features and user flows help teachers find more ways to spark creativity, prompt empathy, and encourage intellectual risk-taking in their students.

2. Make your product a hub for project-based learning

Project-based learning, in which students investigate a problem and work collaboratively on a solution over longer periods of time, dovetails with design thinking approaches to education, too.

edTech products can support these learning and SEL objectives in tools built to facilitate project-based approaches to education. Meaningful ways to do this include:

  • Helping teachers understand and follow student thinking and process skills in digital environments
  • Providing real-time feedback on student interactions using AI
  • Designing templated interactions or offering ways to resolve conflict and overcome challenges with the assignment

By helping students develop context for their work in the real world, project-based learning makes education more meaningful. It also helps students produce their own knowledge, which is a big motivator for student engagement.

edTech products that adopt these principles aren’t just using design thinking to support real needs and approaches to education. They’re also facilitating proven-effective ways to teach and learn that result in better product outcomes and higher user engagement.

3. Help students embrace a design thinking mindset

Design thinking approaches provide a built-in structure for students who need to tackle an assignment. 

This structure can easily be reflected by the user flows in your edTech product, giving students step-by-step ways to:

  • Use data to uncover what their audience needs, wants, or has questions about
  • Support how they find data on the internet with strong source material
  • Survey their audience
  • Create prototypes, versions, or drafts of their final product
  • Test their ideas and gather feedback from their peers by receiving and sharing comments
  • Track versions of their project over time

Just as this approach results in stronger product design, it will also help students produce a better, more meaningful final project.

4. Create features that improve SEL

Developing any creative solution requires emotional intelligence. Students, like designers, need to understand their audience and be thoughtful about when and why something fails.

In the same way that players of traditional video games don’t think of “failing” as negative, students can also be encouraged to see failure as part of a process that results in success if they stick to it.

These are learned skills that can be supported throughout the UX of your edTech product. For example, you can:

  • Prompt students to reflect on ideas or tactics that didn’t work
  • Ask learners what or how they might change about their project to get a different result
  • Create feedback systems that seem less judgmental and that promote failure as a part of the process

Learning tools that integrate SEL frameworks for students aren’t just supporting design thinking in education. They’re also building student engagement and improving efficacy, all while helping learners to practice crucial social-emotional skills.

 

By facilitating the ability of teachers and students to adopt design thinking practices in education, you’ll design edTech products with better learning outcomes, higher user engagement, and more value. Plus, you’ll make the entire learning process more meaningful, which speeds your chances of product adoption. 

From supporting SEL growth to helping students get complex projects off the ground, design thinking principles are a winning approach in digital education products. How will you use it in your tools?

Interested in learning more about the best SEL features to include in your learning tool? Download our free competitive audit to gain industry insights and feature ideas!

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