Fall 2021 is still up in the air as school districts around the country consider whether to permanently end remote learning. 

In May, New York City announced that remote learning will no longer be an option for its students in the fall. In 2020, about 600,000 of its 1,000,000 students chose to learn from home. 

Meanwhile, more than half of San Francisco’s public school students are still learning remotely. Hybrid classrooms are expected to continue in the new school year.

What does the shift to in-person mean for the edTech industry? And how should you address it in your own product planning sessions this fall?

We break it all down for you below.

How Remote Learning Changed edTech User Journeys

The user journeys for edTech have officially changed. As they return to in-person or hybrid classrooms, teachers will be more fluent in technology, including edTech tools. They’re on the hunt for more sophisticated learning tools and interested in using edTech to extend learning outside the classroom.

Parents and school administrators are looking for ways to eliminate 2020 learning loss, too. edTech tools that can be used in both the home and the classroom will still have wide appeal. 

Finally, just because we’re making plans to return to school in the fall doesn’t mean COVID has left us for good. School districts and other buyers likely have new requirements for remote learning functionality in case COVID cases spike again. Your buyer persona will want the ability to address remote learning on a class-by-class basis, making flexible products even more appealing.

4 Remote Learning Take-Aways for In-Person Learning

No matter what kind of edTech product you’re building this year, use these 4 tips to help you stay ahead of the curve.

1. Allow users to customize learning content.
   Learning content will benefit from teacher prompts and customized sequencing suggestions, making it easier for students to learn at home or on-the-go.

    

2. Design for parent personas
   Parent personas aren’t going away. Address this new persona through onboarding, dashboards, and other product features.

    

3. Prepare for hybrid learning
   Hybrid classrooms mean your remote-learning features might be a more permanent change.

    

4. Schedule a classroom field test
   There’s a new user baseline for in-person teaching with digital tools. Test product features with your users in real time to find out how the last year transformed their skillset.

Additional Resources

Want to read more about how a year of remote learning will affect edTech next year? You might also like: 

1. How a Year of Digital Learning Will Shape edTech in 2021 
2. 6 Easy SEL Features for Remote Learning Products
3. What Teachers Really Need in a Remote Learning Product

Your company has a successful print product on its hands, and you’re on the hunt for ways to turn that curriculum into a digital tool. 

On the surface, this seems like good business sense. You know how popular digital tools are with your users; plus, there are no shipping or warehousing costs when you move into edTech. A win-win!

But if you’re used to dealing with print publications—or you’ve only ever built content platforms—you may be unsure of what to do next. 

Below, we outline what it takes to build a brand new edTech product based on content that’s been previously published and vetted. 

This piece will also help you balance your internal and external stakeholders, from the C-Suite down to the original author or curriculum designer. Let’s get started!

Building Your Digital Product Team

Before you can define what kind of learning tool will support your users’ needs, you’ll have to make sure all the right people are in the room.

Here’s a quick break-down of the kinds of stakeholders you’ll likely work with as you translate your print curriculum into a digital tool:

Author or Curriculum Designers

If you still have access to the original author or curriculum designers of your print product, all the better. 

The author is a special kind of stakeholder. But they’re an integral part of understanding the print product’s intended learning outcomes. 

Once you align those outcomes with the content of your new product, you’ll be better positioned to support your users’ needs throughout the design process.

Product planning prompt:

• How do the print curriculum’s learning outcomes align with what you already know about your user personas?

Internal Editorial or Content Team

Your editorial team maintains the author’s standards as content is translated to a digital product. Is every word choice made within the product correct from the author’s point of view? 

Translating your print curriculum into a new digital product means that you’ll also need to develop new content that supports the user’s experience. 

Your internal editorial or content team may also be responsible for working on UX content, in addition to supporting the author’s original vision.

Product planning prompts:

• Which tools does your content team need to structure content correctly and input content into the product? For example, this team may need meta tagging tools or XML capabilities, so content can flow directly into your UI.
• How can you support the content team’s workflow as they input content to your tool?

