Resources

Backpack resources help you stay ahead in EdTech by getting expert analysis on the industry's most important topics.
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Jan 17, 2026

How Rapid Prototyping Fuels EdTech Product Innovation

Over the past few years, some of the best EdTech product breakthroughs my team has facilitated have...
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Dec 15, 2025

7 Trends in EdTech Product Design You Should Know for 2026

From the rise of AI product integrations to alarming upticks in chronic student absences, 2025 gave us...
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Sep 26, 2025

What Teachers Want: How Tailoring edTech Features to Educator Workflows Boosts Product Adoption

For edTech companies, the consequences of poor UX and disconnected tools are clear: if educators can’t...
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Jul 30, 2025

Using UX Design Prototyping at Every Stage of Your edTech Product

The design prototyping stage for a learning tool is exciting. You start to envision how students will m...
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Jun 12, 2025

The Power of Simplicity: Making Learning Design for Everyone

When it comes to building edTech products, it can be challenging to design a complex product with an el...
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May 30, 2025

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

As edTech product designers, we have a unique window into empathizing with the teachers and students wh...
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May 16, 2025

Best Practices for Onboarding Users to Your EdTech Product 

It’s happened to all of us. You’re in a product planning meeting, discussing features for your digital...
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Apr 18, 2025

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

Menus and navigation systems are easy to overlook in edTech products. If you want to design a better le...
Article heros38
Mar 07, 2025

4 Failproof Ways to Improve User Engagement in Your edTech Product

It can happen to any edTech brand.  Your learning content is helpful and effective, but users bail on a...
Article heros51
Jan 24, 2025

How User Experience Goals Change in edTech Products with Alternative Inputs

When SoapBox Labs launched in 2013, they set the bar for speech recognition in learning tools. By train...
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Nov 15, 2024

8 Accessibility Best Practices for edTech Products with Alternative Inputs

Whether you’re designing a learning tool that uses voice recognition or you’re planning the UI for a st...
Article heros 89
Aug 30, 2024

Design System ROI: The Value of Building a Design System in edTech

When you design an edTech product for the first time, part of the fun is developing the visual styles y...
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Jul 26, 2024

5 UX Design & Business Challenges edTech Companies Get Wrong—And What to Do About It

Editor’s note: This article is based on a recorded conversation between Sean Oakes and Jessica Millston...
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Jun 27, 2024

The Value of UX Discovery Sessions in edTech Product Design

If you want to create an edTech product that learners love and teachers love to adopt, UX discovery ses...
Article heros 88
Jun 03, 2024

Designing EdTech Products with Digital Literacy in Mind

Digital literacy can mean the difference between a student using your edTech product to fidelity or fal...
Article heros36
Jul 12, 2023

User Journey Mapping in edTech with Illustration and Infographics

When you design a new edTech product, you know how important it is to start with research. In particula...
Article heros80
Jun 30, 2023

UX Strategy: How to Create More Inclusive and Effective Designs

As the first billion-dollar edTech product, Scholastic’s Read180 is often cited as one of the most succ...
Article heros75
Mar 29, 2023

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

It takes a lot of planning, research, and skill to design an incredible edTech product. In addition to...
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Mar 13, 2023

Finding the Balance: Prioritizing User Needs in edTech Product Design As You Meet Business and Curriculum Requirements

Even if you love the idea of incorporating learning science techniques into your digital learning tool,...
Article heros74
Feb 27, 2023

Using edTech Research and Trends for Smarter Product Design

The edTech industry is growing rapidly, and competition for investment, product development, and school...
Article heros73
Feb 24, 2023

Accessibility and Inclusion in edTech UX Design

Inclusive design draws on the experiences of people from many different backgrounds to make products st...
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Dec 07, 2022

How Human-Centered Design Creates Better edTech Products

In industrial design, considering how the human body interacts with objects has led to incredible, intu...
Article heros66
Sep 23, 2022

Designing edTech for the Long Term By Staying Ahead of Trends

Trends in education don’t always stick around. That’s why they’re trends! From debates about the best w...
Article heros70
Aug 16, 2022

Beyond Reports: Better Ways to Use Data in edTech Products

Because of pandemic learning outcomes, now is a crucial time to use data in your edTech products to ref...
Article heros63
Jul 27, 2022

Designing Interactive Educational Technology for Better Learning Outcomes

One of the most important principles of learning science is to move away from more “traditional” modes...
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Jun 17, 2022

Not Just for Kids– Gamification is For Teachers Too

In edTech product design circles, we often talk about gamification as a way to reach young learners. Af...
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May 19, 2022

How UX Design Wireframes Solve Creative Problems in edTech

In UX design, wireframes are considered a product “blueprint.” Think about a traditional blueprint for...
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Apr 03, 2022

