It’s happened to all of us. You’re in a product planning meeting, discussing features for your digital learning tool. Your product manager wants to invest in a resource library and “Help” section for teachers using your product. But your UX team is advocating to use the design budget for onboarding features. What do you do?

With budget and resource constraints, it can be tempting to downplay the importance of onboarding. After all, if the user experience is strong enough, how much onboarding support will teachers and students actually need?

The answer might surprise you. edTech products are complex tools, and users need support as they learn brand new concepts all while navigating an entirely new product. This makes onboarding a crucial feature for any edTech tool, one that deserves a chunk of your budget for research, design, and testing.

In this article, we’ll help you understand why onboarding in edTech is so high-stakes, review the two types of onboarding every edTech tool should offer, and help you “re-think” your “Help” section, so you don’t run out of budget. Let’s get into it.

Understanding Onboarding in edTech through User Personas

All product owners want their users to navigate software with ease and engage deeply with the app’s content. But, in edTech, the stakes for onboarding a user are incredibly high—even higher than product engagement! 

A student’s grades might depend on how well they learn to use your product, for example. Or a teacher’s ability to manage their classroom and track learning outcomes might be deeply affected by how many features they master in your tool. The stakes mean that onboarding teachers and learners to your product successfully is essential to its use—and to its success. 

There are other persona-driven factors that will affect your onboarding strategies, too. Because teachers are given very little training for using technology in the classroom, they are often left to their own devices to learn how to use edTech. 

How will your product give them all the context they need to implement the tool on their own in a limited amount of time? If your tool is difficult to use, or it isn’t properly supported, teachers will likely use your edTech tool less effectively or efficiently.

This is also why it’s important to keep onboarding as brief as possible without sacrificing clarity. There’s a reason onboarding pop-ups have a ‘skip’ button. Most users—especially busy teachers—feel like they don’t have time for lengthy videos and practice tasks. If you show them your experience is tight and interactive, they’ll be more likely to engage.

Designing onboarding with your personas in mind isn’t just a design challenge—it’s an extreme empathy challenge. It can be difficult for product teams to get into the mindset of a teacher or student starting from step zero. After all, you’ve been working diligently on your brilliant, elegant solution—how could anyone be confused by it? 

But the better you understand how your learning tool affects your users’ day-to-day experience in the classroom, the more effective your onboarding strategies will be.

Onboarding for Product Training vs. Onboarding for Concept Training

Unlike commercial software, learning tools must accomplish two things for every user:

1. Concept training: Teach learners a new academic concept, or provide educators with the best tools for teaching subject-matter content more effectively.
2. Product training: Help all users learn how to get the most out of your edTech product.

It can be a challenge to design just one type of onboarding well. But getting both right in the same product? That takes a lot of thought, great user experience design, user testing, and significant resources.

Prioritizing onboarding features that accomplish both product training and concept training tasks can also be challenging for product designers to remember. Sometimes we’re so interested in our tool’s learning content that we don’t always stop to educate users about how the product works. 

This is especially true for student-facing products. But even young learners need to be trained to use the interface of your edTech tool. No matter their age or role, the users of your product need to understand the relationship between content and design. 

How can teachers expect to use your edTech tool in their classroom? How will students learn while using your product? What will the experience be like? The more you answer these questions through onboarding features, the less likely your users are to be confused by a complex learning tool. 

By providing enough context to understand how the product works and why it’s structured a certain way, you’ll motivate learners to keep going and encourage teachers to use your tool more effectively.

Top Onboarding Features for edTech Products

As an edTech product owner, you already know the types of onboarding features your users respond to. That’s why you gravitate toward just-in-time help for users when you roll out a new feature. Or make sure your product team has an incredible tutorial video ready to roll. 

You can use any of the onboarding features below in an edTech product. The content itself might change based on the onboarding experience you’d like to provide, whether that’s helping a user to understand UI or teaching them a brand new math concept. 

Remember: in order for users to get the most out of your product, you need to cover both types of onboarding.

Product Training

• Asking users to complete a task in real time. 
• Providing a user interface tour.
  • onboarding that trains you to understand what each button does
• Including product tutorial videos, slideshows, or other visualizations.
• Designing just-in-time help for new or complex features.
• Helping users run a report or navigate classroom data.

Concept Training

• Providing expert video content that models specific teaching strategies.
• Demonstrating what progress looks like.
• Designing just-in-time teaching tips for new educators.
• Providing actionable next steps for report data, like how to correct for trends or scaffold content in the classroom.

You can also use personas to further personalize your onboarding features. For example, you might give teachers the ability to engage with onboarding depending on how much time they have. Which onboarding tasks can they tackle in 15 minutes? What should they do if they need to get started right away?

