Category: UI Design

Designing a Better Learner Experience in edTech: How to Reflect Pedagogy through UI

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
April 13, 2023

Menus and navigation systems are easy to overlook in edTech products. Users might not notice an effectively organized menu at all, but they’ll feel the pinch of a badly designed one right away! If you want to design a better learner experience—start there.

Below, we’ll show you how we organized three learning tools to reflect content goals and support users. We’ll also help you ask the right questions during discovery to organize your learning content more effectively as you go.

This way, you can identify incredible navigation sequences that reflect the goals of your learning content for a better overall user experience—and a more supportive UI. Ultimately, this strategy helps declutter menus, organize content more effectively, and signal to users what they can expect from your edTech product.

Stronger Relationships Between Product Navigation and Pedagogy Support Learners

As a product designer, you never want to cram too many things into a navigation bar. But you also don’t want to make it difficult for users to find the features they reach for again and again to meet their goals. It’s a tough balancing act!

In edTech, these challenges are even more pronounced. Designing a streamlined navigation menu may lead to a clean, simple UI—but it might not support the best learner experience within your product. 

After all, edTech products should support the pedagogical goals of your learning content. This process starts with the fundamentals of UX and UI design: product structure. 

UX discovery sessions are one way to proactively tackle this challenge. Devote time to your navigation sequence during the initial phases of product design by using these two steps:

  1. Ask your team to distill core elements of your product’s pedagogy down to three or four main ideas. 
  2. Try using the main ideas as a navigation sequence. The steps of using your learning tool—and the ideas behind the learning content—should now be reflected by your menu or site map.

By using this strategy, you’ll:

  1. Help teachers and learners understand your product’s goals quickly and easily, and
  2. Design a product that has a more active structure and a more active user interface (UI)

Ultimately, a good edTech product has a menu sequence that helps users understand how a learning tool works—not just where they should click to navigate your tool. 

By creating a closer relationship between your navigational structure and the pedagogy behind your learning content, you’ll design a UI that better supports your users—and a stronger overall learning experience. 

Organizing Resources for an Optimal Learner Experience

How often have you been tempted to add a catch-all category in your menu called “Resources” or “Support” and call it a day? Sometimes these are the exact right labels. Other times, unfortunately, these menu items often become a repository of unorganized stuff.

This approach leads not only to clutter within your product, but it also makes the learner experience less guided and intentional. Instead, consider the strategies below.

Active menu structures

Creating a more active menu structure using the principles behind your learning content offers one way to solve this design challenge.

After all, there’s a difference between building an edTech product and creating a resource repository. Remember: effective learning tools are useful and interactive. They’re not just a library of .PDFs.

Labels, UX writing, and mental models

Don’t discount the importance of micro copywriting as you navigate this challenge, either. UX copy is experience design, and the words in your menu must speak to the intention of your learning tool. 

After all, strong labels help users create a mental model of how your product works and how to get where they need to go. And they help product designers move away from unhelpful, inert categories.

How Mission U.S. Used Simple Navigation to Appeal to a Wide User Base

The home page of "Mission US," an educational app that supports the learner experience with strong product navigation choices.
The homepage of “Mission US” supports the learner experience with strong, clear product navigation choices driven by user need.

When WNET Thirteen approached Backpack Interactive to redesign the website for their award-winning educational games and materials, Mission U.S., we knew navigational structure would play a large role in helping teachers, parents, and students use the platform.

Mission U.S. transports students to key moments in American history through choose-your-own-adventure scenarios. The new navigational structure, “Play,” “Teach,” and “About,” ultimately makes it easy for each user to self-select the content area that’s most relevant to them.

The menu also reinforces the idea that there’s an educational component to playing Mission U.S. for first-time users. This includes parents unfamiliar with the game or teachers researching the game prior to classroom use. The menu immediately indicates that these games can be used in the classroom, giving the product both educational legitimacy and value.

In addition to creating a more interactive experience, the navigation suggests how learning content is sequenced in the product. This detail further supports teachers who wish to integrate the content into their classroom.

How Listening to Learn Product Navigation Supports Teachers Documenting Student Process Skills

The simple, clear navigational structure of "Listening to Learn" supports educators as they improve their interviewing and assessment skills.
The simple, clear navigational structure of “Listening to Learn” supports educators as they improve their interviewing and assessment skills.

The Heinemann product Listening to Learn is designed to support teachers as they assess students’ numerical reasoning skills through oral interviews. From the navigation bar, this rich professional learning tool needed to communicate to teachers a sequence of activities. 

