Category: UI Design

15 Ways Universal Design Improves User Experience for All Students

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
October 11, 2021

This fall, most schools are back to in-person learning. But the rise of the Delta variant means virtual or hybrid learning isn’t out of the picture yet. Parents and educators are also searching for edTech products that will help close instructional gaps from the past year. For parents and teachers of students with special needs, identifying software driven by a universal design user experience is even more urgent.

When you ensure that your learning products are not just inclusive but accommodating to students with special needs, you improve overall usability. edTech products that adopt a universal design user interface help students manage self-paced learning activities, receive immediate feedback, and follow explicit instruction.

Universal design also makes it easier for students to replay or reread content on their own time. These features are crucial for special needs students, but they benefit everyone who uses your product. Put simply: products that embrace a universal design user experience are a win for both learners and designers.

What Does Universal Design User Experience Look Like in edTech?

The Universal Design (UDL) framework is based on the most frequent finding in educational research: every learner responds differently to instruction.

According to the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), UDL highlights individual learning differences. Instead of ignoring these differences as an “error,” UDL seeks to understand the impact of individual differences on the learning process. 

Understanding learning differences is critical to designing effective instructional sequences, as well as edTech products that make an impact on student learning.

How to Use a Universal Design User Experience in Your edTech Tool

Meeting accessibility benchmarks is crucial in edTech, but there are additional benefits to adopting the UDL framework at the earliest stages of UX strategy and product design. By meeting more students where they’re at, you’ll improve the UX for all of your users. After all, that’s our goal as UX designers!

New to applying UDL principles to edTech tools? We have 15 ideas you can use right now as you plan your universal design user interface. Below, we cover how to offer multiple modes of engagement, representation, and expression in learning tools.

Let’s dig in!

4 Ways to Offer Multiple Modes of Engagement

Providing students with multiple ways to engage with your learning content and your UI makes your learning tools even more accessible. Here are 4 ways to ensure that students have the personalization options they need to be successful.

  1. Maximize student choice and autonomy in your UI
    Design with special needs students in mind by providing customizable rewards and badges, as well as personalized color palettes, themes, or layouts. Customizable UI is especially important for students who may have adverse reactions to specific colors. For example, students with autism spectrum disorder experience strong physical reactions to the color red.
  2. More visualizations can enhance your user interface
    Address the needs of multiple learners at once by designing labels with clear graphic representations of the next step in your user flow. You can also make your activities more predictable by including visual representations of activity flows, like task lists or timer visuals.
  3. Provide options for custom sequencing
    Allow students to customize activity timing and sequencing. For students who require more support transitioning between activities, you could also include customizable options for alerts or tool tips.
  4. Encourage student goal-setting and self-reflection
    Increase learner agency by allowing students to set their own goals. You might also look for opportunities to design features that encourage self-reflection and response. For example, during an informal post-activity “quick check” students can assess their own comprehension and record any lingering questions.
screenshot of Lalilo Product, showing books and setting a user goal, universal design user experience
Epic allows students to set and track their own reading goals.

8 Easy Ideas for Ensuring Multiple Means of Representation

You already know your edTech product should meet WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards. Here are eight more ideas for optimizing your user experience.

  1. Allow users to customize text size, volume, font, or notifications.
  2. Enable users to customize reading levels for content. For example, high school students using an app to learn high school content may only read at a first- or second-grade reading level.
  3. Include captions and written transcripts for video and audio, as well as speech-to-text for spoken language.
  4. Enable vibrations instead of sound effects or alerts, as well as alt text or spoken descriptions for images and animations.
  5. Build a vocabulary feature. With hover, click, or hyperlink interactions, a user can determine the meaning of unknown words.
  6. Ensure that critical information and vocabulary is available in first languages for students. Provide the option to customize the language of the product’s dictionary.
  7. Alleviate frustration for students who struggle with reading by integrating audiobooks.
  8. Use explicit prompts or step-by-step instructions for learning sequences. As with design choices, written content should be clear enough for students on the spectrum who may struggle with metaphorical or playful language.
 Learning Ally’s LINK mobile app uses audiobook content to help students read. Since its launch last year, there have been over 1M pages “read” by its student users.

3 Strategies for Designing Multiple Means of Action and Expression

Not all students solve problems or work through content in the same way. The more flexible your approach to universal design user experience, the more accessible your edTech product will be. Here are a few starting points for you and your team to consider:

  1. Design activities that allow students to solve problems using a variety of strategies.
  2. Utilize a gradual release model that scaffolds for students when they struggle with a specific activity or question. 
  3. Provide clear and immediate feedback whenever possible.

 

The arrow and +1 UI element from Lalio provides immediate confirmation messaging to the learner that they’ve answered correctly.

Whether you’re rolling out new products for the fall or strengthening your existing tools, UDL principles are ideal benchmarks. By applying a universal design user experience to your edTech products, you’ll ensure that features align with educational best practices, design more accessible learning tools, and support the learning goals of every student. After all, our goal as edTech designers should be to create software that meets students where they are—no matter what their needs happen to be.