Using Wireframes to Power Decision Making and Your UX Design Strategy

Product wireframes are one of the first strategic milestones of the design process. Designed intentiona...
Article heros57
Mar 24, 2022

5 Innovative Trends in Educational Technology that are Changing the Game

As much as we’d all like to be “post-pandemic,” reality says otherwise. Teachers understand this better...
Article heros51
Feb 04, 2022

How to Develop Smarter edTech Tools for Collaboration

When it comes to “smart” edTech tools, we tend to think of artificial intelligence and powerful algorit...
Article heros49
Jan 11, 2022

UX for Kids: Designing Inclusive, Engaging edTech Experiences

As the edTech market becomes more competitive, your digital learning tools have to tick a lot of boxes....
Article heros48
Dec 13, 2021

Design for Education Toolkit: Why User Needs in Higher Ed Are Changing

The market for edTech in higher education is changing fast, and edTech product owners can do more to su...
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Dec 01, 2021

4 Tips for Designing Content in Your Learning Management System

Whether your LMS helps users review videos, work through interactive experiences, or read .PDF resource...
Article heros36
Nov 11, 2021

How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop for edTech Products

EdTech is in the middle of a major transitional moment, and the stakes for education have never been hi...
Article heros44
Nov 09, 2021

Outsourcing Your edTech UX Design: Everything You Need to Know

Weighing the benefits vs. challenges of outsourcing UX design is an important part of developing and la...
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Oct 11, 2021

15 Ways Universal Design Improves User Experience for All Students

This fall, most schools are back to in-person learning. But the rise of the Delta variant means virtual...
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Jul 28, 2021

UX in Education: Why UX Designers are the Learning Engineers of the Future

When it comes to designing UX in education, a generalist approach to product design and user experience...
Article heros37
Jul 09, 2021

A Guide to Turning Your Successful Print Product into a Digital Learning Tool

Your company has a successful print product on its hands, and you’re on the hunt for ways to turn that...
Article heros34
May 21, 2021

How Good UX Design Provides a Safe edTech Environment for Online Student Interaction

We all saw how challenging it was for teachers to keep their students engaged during remote learning. I...
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Apr 14, 2021

Team Spotlight: Pantea Parsa

Welcome to our Team Member Spotlight! Every month we interview a member of our team and highlight their...
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Jan 19, 2021

How to Integrate Your Development Team into the Creative Process

As remote learning becomes the norm, your UX design and development teams need to be even more thoughtf...
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Dec 07, 2020

Why You Should Invest in Accessible and Adaptive edTech Tools Right Now

With limited access to their teachers and peers, the shift to remote learning is especially disorientin...
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Nov 24, 2020

20 Years of Insights from the Front Lines of edTech

For the past 20 years, Backpack Interactive has partnered with museums, universities, publishers, and m...
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Sep 11, 2020

How to Design Impactful Digital Experiences on a Small Budget

Nonprofit and community organizations are already working hard to support their communities with few re...
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May 15, 2020

Where Does Your edTech Product Fall on the UX Threshold?

If you’ve ever tried to sign your child up for a PlayStation or Nintendo Switch account, you know how c...
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Feb 17, 2020

What Are You Selling? UX Solutions for SaaS in edTech

When it comes to designing software-as-a-service, or SaaS, it can be difficult to decide where your mar...
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Feb 06, 2020

Addressing Design Feedback: How to Keep Your Project Moving Forward

Seeing the visual direction for your edTech product for the first time is nerve-wracking. After all, yo...
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Jan 14, 2020

How to Incorporate SEL into any edTech Product

Over the past decade, the education world has embraced the idea that respect, social awareness, and rel...
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Dec 11, 2019

Visual Design Strategy: How to Make Stunning edTech Products Users Will Love

Strong visual design strategy is crucial for creating an effective edTech product that engages your use...
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Dec 03, 2019

EdTech Product Design: How Smart UX Saves $$ on Technology & Creates Efficiencies

We know that adding a UX or UI team into the mix at your company can be scary, even if you have lots of...
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Oct 01, 2019

The edTech Designer's Creativity Toolkit: Deep Listening

“Deep listening” is a process of engaged inquiry and openness crucial to design work. When you truly li...
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Sep 26, 2019

How Intuitive Onboarding Can Replace Costly Teacher PD & Support

Onboarding systems — which help users understand how to navigate your product — can be the difference b...
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Sep 19, 2019

How to Design the Best Data Dashboard in edTech

Student data is an extremely powerful tool for educators. But training educators to use complicated edT...
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Aug 07, 2018

LINK App for Learning Ally Gets Top Rating

EdTech Round Up, the industry’s premier source for educational technology news & reviews, honored t...
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Jul 25, 2018

Personalized Digital Rewards Are the Future of EdTech

“I’m missing basketball,” a student called out, interrupting our demonstration. I was with my design te...
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