UX Team

In addition to designing the user experience of your new learning tool, your UX team needs to understand your print author’s intentions on a fundamental level.

Without this knowledge, your UX team won’t know how to translate the print product into a good digital experience. This means they’ll have to conduct additional desk research by digging into books and classroom materials. 

Not only does this work bring the UX team up to speed on the author’s work, but it also helps them better advocate for the user and their experience within your digital tool. 

The UX team can also bring your print author strategically into the design process. By facilitating brainstorming sessions or design thinking workshops with the original author, your UX team can help you collectively reimagine content for your new format.

Ultimately, your UX team builds a bridge between your author’s ideas and how teachers use those ideas in the classroom. This way, teachers don’t have to perform extensive research before using the curriculum in your digital tool. Your UX team has already done the legwork for them!

Product planning prompts:

• How can I share discovery materials with the UX team so they understand the author’s ideas? 
• What can I do to help them balance the author’s input with our need for user-centric design?

Development Team

Your development team is your guide to the digital content conversion process. 

With content architecture strategies like meta tagging, they can help you find the right structure for your new digital tool. They’ll also help you spot technology opportunities for content delivery along the way.

Realistically, it can take weeks to identify and usefully tag hundreds or thousands of pieces of content. The earlier you can help your development team tee up this process, the better.

Product planning prompt:

• How early in the process can I start this activity?
• Do I have the right technology tools to support the dev team? (i.e. tagging plug-ins like WoodWing)

Managing Stakeholders While Defining Your New edTech Product

From the C-Suite to the author of your original curriculum, everyone has a stake in the development of your new learning tool. 

In order to effectively balance stakeholder input, begin by outlining the intention of the product itself. 

Are you trying to help students better understand a new math principle? Offer professional development for teachers? Decode phonics skills for early readers?

Whatever the big idea for your product happens to be, align your team on the product’s purpose at the outset of the design process. 

With a shared idea of the product purpose in mind, you’ll be able to brainstorm more creative solutions for content presentation and delivery. 

You’ll be better positioned to deliver on the original author’s intended learning outcomes in a brand new format, too.

Product planning prompts:

• What’s the “big idea” guiding your design and development process?
• How flexible can you be in the way content is presented and delivered to teachers or students?
• What opportunities do you see for making your content interactive? 
• What opportunities do you see for presenting your content in a nonlinear sequence?

How a New Digital Tool Transforms Your Company

2020 made everyone rethink the value of digital products. They’re scalable, easier for your sales team to sell, and less expensive to host.

Remote learning has likely transformed your user journeys, too. Teachers are now well-versed in edTech, and they’re on the hunt for remote learning-ready tools. Students are better than ever at collaborating within digital tools. Even parents have had practice helping their students log into digital tools from home.

In addition to transforming your typical user journeys, creating a new digital tool can also affect the rest of your publishing company. Because of the scale of this potential transformation, it’s important to involve internal stakeholders early in the design process. 

For example, digital learning tools often introduce entirely new revenue models for companies that typically rely on print products. Will you roll out a subscription sales model for your new digital products? How will a new and potentially wider customer base affect your customer service needs?

When it comes down to it, you’re not just transforming a print product into a digital learning tool. You’re also transforming your marketing and sales teams, as well as your internal content and UX teams.

Product planning prompts:

• Which marketing, sales, and other brand stakeholders can you invite into the discovery or product planning process?
• Are you defining a new technology need for your company?
• How will your marketing or sales models change to support this new product?
• How will your customer service models change to support this new product?
• What other large-scale implications do you see for your brand’s mission or audience?

It takes a team effort to transform a beloved print product into a new edTech tool. With these product planning prompts, you’ll be able to guide the digital transformation process from start to finish and spot technology opportunities along the way. You’re ready to support the internal changes your company might need to make to market and sell an incredible new digital tool, too. Now it’s time to take the edTech world by storm!

Are you converting your print content into a new edTech tool? Contact us to learn how we put teachers and students at the center of the digital conversion process.