As the order suggests, first teachers conduct interviews, then they might learn additional interviewing strategies, run a report on classroom performance, or practice their interview techniques in the “Labs” section.

This user-friendly approach helps teachers quickly understand what they need to do, and where they need to go to accomplish each task. The language and approach is also integral to the pedagogy behind the tool, which is based on using interviews to assess the process skills students need to complete math problems.

Finally, even for a complex tool, the language in the menu is simple and easy to understand. Compared to long or overly descriptive titles, this user-centered approach to UX copy better supports users as they make mental models of the site navigation.

How the Product Navigation for NSGRA Helps Teachers Implement Reading Assessments

The NSGRA menu structure helps educators follow assessment tasks in a specific order.
The NSGRA menu structure helps educators follow assessment tasks in a specific order.

Scholastic’s Next Step Guided Reading Assessment, or NSGRA, helps teachers accurately determine their students’ reading levels. The tool also provides teachers with insights into how individual students are developing as readers, as well as targeted resources for improving reading skills. After collecting assessment data, teachers create reports and group students in their reading classroom.

When Backpack Interactive designed this tool, we ensured that the navigation sequence reflected the order of operations for teachers. Conducting assessments, running reports, and creating student groups are the most important tasks for the user, while the resources section provides additional support. 

Because of the importance of navigation to the NSGRA, we conducted rigorous user tests in real classrooms. In particular, we used UX prototyping to test sequences and collect teacher feedback on the tool’s navigation. Then, we applied user feedback as we headed into final designs.

4 Ways to Identify the Best Navigation Sequence for Your edTech Product

You’re about to start designing a new learning tool that showcases the hard work of subject matter experts and your content team. How can you use early stakeholder discussions to uncover the best navigation sequence?

We’ve led countless discovery sessions to figure out this exact challenge. Here are four questions you can ask to help your product team organize learning content more effectively and create a great learner experience through UX and UI design choices.

1. What is the classroom sequence for teaching or learning this concept?

Consider the steps that go into teaching this concept in the classroom. If the product is student-facing, what are the steps students need to take to learn this new concept? If there’s a way to name and quantify those steps, use this as a jumping-off point for product navigation.

By doing this, your navigation will give users an at-a-glance understanding of how the product works, as well as what to expect next. That’s context and an organizational structure in a simple glance.

2. Does an “active” navigation system work for this content?

While active verbs like “teach” and “plan” can be excellent menu titles, this strategy doesn’t work for all edTech products.

If you attempt this type of navigation system, make sure there are equal and reasonable amounts of content in each area. If 90% of your content winds up in one area of the product, you may need to add sub-navigation or use an alternative form of navigation.

With enough desk research and collaboration with your content team, you can determine whether this model is the right choice for your learning tool.

3. Is this a pattern we can follow in the rest of the product?

Product menus set up user expectations, and users make predictions about content and sequence based on your design choices. 

For example, a pattern like “Pre-test,” “Unit,” and “Post-test” would imply that teachers are expected to give a pre- and a post-test for every unit of content.

No matter what pattern you choose, it’s important to maintain that pattern throughout your learning tool. This way, users understand where they are, how much progress they’re making, and what comes next.

These mental models are especially important in the classroom because they affect timing: do teachers have enough time to complete the sequence they’ve started? If you’ve chosen the right pattern and sequence, the answer is hopefully yes!

4. What do users need to know to make your content library more effective?

Some edTech products provide a collection of resources for their users. Helping teachers or students access those resources in an intuitive way is crucial to this content area’s success.

For large libraries, use common UX patterns to make navigation within the area as clear and easy as possible. Is there a place where teachers and learners can start so the library is less overwhelming? Is there context your users should know before they dive in?

By conducting user interviews, you’ll ensure that you make this content area a proactive source of support, rather than a last resort for answers or resources.


No matter what kind of learning tool you’re designing, users need a simple, easy-to-navigate menu that helps them understand what to do—and why they should do it in a specific order.

Use your discovery process to uncover more details about the teaching and learning sequence in real classrooms. You’ll be set up for success as you design a UI that reflects the pedagogy of your content, creating a stronger learner experience overall.

Are you re-thinking the navigation or content sequencing of your learning tool? Contact us below to find out how we can help!

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Design for Education: How to Optimize UX and UI for Better Learning

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
March 29, 2023

It takes a lot of planning, research, and skill to design an incredible edTech product. In addition to an engaging user experience and a beautiful user interface, design for educational products requires a nuanced understanding of how people learn.