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Shifts in EdTech: What This Top-Level Hiring Trend Means for You

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
September 1, 2021

Tech-focused edTech startups are ramping up their hiring, especially for roles at the intersection of UX, product, and technology. 

Over the past month, new chief product officer positions have popped up at:

  • GoCoach, a professional development and education platform
  • DreamBox Learning, a math software company
  • Sketchy, an illustrated learning platform for medical and pharmaceutical students

What does this shift in edTech hiring mean for you and your company? And how can you get ahead of the curve through UX edTech research and product planning?

We break it all down for you below.

Why Smart edTech Start-Ups Are Investing in UX 

Shifts in edTech are happening faster than ever, and smart product leaders are essential to weathering these changes. Product leaders must have their finger on the pulse and be able to encourage their team to adopt and maintain a nimble mindset. 

As edTech start-ups mature, they’re finding new opportunities to invest in leadership, review their products, and address UX challenges. By refining the experience of their products, these start-ups will likely see bigger gains in adoption and customer success.

When chief product officers know how to build for this level of flexibility and adaptability, they’re better able to respond to the needs of their customers and incorporate new technologies more quickly into the classroom.

From B2B to B2C: The Great edTech Pivot Continues

This hiring mindset is likely driven by the industry-wide pivot from B2B product to consumer technology. The pandemic shook things up so much that the fastest-growing edTech companies are now thinking about multiple markets. In order to expand their reach and appeal to family consumers, many of these companies are pivoting B2B learning tools to commercial products.

When edTech companies pivot to the B2C market, their products must be more user-friendly than ever. Under these conditions, investing in UX is a smart move. It allows your sales team to market and sell your products more easily—and has the added benefit of making your customer service team’s job easier, too. 

This also means that edTech companies who keep chief technology officers in product development positions risk getting out-maneuvered. After all, technology isn’t usually the differentiator in edTech products. UX is. 

3 Ways to Futureproof Your edTech Product During a Pivot

Changes in leadership ahead? Still figuring out how to design for that consumer audience? Adjusting to these shifts in edTech isn’t easy–these three best practices will help you focus on user-centered design.

  1. Take advantage of discovery
    More thorough discovery sessions will set you up to build the right thing, right now. When the market is changing this quickly, any time spent conducting competitive analysis or internal UX audits is worth it.
  2. Invest in user-centered research
    User-centered research is more important than ever. UX research is now your mitigation against building the wrong thing or missing an opportunity to introduce a helpful feature.
  3. Use UX research to optimize your workflows
    Investing in UX up front helps optimize your workflows. Nail down the most efficient development process and make your dev team happier than ever.

Additional Resources

Want to read more about industry-wide trends and investing in UX? You might also like: 

  1. How to Pivot Your edTech Product Directly to Consumers
  2. EdTech Product Design: Why Smart UX Saves You $$ on Technology
  3. How Competitive Audits Ensure User-Centered edTech Products
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How Good UX Design Provides a Safe edTech Environment for Online Student Interaction

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
May 21, 2021

We all saw how challenging it was for teachers to keep their students engaged during remote learning. If anything, it’s made us rethink the role of edTech in supporting peer-to-peer learning interactions and building classroom communities within digital products. 

Maybe you’ve already been tasked with creating more opportunities for students to interact with their peers within your digital tools. Or maybe you’re looking for new ways to incorporate social emotional learning (SEL) features into your existing products and need inspiration for the peer-to-peer aspect of collaboration tools. 

Whatever your user engagement goals might be for 2021, strong UX and design principles can help you make more valuable social interaction features for your users. 

By breaking down social interactions into smaller, more manageable units, you’ll avoid the privacy challenges and legal constraints that large, open-ended platforms present. You’ll also make it easier for teachers to manage and monitor online student interactions, all while keeping students who use your tools safe.

Helping Students Successfully Navigate Digital Interactions in edTech 

Educators value student-student collaboration tools because they offer ways to foster community in individual classrooms. These features also help students improve their SEL skills by working with their peers. But what happens when product owners want to introduce these same features to connect students from different classrooms—or different parts of the world?

Expanding your platform beyond individual classrooms will immediately bring privacy and safety issues to the forefront. If your goal is to support learning interactions between classrooms or create a large online community of student users, you must address state and federal privacy standards for students, as well as legal constraints around user-produced content. If best practices for building and maintaining social platforms aren’t followed from the beginning of your design process, your platform runs the risk of enabling real harm. 

Even though this process presents design and safety challenges, it’s possible to navigate these concerns safely. The digital platform DIY.org, for example, offers a strong model for connecting individual learners to a larger digital community. Student-generated content is shared with guardians via the DIY.org app. Family members then choose whether to share this content with the larger DIY community by signing a consent form; they even retain the ability to ‘approve’ each submission from their child. This added layer of informed consent mitigates privacy challenges and involves parents directly in the process of community engagement.