Users experience challenges in edTech products for all sorts of reasons. Everything from overly complex navigation patterns to visual noise can distract from your learning content and prevent users from getting the most out of your tool. 

Has your customer service team noticed a pile-up of user feedback on the same feature? Or are your sales dwindling unexpectedly? If so, it’s time to get to the bottom of things with user experience research.

By using tools from the UX research process, you’ll be able to pinpoint specific areas of frustration and develop better solutions. This could mean conducting a full UX audit or holding one more round of user testing to get to the bottom of your users’ product challenges.

Below, we break down UX research best practices for identifying the biggest product challenges for your edTech users. We also decode some of the most common design feedback we hear from teachers and students. If any of these comments mirror user feedback for your own product, you’ll be ready to move faster, identify the problem, and design solutions that delight your users.

How to Identify Product Challenges with User Experience Research

It can happen to any edTech brand. 

Your learning content is solid, your marketing team is doing well, but your users bail on activities early in their journey. Or teachers and parents have started to leave negative reviews identifying the same issue.

Where do you go from here? 

Turning to the UX research process is your best course of action. Here are the three UX best practices we use again and again to identify sticking points within edTech products.

1. Conduct a UX audit

Conduct a UX audit of your existing product to illuminate areas with unintentional obstacles in the user’s journey. Most likely, there’s some challenge between your user and their intended goal. Your audit will help you determine what those challenges are.

Within your audit, a heuristic analysis can provide guidelines and criteria for evaluating usability. We recommend Jakob Nielsen’s principles for interaction design as a starting point. By applying heuristic analysis to your product, you’ll uncover the design pitfalls that lower its overall usability. 

2. Identify specific pain points with user testing

Observing users as they perform tasks in real time will tell you a lot about their challenges within your existing product. 

Before you spring for a feature re-design, get to the bottom of the issue by conducting several rounds of user testing. What stumbling blocks do you notice? What kinds of feedback do your users provide? 

3. Audit your competitors

Competitive audits provide industry-wide insight into common UX patterns. By understanding which UX patterns your users are familiar with, it will be easier to design intuitive interactions within your edTech product.

Not only will competitive audits help you avoid making the same mistakes as your competitors, but they also offer a fresh lens for evaluating user challenges within your own product.

4 Common edTech Design Challenges and How to Fix Them

Challenge #1: Targeting the Wrong Age Group

If your digital reading tool is designed for second graders, testing might reveal that the UX copy is easier for fourth and fifth graders to understand. Or it might be that your product’s UI doesn’t quite appeal to the young students who are your target user base. 

Whatever your specific challenge might be, user feedback points to a mismatch between existing content or design and the targeted age group of your users.

Typical user feedback: When testing adult users of your product, you might hear things like, “I like the learning content, but other products do a better job making content visually interesting for my students.” 

If you’re testing student users, you may hear specific design or content-related ideas, including, “I like when products have themes that change,” or, “I like when I can customize my avatar.”

Actions to take: Review the customer feedback you’ve already received. Based on feedback, conduct focus groups that target students in the right grade levels. Focus groups with real users at different developmental stages ensure that students are responding to design decisions in the way that you intend.

You might also consider running A/B tests on different visual solutions for your product. Which solution performs better? Can you offer different designs targeted to each grade band? What responses do students have to specific themes or characters? 

For an even more thorough approach, audit the visual interface, illustration, and theme decisions of your competitors and consult educational experts for additional insights into the developmental needs of specific age groups.

Challenge #2: Product Navigation Doesn’t Follow a Logical Sequence

While playing around with common UX patterns can result in interesting visual design choices, you may also unintentionally create confusion for your users. 

For example, if your log-in button is located at the bottom of a landing page, rather than on the right-hand side of your screen, young users might have a tough time accessing your product.

Typical kinds of user feedback: User feedback on navigation issues can be spectacularly blunt or straight-forward. You might hear users say something like, “I don’t know how I got here. Why did clicking on this link bring me to this page?”  

We’ve also heard teachers give feedback like, “I know my kids would be so frustrated by this,” or, “This doesn’t make any sense.” Time to go back to the drawing board!