By applying learning science principles to the user flows in your products, you’ll support students as they learn and retain new concepts. You’ll also help teachers instruct their students more effectively, with ease, and in less time.

Whether you’re new to edTech product design or simply interested in how to make your learning tools more effective, this guide is for you. Learn the essentials of edTech user flows, how to optimize UX and UI for better learning experiences, and how to integrate both learning science principles and social emotional learning features into your tools.

Table of Contents

  1. What does great UX design for education look like?
  2. Essential edTech user flows
  3. How to optimize UX and UI for learning
  4. Applying learning science principles to edTech products
  5. Including SEL features in learning tools
  6. 5 examples of great UX design in educational products

What does great UX design for education look like?

The goals of UX design in educational tools are different from the goals of commercial products. In particular, edTech products:

  • Help students learn and practice new concepts
  • Evaluate students for understanding
  • Help teachers assess students 
  • Make it easier for teachers to manage classrooms more effectively
  • And much more.

The stakes for great UX design in learning tools are high. edTech products affect learning, retention, grades, and classroom management, and the user experience must be designed with these goals in mind.

edTech product designers still care about common UX goals, including:

  • User engagement
  • Task completion
  • Easy-to-use experiences
  • Tailoring experiences to specific personas

However, because learning tools are used in academic contexts, typical product metrics like “user engagement” must be discussed with more nuance and care. If a learner is disengaged in your edTech product, they risk not understanding a concept that is crucial to their academic success.

For this reason, a great UX designer in education knows how to reflect good pedagogical practice within an edTech product. This could look like:

  • Choosing product features that facilitate learning.
  • Applying learning science principles to individual features, so that students learn more effectively.
  • Working with content and learning/curriculum designers to sequence learning content in the best possible way. 

Ultimately, UX design for education is a specialized field that combines knowledge about user experience design with knowledge about the science of learning. This specialized knowledge is reflected in every aspect of edTech product design, including feature design, content design, and user flows.

Essential edTech user flows

Like all specialized design fields, edTech has essential user flows that are integral to how products work in the classroom.

In this context, user flows are the paths that a teacher or a student takes in your edTech product in order to complete a task. 

Essential user flows in UX design for education include onboarding, rostering and grouping tools, learning content sequencing, as well as data dashboards and reporting.

Onboarding

Remember when we said that stakes are high in edTech products? That’s especially true for onboarding user flows. 

When users log in to your edTech product for the first time, they’re learning how to navigate a new piece of software while also learning a new concept or practicing a new skill. 

By optimizing the UX and UI of your onboarding flow, you’ll ensure that both students and teachers can use your product with ease. In UX design for education, this means balancing product training tasks with concept training tasks.

Product training tasks help users get the most out of your product features. Concept training tasks, on the other hand, support edTech users as they learn a new academic concept. Applied to a teacher persona, concept training tasks help educators teach subject-area content more effectively using your tool.

 

Onboarding is an essential user flow in UX design for education. There are two types of onboarding in edTech, concept training and product training. 

Rostering & grouping

Class rosters and student grouping tools are complex edTech features. Rostering workflows help teachers capture and organize details for all their students in order to manage their classroom digitally. UX designers often create a rostering wizard in order to make this workflow easier. You can also create an API handshake with existing products like Google Classroom or Clever.

A grouping feature, on the other hand, helps teachers group students based on instructional needs. Thanks to AI, it’s easier than ever to make automated grouping or classroom management suggestions to teachers that help them save time. 

Optimizing the UX for these user flows requires careful problem solving and testing, so you solve for the biggest pain points teachers have in their classroom. By helping teachers do less manual labor in your edTech product, you’ll make rostering and grouping workflows more valuable to educators—and more supportive of student needs.

The NSGRA features automated grouping based on reading level.
The NSGRA features automated grouping based on reading level.

Learning content sequencing

Great edTech product design involves a collaborative effort between UX and content designers. Because content sequencing has the power to give users agency over their learning goals,  strong UX choices in this workflow contribute to a better overall learning experience. 

Unlike print learning content, digital content can be broken down into discrete components that add back up to an entire user flow. Most importantly, your learning content must be presented in a way that minimizes overwhelm. Specific content sequencing strategies will support this goal, including:

  • Spreading content across multiple screens for digestibility
  • Including progress monitors, so students know where they are and how long a lesson or task will take
  • Integrating just-in-time help to keep students moving through lessons

The more your UX design choices give students options for moving through learning content, the easier it will be for your users to work at their own pace and make choices about what and how they learn.

Literacy Pro wireframe and final design
Scholastic’s Literacy Pro tells student users how close they are to reaching their goal.

