Design for Education: How to Optimize UX and UI for Better Learning 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 What does great UX design for education look like? Essential edTech user flows How to optimize UX and UI for learning Applying learning science principles to edTech products Including SEL features in learning tools 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. 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. 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. 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. 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: Motivate and provide agency Provide opportunities for peer collaboration Support social-emotional learning Adapt to their skills and knowledge 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: 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.” 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. 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. 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 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! Mini Competitive Audit: 3 edTech Tools with Great SEL FeaturesAssess the marketplace and prioritize your next feature roll-out with our mini competitive audit. Use this free market research to: • Learn which edTech features support SEL growth • Consider how to integrate SEL features into academic content • Discover the importance of learner agency, persistence, and positive feedback I want FREE market research! You have Successfully Subscribed! Want more edTech insights? 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Related Articles July 28, 2021 UX in Education: Why UX Designers are the Learning Engineers of the Future May 5, 2021 6 Easy SEL Features for Remote Learning Products October 11, 2021 15 Ways Universal Design Improves User Experience for All Students
How Human-Centered Design Creates Better edTech Products 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! Want more edTech insights? 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Related Articles November 11, 2021 How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop for edTech Products December 11, 2019 Visual Design Strategy: How to Make Stunning edTech Products Users Will Love September 19, 2019 How to Design the Best Data Dashboard in edTech
The Product Owner’s Guide to Designing Onboarding in edTech Products Sean Oakes November 23, 2022 It’s happened to all of us. You’re in a product planning meeting, discussing features for your digital learning tool. Your product manager wants to invest in a resource library and “Help” section for teachers using your product. But your UX team is advocating to use the design budget for onboarding features. What do you do? With budget and resource constraints, it can be tempting to downplay the importance of onboarding. After all, if the user experience is strong enough, how much onboarding support will teachers and students actually need? The answer might surprise you. edTech products are complex tools, and users need support as they learn brand new concepts all while navigating an entirely new product. This makes onboarding a crucial feature for any edTech tool, one that deserves a chunk of your budget for research, design, and testing. In this article, we’ll help you understand why onboarding in edTech is so high-stakes, review the two types of onboarding every edTech tool should offer, and help you “re-think” your “Help” section, so you don’t run out of budget. Let’s get into it. Understanding Onboarding in edTech through User Personas All product owners want their users to navigate software with ease and engage deeply with the app’s content. But, in edTech, the stakes for onboarding a user are incredibly high—even higher than product engagement! A student’s grades might depend on how well they learn to use your product, for example. Or a teacher’s ability to manage their classroom and track learning outcomes might be deeply affected by how many features they master in your tool. The stakes mean that onboarding teachers and learners to your product successfully is essential to its use—and to its success. There are other persona-driven factors that will affect your onboarding strategies, too. Because teachers are given very little training for using technology in the classroom, they are often left to their own devices to learn how to use edTech. How will your product give them all the context they need to implement the tool on their own in a limited amount of time? If your tool is difficult to use, or it isn’t properly supported, teachers will likely use your edTech tool less effectively or efficiently. This is also why it’s important to keep onboarding as brief as possible without sacrificing clarity. There’s a reason onboarding pop-ups have a ‘skip’ button. Most users—especially busy teachers—feel like they don’t have time for lengthy videos and practice tasks. If you show them your experience is tight and interactive, they’ll be more likely to engage. Designing onboarding with your personas in mind isn’t just a design challenge—it’s an extreme empathy challenge. It can be difficult for product teams to get into the mindset of a teacher or student starting from step zero. After all, you’ve been working diligently on your brilliant, elegant solution—how could anyone be confused by it? But the better you understand how your learning tool affects your users’ day-to-day experience in the classroom, the more effective your onboarding strategies will be. Onboarding for Product Training vs. Onboarding for Concept Training Unlike commercial software, learning tools must accomplish two things for every user: Concept training: Teach learners a new academic concept, or provide educators with the best tools for teaching subject-matter content more effectively. Product training: Help all users learn how to get the most out of your edTech product. It can be a challenge to design just one type of onboarding well. But getting both right in the same product? That takes a lot of thought, great user experience design, user testing, and significant resources. Prioritizing onboarding features that accomplish both product training and concept training tasks can also be challenging for product designers to remember. Sometimes we’re so interested in our tool’s learning content that we don’t always stop to educate users about how the product works. This is especially true for student-facing products. But even young learners need to be trained to use the interface of your edTech tool. No matter their age or role, the users of your product need to understand the relationship between content and design. How can teachers expect to use your edTech tool in their classroom? How will students learn while using your product? What will the experience be like? The more you answer these questions through onboarding features, the less likely your users are to be confused by