Actions to take: Start with a user test and observe students or teachers trying to navigate within your product in real time. Once pandemic restrictions lift, you may even be able to conduct a field study by going into a classroom and observing kids using your product in their typical environment.

Collecting anecdotal information will also help you pinpoint where the navigation breaks down for student users. With more information, you’ll be able to better reconfigure your screens, or streamline the user flow for the most troublesome areas of the product. Don’t forget to test your new solutions!

Challenge #3: Lack of Visual Engagement

Even if your UX works like a charm, your user interface might be overly corporate or geared toward adult users. 

Students need to be visually engaged with compelling, age-appropriate designs. Once they’re having fun, it’s much easier to help them learn.

Typical kinds of user feedback: You may get positive feedback from teachers about visual design, even as they express hesitancy about what will engage their students. 

Comments like, “I like looking at this, but I don’t know that the kids are going to react well to it,” or, “I think this is geared more towards me,” are common.

Actions to take: If your product has both student- and teacher-facing UI, consider how you might further customize the student view. 

Which visual elements can be changed to appeal to student users? Where can you infuse the student experience with delight? How do you show a visual relationship between the student and teacher interfaces without making the teacher interface too kidlike?

Challenge #4: Too Much Visual Noise
Sometimes we go for visual engagement and delight and overwhelm our users. If there are too many animations, alerts, or multiple navigational choices for your users to make, they might quit rather than engage at all.

Typical kinds of user feedback: Be on the lookout for signs of frustration during usability tests. Student users might express concerns like, “I don’t know where to look.” Meanwhile, teachers might come right out and say, “I know my kids or my parents would be frustrated and not know what to do.”

 Actions to take: Conduct qualitative interviews and ask existing customers to identify the main task on the primary page of your site. Can they pinpoint the most important area of your app?

Based on the results of your interviews, re-organize the visual hierarchy of your page to emphasize the user’s primary need or task. Then, conduct additional user testing to verify whether you’ve hit on the right solution.

User research and testing is your best tool for identifying specific product challenges and designing an innovative solution. The faster you deploy UX audits or schedule a focus group, the sooner you’ll smooth out any rough edges in your UX. And the happier teachers, parents, and students will be to use and recommend your learning tool!

Are you trying to understand a mysterious dip in user engagement? Drop us a line and tell us how we can help!

Welcome to our Team Member Spotlight! Every month we interview a member of our team and highlight their unique contributions to Backpack. We’re a close-knit, interdisciplinary team, and we love to share how our experiences inform everything from UX research to visual design. Learn all about our approach to UX—not to mention staff secrets, hidden talents, and the things we can’t live without.

Pantea Parsa, Designer

What was your first grade teacher’s name?

Her name was Mrs. Ghadimi and we loved her very much. I remember that it was her last year of teaching and we were all sad that we can’t see her in the school next year.

What is your essential work-from-home comfort item?

I have a new wall calendar called Kitties for Social Justice. It’s been great to plan my week while looking at the kitty pictures that come with a socially conscious quote.

You were born and raised in Tehran, Iran. What do you miss most from back home?

I think one thing I miss the most from Tehran is my grandma’s house where I spent most of my childhood in.

What are you currently reading? 

I’m reading a book called Educated by Tara Westover. It’s the story of how she overcame her survivalist family to go to school. It’s really interesting so far and I like the way she describes things.

What’s been your favorite moment working with Backpack so far?

During my first week at Backpack I illustrated a sea turtle as an avatar for a project. Our client really liked it and I later found out that the turtle was very sentimental and meaningful for them. It felt great that I am part of something so meaningful and impactful.

What’s something you are currently learning?

I am currently learning how to animate using After Effects. This has been in my to-do list for awhile and I finally got the chance to learn it by creating illustrations and animation for a blog post about SEL in edTech products (coming soon!). I’m really grateful for my team that encouraged me and gave me the space to be creative and to learn new skills.

Follow Pantea and see more of her work on Linkedin.