Data dashboards & reporting

Data dashboards provide educator personas at-a-glance updates on how their students are performing within individual classrooms, across an entire grade, or throughout an entire school district. 

Actionable data is crucial to great user experience design for education. Without overwhelming users, data dashboards and related reporting flows must use data to provide concrete next steps for educators to take, including:

  • Addressing classroom trends 
  • Identifying students who need help or who are under-challenged
  • Suggesting classroom activities
  • Referencing specific assessments within the product

Students benefit from data dashboards, too. When encouraged to choose their own learning goals and track progress, students have more agency, are more motivated, and learn more effectively. Strong UX and UI design choices make student data dashboards clear, encouraging, and delightful while promoting the learner agency that affects outcomes.

EL Education's data dashboard helps teachers quickly access training materials, work plans, events, and reporting.
EL Education’s data dashboard helps teachers quickly access training materials, work plans, events, and reporting.

How to optimize UX and UI for a better learning experience

Designing edTech products is a specialized field. While we want to optimize learning tools to work in classrooms and on-the-go, we also need these tools to deliver valuable learning experiences to students.

In addition to using standard UX design principles, you’ll also have to conduct in-depth user experience research to understand how to best support the complexities of teaching and learning with your tool.

Draw on standard UX design principles

UX design for education draws on standard user experience principles. These principles include:

  • Prioritizing ease of use by simplifying complex features, user flows, or concepts
  • Supporting user engagement through interactivity, rewards, and other motivators
  • Demonstrating user progress through the experience

Keeping these UX design principles in mind is especially important when working on complex user flows like rostering and reporting. The more you can simplify these complex user flows, the easier it will be to support busy teachers who have little time or patience for learning complex and clunky new technology.

Simplicity in UX design for education is also key to sequencing learning content for students. By supporting user engagement goals and demonstrating progress, you’ll keep students motivated and excited to learn complex new concepts. 

Conduct UXR to understand the nuanced needs of edTech users

In order to optimize for the specific needs of edTech users in learning tools, you’ll have to conduct user experience research.

A strong UXR strategy in edTech includes qualitative interviews, user testing, and competitive audits, among other types of research. Ultimately, your aim will be to understand the needs and pain points of edTech personas, including students, teachers, and administrators. Parents are an emerging edTech persona you should consider including, too.

Crucially, teacher personas have infinite variety and nuance, depending on the tool. You might even have multiple types of teacher personas for a single edTech product! In general, these personas are looking for learning experiences that:

  • Address the learning gap with adaptive content
  • Provide professional development through just-in-time help modals
  • Integrate with their existing tech stack
  • Align with curriculum standards

UXR also supports optimizing for the best student-facing experiences. Learners need experiences that:

As you balance user needs with curricular  requirements, your next challenge will be to address the realities of classroom technology.

Simplify complex user flows for mobile designs

Design for education also requires UX teams to consider how they’ll optimize for mobile screens vs. desktop computers. 

Mobile devices aren’t always the best way for users to experience the complex features that make up the bulk of edTech products. Optimizing for mobile experiences requires simplifying complex user flows, including data dashboards, reporting, rostering, and grouping. 

One of the primary challenges in design for education will be deciding how you can optimize your product’s UX for mobile, while still providing a valuable user experience.  

Additionally, most classroom environments have technology challenges you’ll need to keep in mind. From spotty internet connections to a lack of digital devices, you’ll need to optimize for screen size and the school environment.

Applying learning science principles to edTech products

Now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to dig into what makes UX design in education really unique. 

Most importantly, a specialization in edTech UX design requires an understanding of learning science principles. Learning science principles are research-backed methods for teaching that support how all humans learn and retain new information. 

According to Education Week, these include cognitive science principles like “Students learn new ideas by building on their prior knowledge” and “Students are motivated to learn in environments where they feel safe and valued.”  

UX designers can reflect learning science principles in edTech product features through user experience and user interface design choices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re creating learning content or a curriculum. But with a deep understanding of learning science, you can help learning content designers sequence existing content more effectively. 

You can also apply your knowledge of UX and learning science to break down content designed for a print curriculum into pieces that will work more effectively in a digital product. This requires:

  • Understanding how to apply learning science to user experience flows for better learning
  • Breaking learning content into a nonlinear experience to support adaptive tools
  • Introducing learning content into complex user flows
  • Creating teacher-facing products that allow educators to unlock the power of learning science principles

Whether or not you’re working with a content designer, great UX designers in education strategically present the most effective learning experience for both teachers and students. This typically requires using learning science and other research-backed approaches to deliver strong learning outcomes. 