a complex learning tool. By providing enough context to understand how the product works and why it’s structured a certain way, you’ll motivate learners to keep going and encourage teachers to use your tool more effectively. Top Onboarding Features for edTech Products As an edTech product owner, you already know the types of onboarding features your users respond to. That’s why you gravitate toward just-in-time help for users when you roll out a new feature. Or make sure your product team has an incredible tutorial video ready to roll. You can use any of the onboarding features below in an edTech product. The content itself might change based on the onboarding experience you’d like to provide, whether that’s helping a user to understand UI or teaching them a brand new math concept. Remember: in order for users to get the most out of your product, you need to cover both types of onboarding. Product Training Asking users to complete a task in real time. Providing a user interface tour. onboarding that trains you to understand what each button does Including product tutorial videos, slideshows, or other visualizations. Designing just-in-time help for new or complex features. Helping users run a report or navigate classroom data. Concept Training Providing expert video content that models specific teaching strategies. Demonstrating what progress looks like. Designing just-in-time teaching tips for new educators. Providing actionable next steps for report data, like how to correct for trends or scaffold content in the classroom. You can also use personas to further personalize your onboarding features. For example, you might give teachers the ability to engage with onboarding depending on how much time they have. Which onboarding tasks can they tackle in 15 minutes? What should they do if they need to get started right away? By thinking strategically and intentionally about the onboarding needs of your personas, your learning tools become more customizable—and more valuable to your users. How Better Onboarding & UX Design Will Make You Rethink the “Help” Section It’s tempting to divert your design resources to the “Help” section in your product. After all, it’s the one place users go to answer all of their questions. But focusing on “Help” at the expense of onboarding is a big mistake. Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another. Not only will you better support users who need more context for their learning experience, but you’ll also meet users where they are when it comes to product support. Done well, onboarding takes place over many touchpoints, rather than in the initial moments of a user’s first login. Once you lengthen your onboarding timeline, it’s easier to re-imagine what a useful “Help” section really looks like for your users. With a thoughtful onboarding strategy in place, you’ll be able to successfully scope your content creation budget for “Help”—without short-changing your onboarding experience. Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another. This approach works from a user experience standpoint, too. Most users are resistant to engaging with “Help” sections because they want to keep moving through your experience. “Help” slows users down, but onboarding features don’t have to. For example, integrating just-in-time help sequences for complex tasks is far less overwhelming than requiring users to watch a video tutorial in order to use your learning tool. However, sometimes edTech products are so complex, user challenges simply can’t be solved through better UX. If you find that your UX leans too heavily on “Help,” consider reducing the complexity of your product. Otherwise, you’ll risk users becoming so frustrated that they give up—even with incredible onboarding that supports their needs! Using Your Onboarding Resources Wisely Prioritizing “Help” and designing big ticket features often leads to a dwindling budget for an incredible onboarding experience for teachers and students. We know how important it is to build critical features for your minimum viable product (MVP), so here are a few solutions for ensuring that you don’t run out of budget before you tackle onboarding: Create a first-round onboarding experience. By prioritizing onboarding features for first-round designs, you won’t run through your entire budget without addressing onboarding must-haves. Build at least some onboarding into your MVP designs and budget. Test in the field to see where user pain points are. Even if you feel confident about the pain points teachers and students face, onboarding should always be informed by user testing. Before designing a full onboarding experience, test your prototype with users. You’ll likely realize that you haven’t given users enough context about the flow of your entire product. Once you identify product trouble spots, solve by improving UX or by finding ways for UX and onboarding to work together. Remember: testing solutions requires at least two touchpoints with users, so be sure to build this into your product timeline. Continue to design onboarding features over time. Like other features, onboarding can be designed iteratively. To create an onboarding experience teachers and students will actually use, strike a balance between devoting resources to onboarding at kick-off and testing along the way. For example, one of the major benefits of designing just-in-time help features is that you can always address challenging UX patterns. As you collect user data over time, you’ll identify areas that require new or modified onboarding support. Onboarding can make or break your product, so don’t leave it as an afterthought—or make it compete with “Help” for resources. When you allocate time and budget to designing the onboarding experience, users are more likely to see the value of your learning tool. This not only increases user motivation, but will also speed teacher adoption in a crowded marketplace. Are you designing new onboarding features for your edTech product? Contact us below to find out how we can support your research and design needs! Want more edTech insights? 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Related Articles January 14, 2020 How to Incorporate SEL into any edTech Product January 28, 2021 Three Ways to Leverage UXR Before You Build Your edTech Product September 28, 2021 Working with a Authors as edTech Product Stakeholders
Designing edTech for the Long Term By Staying Ahead of Trends 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: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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! Want more edTech insights? 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Related Articles March 31, 2022 User Research Findings are the Key to Designing More Adaptive edTech July 27, 2021 What Shifting Back to In-Person Learning Means for EdTech July 25, 2018 Personalized Digital Rewards Are the Future of EdTech
