Drop the Dictatorship and Embrace UX

Teachers are not generally seen as UX designers, but they are. Unfortunately, they tend to design for the wrong user: themselves.

We’ve all had at least one teacher who had every rule, every procedure spelled out explicitly. Papers must be stapled the correct way, assignments must be turned in to the correct box, all supplies are meticulously organized and labeled and don’t you dare put the scissors where the pencils go.

I call them dictator teachers, or classroom dictators. Take your pick.

They do this to avoid going crazy because kids are out of control. During my five years of teaching, I felt this unstoppable push toward more organization, more rules, more dictatorship.

These teachers are designing their own experience. They’re sick of having to clean up and organize their classroom, so they want to get the students to pick up after themselves and keep things organized. They’re sick of dealing with parents who want every exception made for their horrible child. They’re sick of answering the same questions, over and over and over.

Their classroom is less of a place of learning and more of a place to learn and keep rules and jump through hoops.

[Token plug for blended learning] When blended learning is done right, it ameliorates many of these teacher struggles. But this post isn’t about blended learning, it’s about UX.

We shouldn’t blame teachers for being like this. The forces of out-of-control kids and their oh-that-explains-a-lot parents and the squeezed-to-the-last-drop budget makes it all but inevitable for teachers to become classroom dictators. They’ve never taken a class on UX—most of them have probably never even heard of it—so there’s no reason for them to even think about it.

But they should. We should start training teachers to be UX designers.

In competitive software development, UX is crucial. Every delay, every confusing interaction, every ugly button turns away users, and your product fails. (Notable exceptions, of course, are software companies who have big contracts and a bullying market presence that everyday users can’t fight.) A good UX designer will constantly put herself in the mindset of the user and attempt to make use of their product as easy as possible.

That’s how we need teachers to act. The product is learning, the users are students. Teachers should constantly be putting themselves in the mindset of their students and making sure access to learning is as smooth as possible, rather than working on making their own lives easier.

Before we go on, I’ll admit that this sounds like I’m asking teachers to do more work. But good UX—with the help of blended learning—will be the better investment in the long run. If UX fails, but the user has no choice but to use the software, they contact technical support. In teaching, the teacher is technical support. Therefore, good UX means less troubleshooting for the teacher, and more time saved in the long run.

The thing is, learning is fun. Solving problems is fun. Working on projects is fun. But throw on some crappy UX, and it’s no longer fun. It’s work. And students disengage.

I googled “ux design mistakes”:

• Bringing in UX too late. When teachers design curriculum, it often includes some sort of lesson. But if teachers considered how pointless it is to try to get kids to learn anything from someone talking to the whole class, they’d limit it.
• Leaving it to the last minute to get user feedback. The only feedback most teachers get is the glossy-eyed stare during a lesson, and many of them take the cue that the students need to be better listeners. They should take a lesson from Edmodo (and so should ed-tech companies) and give opportunities for feedback on pretty much everything as the semester progresses.
• Not setting any UX standards and guidelines. Actually this is one area where many teachers do well: they create patterns in the classroom. Every Friday is a quiz, every unit has two assignments and one project, etc. But from one class to another there is a lot of discrepancy, so students with 7–10 teachers per semester have to learn 7–10 different class formats. I can tell you from experience that there’s a learning curve that students have to overcome when they take one of your classes for the first time.
• Too much reading. Reading fiction is great. Nonfiction is sometimes great. But the thing with that kind of reading is that you don’t need to pay attention to singular sentences in oceans of paragraphs. Teachers make the egregious mistake of assuming most—if not all—of their students will not only read through the entirety, but remember small pieces of information from it, both when writing directions and writing quizzes. In UX you use text only when necessary, and you present it in a way that the really important things that can’t be communicated any other way are unmissable.

The list could go on but I just wanted to point out key UX ideas that are largely ignored in the classroom, and that needs to stop.