How to apply learning science to UX design for kids

Still new to learning science? Here are three easy ways you can incorporate basic learning science principles into UX design for kids:

  1. Create playful interfaces that help learners absorb new information and concepts.
    This helps students contextualize new information and draw connections between new ideas and what they already know. In learning science, this technique is called “elaboration.”

  2. Give student users the ability to set their own learning goals or choose rewards.
    Goal-setting encourages learner agency, which is a research-backed teaching technique. The more agency a student has in your edTech product, the more likely they are to stay motivated and develop grit.

  3. Incorporate experiments and games that give users a chance to learn new concepts through trial and error.
    Once a user struggles, offer additional context or help through “just-in-time telling.” This learning science principle ensures that students learn in real time and have a chance to experiment before being corrected.

Ultimately, there is a strong relationship between UX design and content design in edTech. As the strategies outlined above demonstrate, applying learning science principles to edTech products makes them more engaging, motivating, valuable, and fun.

Including SEL features in learning tools

In addition to applying learning science to user flows, UX designers in edTech must also understand how to integrate social emotional learning, or SEL, into learning tools. SEL features are deeply valued by educators, and they also support better learning outcomes for student users.

What is SEL?

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), social emotional learning is a process for learning and applying skills that help you:

  • Develop healthy identities
  • Manage emotions
  • Achieve personal and group goals
  • Demonstrate empathy for others
  • Establish and maintain supportive relationships
  • Make responsible and caring decisions 

Including SEL features in edTech products is a user need accelerated by the pandemic. As students returned from at-home learning, for example, teachers noticed students needed help interacting with one another in the classroom. 

Because of their time apart, students struggled to learn how to be part of a real-life community. After all, interacting with peers via text or on video chat is an entirely different skill!

Adding SEL features to your edTech product for better learning

You can support the increasing need for social emotional learning by incorporating SEL features into any kind of edTech product, from math and science tools to English Language Arts products. 

In fact, learning science principles tell us that it’s better not to isolate SEL skills at all. Instead, it’s more effective to integrate SEL skills into existing learning content and provide students a context for practicing them.

Looking for SEL feature ideas? In your student-facing experience, consider adding:

  • Constructive ways to comment on another student’s work or interact with peers. You can even use AI to flag when comments are inappropriate or overly critical.
  • Provide students with micro prompts when they get stuck
  • Encouragement for thinking through the steps of a project, essay, or experiment
  • Infographics or visual explanations of creative thinking skills, including:
    • How to break a task into smaller parts
    • How to review drafts with a team or a teacher
    • How to use design thinking skills to be more creative

Designed with intention, SEL features in edTech products give students a chance to learn about a topic, as well as how they interact with others and create things for themselves. 

When students have more opportunities to investigate their own collaborative and creative skills, they develop stronger SEL skills—and learn more effectively.

5 examples of great UX design in educational products

Here are 5 examples of edTech products that deliver a great user experience for kids, as well as a beautiful user interface that helps users learn more effectively.

1. Duolingo

Duolingo is a language learning app that makes learning a new language friendly and fun.

From a UX design perspective, this app is the gold standard of learning through gamification. Users earn badges, points, and move up levels as they improve their language skills. These game mechanics provide a clear indication of progress, a helpful UX design principle for all types of users—but especially in design for education.

Duolingo also provides a smooth onboarding process. Starting your account and learning a language is broken into discrete steps that users perform over time. This way, users are less likely to feel overwhelmed.

Like all good UX teams, Duolingo rolls out product updates and refined features that are tied to user testing and consistently monitoring interaction analytics. Be sure to study Duolingo’s UX and UI for more ideas on how to optimize your own learning tool!

2. Khan Academy Kids

Khan Academy Kids teaches users foundational academic skills using social emotional learning and play. Aimed at users aged 2 to 8, the software features age-appropriate language and imagery, including colorful animal characters.

Like Duolingo, learners in Khan Academy Kids are also rewarded for their persistence, and they always understand how much progress they’re making. Overall, the app models sharing, playing, and healthy emotional regulation, which are key principles of social emotional development.

3. Waggle

Waggle provides immediate feedback to learners, a great UX design for education tactic.
Waggle provides immediate feedback to learners, a great UX design for education tactic.

Designed for students in grades K-8, Waggle offers Common Core-aligned instruction and assessment for both reading and math skills. Its features include adaptive content, communication tools, planning tools for teachers, as well as actionable data and student feedback.