No matter how big your digital community is, the goal of any online learning tool with social features is to help students communicate with, and learn from, their peers. Whether your learning tool supplements in-person lessons or provides a digital space for students to collaborate remotely, safe, successful student interaction is the key to effective learning, high engagement, and product adoption.

 

How to Support Teachers Building Online Communities

As we build digital platforms and online communities in edTech, we must consider how well-equipped educators are to address online bullying, teach digital citizenship, and foster other forms of online community building. 

After all, without the support of busy educators, community-based products are less likely to be adopted and championed. Here are four ways you can support teachers on your digital platform—without adding to their heavy workload.

 

  1. Develop Simple Monitoring Features

Especially in secondary education environments, teachers need easy administrative tools for reviewing and approving student content before publishing it to the entire class. This might even look like lightly monitored AI chat to streamline a teacher’s initial screening.

In higher education, students are able to self-monitor more effectively. When students are able to flag comments or use up- and down-voting features, instructors quickly become aware of problematic content or positive classroom trends. 

 

  1. Incorporate Digital Citizenship Learning Content

Even in closely monitored environments, students need constant reminders of positive online behavior. By developing professional content for teachers about digital citizenship, we can support them as they model positive behavior for their students. 

But digital citizenship is about more than giving teachers tools to avoid bad student behavior. It’s also about helping students become supportive members of an online classroom. The more teacher-facing content your product provides to help teachers develop positive online environments, the more useful your product will be.

 

  1. Offer Detailed Student Reporting

When teachers can see more detailed information about student participation, it’s easier for them to understand classroom trends. Reports that identify forms of student engagement, from commenting habits to trending topics, give teachers tools to stage behavioral interventions, praise hard work, or simply further engage their class.

 

  1. Anticipate Educator Needs for SEL Features

In addition to designing subject-matter content or sequencing tools, consider how your product helps teachers address the SEL growth of their students. 

Teachers may wish to build in reflective prompts about process or collect student feedback that addresses community dynamics. They may even wish to pose questions to students and track student reactions. Prompts like “How are you feeling today?” or “How do you feel about this assignment?” can help students reflect on their emotional states and ask for support as needed.

Successful UX Design for Digital Student Communities 

In addition to supporting teachers through good UX, your product can make it easier for students to engage successfully with their peers. 

From profiles to trending topics, here are four best practices to keep in mind as you develop features for student learning communities within your next product.

 

  1. Design More Effective Student Profiles

Build a student profile for each participant. This profile should include more than the student’s name or student ID number. Consider mechanisms that create and track reputation, as well. 

As student users build their reputation within your platform, they’ll become more thoughtful about their online social interactions. When individual student interactions are tracked and logged, it’s easier for educators to hold students accountable for their behavior. It’s easier for students to self-monitor their behavior, too. 

 

  1. Develop Badges and Credentials

Reputation building is about more than preventing bad behavior online. Whether you use badges or other forms of credentialing, the “public” celebration of student achievement makes a positive reputation something to be proud of.

Credentialing also creates peer “experts” on your platform. Students can help one another in peer-to-peer online learning environments, or teachers can identify student leaders and group their classrooms more easily.

 

  1. Encourage User Feedback 

In order to safely build evidence of student participation in your digital community, encourage student feedback and ratings. We see these models work effectively in consumer products all the time, whether that’s Netflix’s most popular shows or the trending topics sidebar on Twitter. 

In an edTech context, student agency directly affects community building. From the most popular science projects to the best middle-grade reads, students find meaning in what their peers are learning and enjoying. 

Showing how these trends change in different contexts offers additional learning opportunities, too. Students will find new levels of meaning in discovering how the popular science project in their class compares to the most popular project in their school—or even their country.

Whether you show teachers that 20 students gave a digital book four stars or show students trending topics and projects across your platform, digital trends offer a safe and exciting way to build community for young learners.

 

  1. Offer a Range of Media Responses

Gone are the days of requiring 500-word student reflections. Digital media-savvy students may be able to communicate just as effectively through photography, video, or audio responses. 

Whether students shoot a commercial on their iPhone, build a diorama, or create a podcast, your product can reflect the legitimacy of multimedia responses for both teachers and students.

The most successful digital communities foster student engagement and set students up to learn from interactions with their peers. By anticipating how to better support the needs of both teachers and students in these interactions, you’ll ensure a safer classroom environment for everyone, while streamlining the administrative burden for educators. 

You’ll also help students become better digital citizens—skills they’ll need to succeed in online environments far into the future. After more than a year of remote learning and working, that’s a win-win.

Are you building interactive features into your student-facing products for Fall 2021? Contact us today to discuss how good UX design creates better digital environments for teachers and students.

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6 Easy SEL Features for Remote Learning Products

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
May 5, 2021

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

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

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

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

How to Design SEL Features That Teachers Really Want

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

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

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

1. Develop a supportive content strategy

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

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

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

 

2. Design affirmative, warm UI

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

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

 

3. Anticipate teacher-student touchpoints

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

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

4. Improve onboarding experiences

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

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

5. Create synchronous activities for remote learning

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

 

6. Help students develop more agency over their learning

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

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

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

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

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