Category: UX Design

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

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
October 18, 2023

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

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

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

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

Here’s how to do it.

Prioritize onboarding flows in your edTech products for maximum ROI

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

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

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

Let them skip the tour

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

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

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

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

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

Get set up in a few clicks

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

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

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

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

Just the highlights, please

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

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

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

Streamline student log-ins

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

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

Make it easier for teachers by:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace OneRoster compliance

OneRoster is a standardized way to structure rostering data. 

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

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

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

Devote budget to email & gradebook integrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional learning works—when it’s bite-sized

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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How edTech Can Support Educator Burnout: edTech UX Tips Vetted by Teachers

Monica Sherwood bio picture Monica Sherwood
June 15, 2023

There’s a crisis brewing in education: teacher burnout. In fact, in a 2022 survey conducted by Gallup, 44% of K-12 education workers described feeling burned out at work “Always” or “Very Often.” As educators grapple with burnout symptoms like frustration and fatigue, they are turning to edTech for time-saving solutions to lighten the lift in the classroom. 

In order to ensure that edTech companies design effective UX for their products, we conducted user research on burnout with our in-house Teacher Council. Members of the council shared pain points from their classrooms, described favorite edTech products, and identified the product features that save them time and energy. 

Apply the results of our research to the next iteration of your learning tool, so you can make educators’ responsibilities easier to tackle—and make your tool more valuable to time-strapped users. 

edTech UX patterns that support teachers and ease burn out symptoms

To better serve teachers, edTech publishers must ensure their digital products include features that will improve a user’s ability to efficiently tackle heavy workloads. 

Unfortunately, many existing learning products follow outdated or illogical UX patterns. These UX design choices may meet an arbitrary business requirement, but they no longer serve teachers well. 

Instead, opt for patterns and features that support teachers’ needs throughout your iteration and design process. These include:

  • Streamlined logins via SSO and learning management system integrations, especially for popular services like GoogleClassroom and Canvas
  • Sophisticated user customization options throughout the experience
  • Preloaded templates and frameworks that support task completion, as well as the ability to save, edit, and reuse documents created from templates
  • Modals that allow teachers to capture observational data quickly and access data points easily
  • Simplified user flows that reduce the number of clicks it takes for a user to reach their end destination

By advocating and prioritizing these experience solutions, you’ll create a more valuable edTech product that helps teachers who are chronically strapped for time, worn down, and burned out.

 

This infographic describes the current teacher burnout crisis in education and offers tips for edTech UX design vetted by UX research conducted with members of Backpack Interactive's Teacher Council.
How edTech UX design can alleviate symptoms of teacher burnout.

3 edTech products teachers love—and how to apply their UX patterns to your learning tools

In our interviews with members of our Teacher Council, three edTech products came up in conversation over and over again.

Below, we outline why teachers appreciate the user experiences of GoogleDrive, Slack, and Google Forms. Use our findings and apply them to your own learning tools, in order to improve or streamline your teacher-facing experience.

Notable edTech UX Patterns from GoogleDrive

  • Autonomy over file organization and naming systems
  • Integration, sharing, and collaboration features
  • Single-system simplicity

GoogleDrive isn’t just a popular storage system for teachers. The product also gives them autonomy over their files, allowing them to use an organizational system that works best for them. This includes features like customizable file names.

 

Consider giving edTech users simple organizing and sharing features, just as GoogleDrive does. Better yet, integrate with GSuite!

 

With added integration and sharing features, GoogleDrive makes common tasks easy to accomplish. Teachers can create different types of documents within a single product system, then quickly share those documents with colleagues. Everything from collaborating on lesson plans to creating and sharing templates with teammates happens all in one place.

If your edTech product requires a resource repository, consider giving users simple organizing and sharing features. Better yet, integrate your product with GSuite to leverage existing, popular tools, making your own product more valuable to busy teachers. 

Notable UX Patterns from Slack

  • Synchronous and asynchronous communication and sharing
  • Common UX patterns from instant messaging tools facilitates quick communication and user onboarding

The shift to at-home learning made communication tools like Slack very popular among teachers. The result? Users now expect robust synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and communication abilities from edTech products with chat features.

 

Leverage familiar UX patterns from Slack, like synchronous communication, for teachers who use your edTech products.

 

Slack’s UX patterns look and feel familiar to teachers who already use instant messaging features in other products. If you need to build collaboration features into your product, you can draw from these common UX patterns to facilitate quick communication between teachers, students, and even parent personas.

Notable UX Patterns from Google Forms

  • Customizable fields
  • User-friendly note and data collection
  • Integrations that reduce administrative work

Whether teachers are conducting classroom observations or collecting student data, they need customizable data collection tools. In particular, giving users the ability to customize form fields means both teachers and administrators can use a single product for many different use cases or scenarios.

 

edTech designers can leverage how much teachers love Google Forms for its customizable fields and easy data collection.

 

Without strong product integration, your data collection tool might actually add to a teacher’s workload. To be valuable to teachers, your learning tools should leverage integrations with common products to reduce administrative work.

 

It’s up to those of us who influence feature prioritization to advocate for teachers’ needs and support features that will reduce the time it takes to perform administrative tasks.  

When we apply efficient technological solutions to teachers’ most demanding administrative work, we’re giving them much-needed time back in their days. With more demands on teachers than ever before, time is the single, most valuable resource an edTech product owner can prioritize for their users. 

That way, teachers can concentrate on doing what they do best—teaching and supporting the students who need them.

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

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
May 12, 2023

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

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

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

Let’s dive in!

What does design thinking in education and edTech look like?

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

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

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

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

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

Why design thinking approaches in education support SEL skills

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

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

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

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

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

More on this below!

4 ways to create better edTech products using design thinking

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

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

1. Build supportive teacher-facing prompts and templates

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

Product designers and content engineers can achieve this by:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Help students embrace a design thinking mindset

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

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

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

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

4. Create features that improve SEL

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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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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