For example, Waggle tracks individual students’ performance over time. With enough student data, Waggle will provide content suggestions based on a learner’s individual skill levels. It will also adapt assignments based on student competency, making it easier for teachers to differentiate their lessons.

This is a great example of adaptive content design that supports both teachers’ instructional needs and the individualized needs of learners.

4. Lalilo

With its combination of gentle colors and warm imagery, Lalilo integrates many SEL principles into a digital literacy tool for Kindergarten through 2nd-grade teachers and students. 

The UX is engaging, provides immediate, specific feedback, and encourages learners to persist as they progress through the app. By marking lessons a student has completed with a gold star icon, the UI also provides a clear indication of learner progress and accomplishment.

There’s even an audio reader for additional support, helping non-readers to receive positive affirmations for their work and to navigate easily throughout the tool. This feature is critical for edTech products in literacy content areas, making Lalilo a stand-out tool for young readers.

5. Mathspace

Mathspace offers adaptive learning content for students, a critical feature in UX design for education.
Mathspace offers adaptive learning content for students, a critical feature in UX design for education.

Mathspace is a math instruction tool with content that ranges from 3rd grade to high school-level concepts. 

Like Waggle, Mathspace adapts learning content to the individual needs of students. The product will select questions based on a student’s prior mastery of a topic, and, as students progress, the questions grow in difficulty.

Within the student-facing experience, Mathspace provides learners with hints for each question. After a lesson, the tool provides a score showing any areas where improvements are needed. Learners can watch refresher videos to revisit a confusing concept and answer additional practice questions to build their confidence with a new skill.

This is a great example of adaptive content design, as well as providing just-in-time help for student users to reduce friction and boost engagement.

When better UX design leads to better learning outcomes

Designing digital products for education requires specialized skills, user experience research, and a lot of creativity. 

In addition to applying standard UX design principles to learning tools, you’ll also need a foundational understanding of learning science. This way, you can design solutions that meet teachers’ and students’ most pressing needs, from adaptive content to social emotional learning. 

When you design edTech products with these UX goals in mind, you’ll also design learning tools that deliver better learning outcomes—and offer more valuable experiences to each of your users.

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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How Human-Centered Design Creates Better edTech Products

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
December 7, 2022

In industrial design, considering how the human body interacts with objects has led to incredible, intuitive products. In fact, you can see human-centered design in many everyday objects.

Think of the standard light switch. Or a bicycle.

These objects don’t come with instructions, but their designers acknowledged the “human factors” that make it easy for us to switch them on or peddle away. 

Similarly, in digital design for edTech products, we consider both how people learn and how they will physically interact with your tool.

After all, there are commonalities in how people learn, backed by science. If edTech product design doesn’t leverage these elements, it’s a missed opportunity for your users—and for you.

User-centered design in edTech isn’t just something you can check off your requirements list — it’s an overall approach to design that impacts your work, every step of the way.

From conducting user experience research to designing for specific technology needs, user-centered design will shape how you create learning tools—and make stronger products for your users.

Conducting User Experience Research (UXR) and Testing

When you build a new edTech tool, you begin by trying to solve a specific user problem. Before you start designing, though, it’s important to validate user challenges and pain points through qualitative interviews and testing.

No matter how talented your team is, you won’t know if you have created a user-centered learning tool without researching and testing it first.

When you interview and observe your users closely, you also determine the many human factors that drive how a product is used. In edTech, these physical factors include:

  • How much time a teacher or student has to use the tool
  • The classroom environment
  • Whether your product can work with slow or crummy internet connections
  • How users physically interact with the tool, including:
    • Audio components—Do users need headphones?
    • Printed components—Do teachers need printers or scanners?
    • Inputs—Do users swipe with their thumb or  index finger? Do they need a stylus, keyboard, or mouse? Can they use voice commands? 

By designing within the physical limitations of the classroom, you’ll solve the challenges faced by teachers and students in a way that engages their interest and piques their delight.

Designing through the Lens of Teacher Personas

Human-centered design also means understanding the limitations of those who are teaching with your edTech product.

It doesn’t matter how effective your edTech product is—or how much students love it. If it’s too complicated for teachers or learners to use in the classroom, educators might not think your product is worth the trouble. 

When you design through the lens of your teacher persona, you ensure that learning tools integrate into a teacher’s classroom, their pace, and their available time.

Without validating these challenges ahead of time, you’ll run into problems with use and adoption. That’s why ease of product set-up and product management is foundational to edTech product design—and to understanding your teacher persona.

