UX in EdTech: Small Victories in Class
Micro-interactions can deliver value to students and teachers
Know Our Customers
Two of Learning.com’s core values really resonate with the research and design efforts that go into our products: ‘Listen’ and ‘Know Our Customers.’ We take this to heart and our teams regularly conduct focus groups to ensure that we are building deep understanding of what administrators, teachers, and students need in order to be successful in the classroom.
To do this, it’s essential to get out of the office and go visit schools. What we learn from our focus groups always exceeds our expectations and helps us have a better understanding of some of the challenges that teachers and students face in the classroom.
Small Victories
Earlier last year, we visited an elementary school and conducted an after-school focus group with 12 students ranging from grades 2–5. Each student had a laptop and log-in card to access Learning.com lessons. After the students logged into their account, we asked them to launch their first lesson. Immediately we heard lots of clicking, and hands started going up in the air. None of the students could launch the lesson and couldn’t figure out why. We quickly discovered they had encountered a pop-up blocker, since the lessons launch in a new tab. The pop-up blocker icon (in Chrome) is very subtle and these young students had no prior experience or understanding how to resolve the issue on their own. After a few minutes of frustration, many students abandoned their attempts to launch the lesson and started surfing the internet. It took four of us adults about 10 minutes to resolve this problem by going around to each student’s computer and help the kids get back to the task at hand.
Our big takeaway from that session was realizing that if a single teacher encountered this problem in a class of 20–30 students, they wouldn’t have the time or resources to help all their students resolve this issue. We went back to the office and brainstormed ways to solve the problem. It is important that we maintain the rule of content opening in a new tab due to interoperability considerations. This ensures the content will have the maximum available screen real estate and the best student experience on any Learning Management System such as Canvas or Schoology. We came up with a design for a pop-up blocker alert to help students and teachers identify and resolve this issue in the future. Additionally, we added a graphic with a character from a Learning.com lesson to add some extra delight.
Recently a group of customers visited our office and they reported how helpful this alert was for both teachers and students. They shared that the pop-up alert created a teachable moment and students feel proud that they can help inform other students with non-Learning.com content if a pop-up blocker is present.
Uncovering Magic in Small Moments
Teachers are truly heroes. It’s a humbling experience to see how much they balance each day. Time is limited and it’s essential that our products are reliable and help make teaching digital literacy curriculum engaging and fun. When we’re offsite at a school, what stands out the most are the insights into small details that customers don’t often report. Additionally, customers will sometimes avoid searching through support documentation to find information that isn’t available in the moment they need it. These small moments can be captured as micro-interactions within the overall user experience and can cause frustration if they aren’t properly addressed.
By understanding and anticipating the needs of our customers through micro-interactions, we can eliminate any roadblocks and allow 1) teachers to focus on teaching and 2) students to focus on learning.
Tiny Wins
Joel Califa wrote a fantastic article called ‘Tiny Wins’ which described successful implementations of small changes that delivered a big win for GitHub customers. In his article, he breaks down some of the characteristics of a tiny win.
Joel talks about highly repetitive tasks as being an important ingredient to a tiny win. Addressing these types of moments helps save time, which is extremely valuable in education. The implementation of our pop-up blocker alert fell within the upper left quadrant of High Impact / Low Effort. Additionally, it was a visible change to our customers and they immediately received the benefit of this new feature.
Another instance where we implemented a ‘tiny win’ was with our new Adaptive Keyboarding product. When we interviewed customers early in the project, one teacher said how often she reminds students about proper finger placement and ergonomics. This was reinforced during another off-site visit, where we watched a teacher telling his students to check their posture while keyboarding. We watched the students get their hands back on home row and sit up in their seats (and not begrudgingly, they truly wanted to do it the right way… they just needed the reminder). We used this insight as an opportunity to save teachers the effort of reminding their students about finger placement by building in a ‘Ready, Set, Go’ reminder before students begin an exercise. It’s a small moment in time but multiplied across multiple classes and students, this saves a lot of time and energy in their day.
Conclusion
Our priority is to provide customers with an experience that saves them time, leaves them happy and helps to eliminate barriers to student learning. Taking action on our core values of ‘Listen’ and ‘Know Our Customers’ allows us to incorporate tiny wins in our process. The result is delighted customers and an improved user experience.