By thinking strategically and intentionally about the onboarding needs of your personas, your learning tools become more customizable—and more valuable to your users.

How Better Onboarding & UX Design Will Make You Rethink the “Help” Section

It’s tempting to divert your design resources to the “Help” section in your product. After all, it’s the one place users go to answer all of their questions. But focusing on “Help” at the expense of onboarding is a big mistake.

Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another. Not only will you better support users who need more context for their learning experience, but you’ll also meet users where they are when it comes to product support. 

Done well, onboarding takes place over many touchpoints, rather than in the initial moments of a user’s first login. Once you lengthen your onboarding timeline, it’s easier to re-imagine what a useful “Help” section really looks like for your users. With a thoughtful onboarding strategy in place, you’ll be able to successfully scope your content creation budget for “Help”—without short-changing your onboarding experience.

Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another.

This approach works from a user experience standpoint, too. Most users are resistant to engaging with “Help” sections because they want to keep moving through your experience. “Help” slows users down, but onboarding features don’t have to. For example, integrating just-in-time help sequences for complex tasks is far less overwhelming than requiring users to watch a video tutorial in order to use your learning tool.

However, sometimes edTech products are so complex, user challenges simply can’t be solved through better UX. If you find that your UX leans too heavily on “Help,” consider reducing the complexity of your product. Otherwise, you’ll risk users becoming so frustrated that they give up—even with incredible onboarding that supports their needs!

Using Your Onboarding Resources Wisely

Prioritizing “Help” and designing big ticket features often leads to a dwindling budget for an incredible onboarding experience for teachers and students. 

We know how important it is to build critical features for your minimum viable product (MVP), so here are a few solutions for ensuring that you don’t run out of budget before you tackle onboarding:

1. 1. Create a first-round onboarding experience.
      
      By prioritizing onboarding features for first-round designs, you won’t run through your entire budget without addressing onboarding must-haves. Build at least some onboarding into your MVP designs and budget.
   2. Test in the field to see where user pain points are.
      
      Even if you feel confident about the pain points teachers and students face, onboarding should always be informed by user testing. Before designing a full onboarding experience, test your prototype with users. You’ll likely realize that you haven’t given users enough context about the flow of your entire product.
      
      Once you identify product trouble spots, solve by improving UX or by finding ways for UX and onboarding to work together. Remember: testing solutions requires at least two touchpoints with users, so be sure to build this into your product timeline.
   3.  Continue to design onboarding features over time.
      
      Like other features, onboarding can be designed iteratively. To create an onboarding experience teachers and students will actually use, strike a balance between devoting resources to onboarding at kick-off and testing along the way.
      
      For example, one of the major benefits of designing just-in-time help features is that you can always address challenging UX patterns. As you collect user data over time, you’ll identify areas that require new or modified onboarding support.

Onboarding can make or break your product, so don’t leave it as an afterthought—or make it compete with “Help” for resources. When you allocate time and budget to designing the onboarding experience, users are more likely to see the value of your learning tool. This not only increases user motivation, but will also speed teacher adoption in a crowded marketplace.

Are you designing new onboarding features for your edTech product? Contact us below to find out how we can support your research and design needs!

So many digital professional development offerings are very linear. Teachers take courses, watch video content, and test for understanding. This linear approach leaves something to be desired, especially in edTech! 

Take advantage of all the things you can do in products to make them more engaging and personal. Whether you’re supporting teachers as they perfect their classroom management skills or helping them to use your product with more fidelity, here are tactical ways you can integrate professional learning into any edTech tool.

1. Train teachers to be more effective in the classroom.

Entire edTech products can be devoted to professional development that helps teachers become more effective across the board.

From better results in the classroom to creating more memorable learning experiences, pedagogies in a holistic professional development tool might include:

• integrating SEL skills across subject areas
• introducing project-based learning
• mastering classroom management
• building student engagement around new subject matter

Unlike in-person workshops, edTech products can deliver these trainings in scalable, flexible ways that work for teachers and their busy schedules. 

As learning engineers, a specialized UX team can also translate the power of these techniques using a variety of media to explain concepts. Interactive infographics, videos of teachers modeling best practices in classrooms, and gamified experiences all help build user engagement and encourage teachers to stick with a training course or program.

Try incorporating these support systems in your edTech product:

• Create a system that tracks accountability over time
  Help teachers track their own progress against classroom outcomes by showing their progress over time.

• Develop qualitative tracking systems by using self-reflection
  Prompt teachers to be reflective in light-weight, convenient ways. For example, your product might help users learn to integrate formative assessments into their classroom. By answering questions like, “How did the lesson go today?” or “If you had to attribute the success of today to a specific resource, what would you choose?” your users can help you build helpful qualitative data sets.