Creating Prototypes and Wireframes

The best wireframes and clickable prototypes reflect user needs, research, and requirements. In other words, they’re a great opportunity to put human-centered design to work!

Say you’re designing an edTech product with a complex reporting process. From user research, you might know that many of the teachers who use your product are intimidated by generating reports about their classroom. For your first iteration, you might design a product look-and-feel that offers teachers a friendly boost of confidence. Reflect these choices in a high-fidelity prototype and test it with your users for feedback.

Ultimately, your product team will design many prototypes to validate the user-centered approach to your design. They’re a lightweight, inexpensive way to ensure you’re making the right design decisions for your users.

Developing Learning Content

Whether it’s microcopy or a full curriculum, the content in your edTech product is inextricable from user experience.

Here are three ways you can ensure your content is centered on the needs of real people:

  • Consider sequencing. In a digital tool, you have more control over content sequencing. You can create something adaptive or non-linear to support the learners who use your product. What’s the optimal way to organize content for your specific users?
  • Allow for learner choice and agency. Print curricula doesn’t typically allow the flexibility for learners to make choices. But in digital tools, you have the opportunity to break learning content into smaller, more discrete pieces that can be recombined in many coherent ways.

    Say you have a digital reading tool. After a student reads a chapter, they might have four or five options for where they can go next. Or, they might always be able to choose where they go next in your product because you provide just-in-time support along the way.
  • Use learning science techniques. Learning science techniques are critical to developing content in a human-centered way. Whether you plan to accommodate contextualization needs or create reflection activities, work with your content team to develop additional support and scaffolding. To be most effective, your content team should be prepared to work in concert with your user experience team.

Addressing Technology Needs

edTech product teams are used to designing responsive screens for mobile devices. But there are other ways to keep users top-of-mind as you discuss technology needs for your learning tool.

Optimize Your Learning Tool

As you consider mobile vs. desktop design needs, you’ll have to think beyond optimizing by screen size. User-centered design also requires that your team understands where and how your learning tool will be used. 

Remember: the physical use of your product determines everything from button placement to product accessibility. Very young learners, for instance, have smaller hands than adults, and they may be more tempted to use their pointer finger than their thumbs. This may change your layout more than you realize!

Optimizing your tool for the mobile version also requires you to streamline your features. For example, mobile doesn’t typically provide a great experience for data-driven features like reporting or rostering. Now’s the time to think about how you can still provide robust mobile features and a great user experience.

Engage your Engineering Team

Ask your technology team to participate in user testing. This way, they can watch teachers and learners use your product and observe these interactions for themselves. At the very least, make sure they participate in the analysis and recommendations that come out of UXR.

In order to address UX and engineering challenges, it’s crucial for technologists to see where users hit stumbling blocks. Good engineers will step up with creative solutions. They may even be able to solve a “UX problem” with a smart technology fix! But they can only provide this level of support when they’re engaged in the creative process from the very beginning.

Reconsidering Design ‘Frills’

Design teams often use techniques like micro animations or transitions to get a minimum viable product, or MVP, out the door. When it’s down to the wire, engineering teams push these ‘frills’ to the bottom of the priority list. 

These carefully designed UI elements guide users’ attention, sometimes even making users aware that they haven’t completed a form, assessment, or quiz. In edTech, the stakes for these fun extras are often quite high!

When engineers take into account that these elements add to the usability of your product, making the design even more human, they can be reprioritized in product planning (and perhaps even the budget). Very often these elements aren’t just icing on the cake—they’re essential to your product’s success.

The ROI of Human-Centered Design

If your team lays a strong foundation for user-centered design during the initial phases of UX strategy, you’ll avoid expensive changes down the line. (That expensive technology platform you’ve been eyeing…does it really align with user needs? Or support a user-centered product experience? Don’t wait to find out!)

But focusing on your users is about more than avoiding painful mistakes or wrong turns. It also opens up the possibility to create edTech products that truly engage your users. After all, once you’ve solved a challenge in the best possible way, your product team can focus on designs that deliver delight. What’s more human than that?

Are you looking for more ways to center the needs of your users? Contact our team to find out how we can help!

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Designing edTech for the Long Term By Staying Ahead of Trends

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
September 23, 2022

Trends in education don’t always stick around. That’s why they’re trends! From debates about the best ways to teach literacy to shifting needs for remote products, user needs or desires will always change over time. 

As edTech designers, it’s our job to understand what will always be valuable for teachers and learners. Designing edTech for the long term requires using tried-and-true, research-backed methods. 

