Inclusive. Intelligent. Design: Solving the Problems that Matter
by: Jeremy Sabath, Chief of Product Development
What We’ve Done:
We began the design process by systematically studying our greatest strength: first-hand experience. Sage has taught nearly 100 WordsLiive programs, iterating each time, refining the user-experience, and creating meaningful impact that students and teachers love, and that schools and districts have paid for. By examining that experience, we were able to distill core, abstracted components of our product. I then interviewed Sage to better understand our primary users and the WordsLiive curriculum. After auditing existing lesson plans, I had Sage teach multiple lessons to me as a student so that I could capture the success of Sage’s existing lesson plans to translate into our digital platform.
This process resulted in a generalized scaffold for WordsLiive lessons that informed the next phase of our process — experience mapping. Experience maps are a structured way to create empathy with our primary users — classroom teachers — and identify their goals, needs, and pain points at each stage of the WordsLiive experience. Through interviews and discussions between Sage, myself, and classroom teachers, we generated numerous insights and used them to kick off the visual design process. Read more about our design philosophy below.
Our Design Philosophy
At WordsLiive, a core practice of our design philosophy is putting teachers and students first. That means being transparent and open about our design process and ensuring our users are fully involved from start to finish. What I love most about product design is solving real problems that matter to real people. That’s why I’m motivated every day to partner with brilliant educators to design a revolutionary tool for the future of learning.
Problems don’t matter in isolation or in the abstract; they matter to people. For this reason, I am intentional about crafting a design process that identifies specific solutions to specific user needs and tests the success of those solutions as efficiently as possible. It goes something like this:
- Empathy research: Connect with users and identify specific needs. This stage helps us zero in on what matters most to them.
- Rapid sketching: Draft multiple potential solutions to reveal hidden requirements, unearth design challenges, and refine the design strategy.
- Mobile-first wireframing: Identify the strongest ideas and sketch in greater detail to hone in on interface components, layout, and flow. At this stage, it’s all about considering how the app flows in the hands of the user.
- Digital wireframing and prototyping: Utilizing Sketch and InVision, I build medium-fidelity clickable prototypes that further focus on flow. It’s important to hold off on look and feel at this stage because people (including me) get married to things that look good (even if they don’t work), which can slow down the process.
- User interviews and testing: After creating a clickable prototype that simulates a potential user experience, we put it in front of real users — middle and high school English teachers and relevant stakeholders. We ask them to build a lesson without our assistance. Their successes and failures, en masse, reveal insights that allow us to iterate on our design, improve the user experience, and build up a knowledge base about what matters to our users so that we can best serve them.
Insights and Implications
There’s only so much we can learn from our prototype, especially when the experience we’re designing lives, in large part, outside of the screen. That’s why I’m so excited to begin testing our functional, coded prototype in a live classroom this fall. Working closely with our teacher partners at Wise High School, we’ll spend the upcoming semester nailing the experience, closing in on the things that matter most to our users, and collaboratively building up our content library as we prepare for official launch and commercialization.
About Jeremy
Jeremy graduated from Harvard with a degree in Psychology and Computer Science. He has professional experience in software engineering and product design from time at Google, Fresh Tilled Soil, and as an independent contractor. He’s fascinated by the human experience and has spent much of his life investigating why we are the way we are and what that means for how we conceive of ourselves and our place in the universe. He also plays guitar, sings and plays trombone in a soul band, and is obsessed with NBA basketball.