• Allow users to choose their preferred learning modes
  When teachers are able to customize your software settings in highly contextualized ways, your tool becomes more responsive and more valuable over time.

• Provide non-linear experiences that allow for learner agency
  When teachers have opportunities to choose the areas they want to focus on, they have more agency over their professional development and skill-building. Whether you design a customized dashboard of skills or prompt them to choose a new area of learning content, taxonomizing your content allows for more choice—and more flexibility for content engineers.

• Identify user trends over time
  Teachers ultimately use professional learning software to address specific needs. When they can look at a journal, report, or dashboard that captures needs or trends over time, they develop a more holistic picture of their own teaching practice.

2. Train teachers in best pedagogical practices for specific content areas.

If you design edTech products specifically to help students learn new concepts, you can always build a more robust teacher-facing side of your learning tool. 

Professional development that supports educators as they dive into the specifics of teaching a new concept helps them develop instructive mastery for a specific subject area. This benefits your users—both students and teachers—and will make your tool even more valuable to administrative buyers.

Here are some practical effective ways to support teachers throughout your learning tool:

• Complete a real task during onboarding
  Asking teachers to complete a real task during the onboarding process allows them to make choices right away. They might even potentially make a mistake, which means you have the opportunity to create and introduce a powerful feedback system.

• Offer just-in-time help
  Go beyond onboarding to offer in-line tips and tricks or other feedback items associated with reporting. By providing next steps, you’ll train teachers to use the software more effectively. Potential next steps could be anything from suggesting the next lesson to prompting teachers to offer resources to struggling students. 

• Help them to understand the complexity of your tool
  As much as you want to design simple turn-key software, the truth is that edTech products are often based on robust content sets and complex learning experiences. Even tech-savvy teachers experience barriers to complexity, whether they don’t have time to learn new features or think a specific tool isn’t really “for them.” Prompt them to use new features and tie features directly to outcomes or benefits.

• Demonstrate the value of engagement
  Persuade users to engage by telling a compelling data story or creating a mini marketing moment. For example, you might suggest, “We’ve found that other teachers improved reading comprehension by 25% once they introduced this guide to their students. Do you want to try and use it?” Just be sure you have a solid data plan in place with your engineering team!

• Help them integrate supplemental tools into existing curricula
  Typically, teachers aren’t the buyers for supplemental learning tools. That means there’s extra pressure on you to help them understand how the tool integrates into an existing curriculum or their existing practices. Demonstrate how they can save time or build efficacy without disrupting their usual teaching flow.

3. Train teachers to use your products with greater fidelity.

When teachers use your learning tool the way it was designed to be used, everyone sees better results. Teachers see better learning outcomes in the classroom, students retain new concepts more easily, and you’ll see better product engagement across the board.

By extending the concept of professional learning to include teacher training to use specific products, you’ll design stronger features. You’ll also help your users unlock the full potential of your edTech product.

Here are the features where professional development packs the biggest punch:

• Onboarding
  Train users on how your product works, including how to complete tasks that are integral to product success. You can do this by offering just-in-time help or tool tips for additional context. In addition to helping teachers understand the full work-flow of a feature, it’s also important to demonstrate how your learning tool integrates with other products or supports curriculum-based tools. Integrations are valuable to busy teachers and cash-strapped administrations, and they make your overall product a more powerful solution.
  
• Reporting
  Help teachers go beyond generating reports on high-level classroom trends. Reports should be the jumping-off point for further action. For example, you might also provide clarifying details about student trends or prompt your users to take specific next steps most relevant to the students in their class.
  
• Virtual training sessions
  Build community around your product through webinars or other virtual training sessions that help teachers connect with one another and with your brand. If training is too much of an upfront cost, provide downloadable resources that support teachers learning to use your tool.

• Video demonstrations
  Modeling product usage is one of the most effective ways to ensure that teachers are using your learning tool correctly. Show them how the product gets used in the classroom and provide step-by-step instruction.

• Toast messages
  This is a light-weight way to provide continuous training, even for veteran users. Messages give users ideas for the best ways to use the product or encourage them to try new features.

As teachers use your product over time, you can deepen their engagement with your product. If you’ve done a good job making it relevant and useful, they’ll understand how valuable your tool is to their classroom practice.

As you develop professional development features for your edTech product, find opportunities to make it more useful and relevant at every turn. Respond to teacher feedback, test your product in real classrooms, and survey the competitive landscape to gain more insights about how teachers can use your tool more effectively in the real world.

Teachers will see immediate value in this work. After all, they know when learning tools are designed with them in mind. And because teachers value professional learning, they’ll value learning tools that support their career goals and help them improve classroom outcomes. Why not make sure the product they value is yours?

Are you planning to integrate professional development features into your edTech product? Contact us below to find out how we can help!