Designing tools this way will not only help you create better products that are more effective in the classroom. It will also help you sell products over time, whether you move to a subscription model or continue to offer support, upgrades, and new content for a well-loved product.

Whether you’re new to edTech product development or you’ve been doing this for a long time, this article will ensure that you’ve solved the needs that will always be top-of-mind for your users.

Let’s jump in! Here are five user-centric goals to help your edTech tools stand the test of time: 

  1. Design a Great Onboarding Experience

    Onboarding is critical for both teachers and learners, but it can fall on the back burner as you prioritize other features. Sometimes we’re so interested in how the product supports learning goals, that we don’t necessarily stop to educate users about how the product works!

    Even young learners need to understand how the structure of your product works together with your learning content. As you train students on how to interact with your tool, you’ll help them understand how learning new concepts is supported by the tool itself.

    Similarly, teachers need onboarding support in both student- and teacher-facing products. Whether you have teachers complete a task to understand product set-up or provide just-in-time help, better onboarding increases teacher efficacy and builds engagement with your tool.

  2. Ground feature development in research-driven user needs

    The top challenge that comes up in every user research interview with a teacher? Lack of time. If your product can’t help teachers perform their roles more efficiently or optimize a challenging process, teachers simply won’t use it.

    But we only know this because of how much user experience research (UXR) we conduct at Backpack Interactive. Designing edTech for the long term requires consistently validating user needs with foundational UXR. 

    Qualitative user interviews, competitive audits, and user testing will ensure that your learning tools are relevant, easy to use, and ready to help users solve their most pressing challenges.

  3. Incorporate SEL Principles into Any Product

    Our edTech research findings also indicate that both teachers and students need products that develop and support social emotional learning (SEL) skills. SEL skills include a range of behaviors and abilities. Two of the most important are learner agency and self-motivation.

    Learning tools have many ways of giving users more choice, so they have agency in their education. Whether you build in ways for users to set goals, choose content paths, or respond to questions using a variety of media, you’ll help them develop grit, agency, and other qualities that are fundamental to social emotional learning (SEL).

    In addition to providing users with more opportunities to make choices, you can also design features like reward systems or sandbox learning to improve engagement and spur learner motivation. The more learners understand the role they have in their own education, the more motivated they will be.

    Remember, SEL principles can be incorporated into any type of learning product—and any type of learning content. For more information and a product checklist, check out this article from our archives.

  4. Build Engagement through Community, Gamification, & Contextualization

    Asking a teacher or student to engage with a new product is always a big ask. After all, learning something new or integrating a new tool into a well-established teaching routine is challenging.

    No matter how great your learning tool is, lack of time in the classroom is your biggest hurdle to product engagement. Designing edTech products for long term success requires you to build relationships with teachers and students through the tool itself.

    Three types of features can drive this relationship—and increase engagement—effectively. Let’s break them down:

    • Community features. Authentic community-driven features must be thought of in initial phases of product design to work well. Whether you provide a platform for teachers to share content with one another or engage in professional learning conversations, this is a major time investment.
    • Gamification features. Like learners, teachers are also motivated by game mechanics to meet goals and try new features.
    • Contextualized onboarding features. If you can successfully tie your users’ pain points to your product’s benefits, both teachers and students will engage with your tools more deeply. Whether you provide just-in-time product help or mini value props throughout the onboarding process, your users need to understand that your tool can really help them solve their challenges.

  5. Use the Principles of Learning Science to Create More Effective Learning Experiences

    Because learning science is based on tested scientific principles for how we learn, you can rely on it over time—no matter what the edTech trends happen to be that year.

    It might sound intimidating, but using learning science principles in edTech doesn’t have to be hard. Once you understand principles like formative assessment and “learning by doing,” you’ll always be designing edTech tools for the long term.

    Your tools should also work for every learner. Whether your tool provides adaptive learning pathways, addresses different learning styles or modes, or offers real learner agency, learning techniques all work the same way.

When it comes down to it, our best learning tools are meant to improve teaching and to catalyze learning. These are big overall goals. As you start to dig into the nuances of your edTech product, it’s easy to lose sight of this purpose and begin generating content- or technology-centric solutions.

Sure, tech developments like AI assistants, speech recognition, and other tools are also important to track and use. They may even make your product seem more cutting-edge. They could even be the answer for how to deliver your strategy or product design! 

But these five user-centric methods will help you focus on major user goals while also making room for technological innovation. No matter how many buzzy new capabilities your product has, designing learning tools for long term success will always mean centering your users first.

Are you kicking off a new edTech product? Contact us below to find out how we can help ground your learning tool in UXR and learning science!

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