Design in EdTech: Product Design + UX Research + UX Writing + LXD
A deep dive into how four design disciplines collaborate to ensure consistent high quality learner impact throughout product discovery and development at Babbel
Design in edtech organizations often looks and feels different from other companies in the technology sector. The glaring difference is that the “user” is a learner, which is not a trivial distinction. For anyone who has been tasked with designing specifically for learners, the importance of acknowledging the special needs of adult learners and the conditions required for learning should be obvious.
Yet, this distinction does not always receive adequate attention when it comes to defining organizational structures or team compositions. Is this because product leaders fail to grasp the implications of building a product for learning? While that can’t be ruled out in some instances, a more likely explanation is that since most employees of any edtech organization have been learners themselves, they tend to overestimate how much they understand about the science of teaching and learning.
Thus, they may design and build based on assumptions that the ways they’ve personally learned in the past — what has facilitated or hindered their learning — mirrors what the users of their product or service need in order to be successful in their own learning journey. This could be attributed to common cognitive biases, such as the Dunning-Kruger Effect or the Overconfidence Effect.
Regardless of the rationale that might explain this misconception, the impact on learners is often an experience with a functional or even truly enjoyable UX/UI that fails to provide them with the guidance and support they need to acquire, consolidate, and confidently transfer new knowledge and skills to the real world.
Design at Babbel — Then
Babbel’s Product Design team is large and growing, but when I joined Babbel nearly three years ago, the Product Design team included only a handful of Product Designers, one full-time UX Researcher, and one UX Writer. Those three roles interacted with the product development teams in a quasi– “internal agency model”, often supporting multiple teams and initiatives simultaneously.
More often than not, UX Research was only brought in to conduct usability tests of prototypes. UX Writing was often looped in late in the process, mostly ensuring that the copy fit the constraints of the design. Babbel didn’t have any LX Designers, though there was a small team of Instructional Designers in the Didactics department, who similarly functioned as more of a service team, supporting product and content teams on an ad hoc basis.
Much of what we would now consider “discovery” was conducted in Design Sprints, facilitated by a Product Designer and applying Design Thinking to solve user problems.
While the Design Sprints did focus on understanding real user problems and ideating solutions to those problems, and sprint participants usually represented a diversity of functions and perspectives, many of those participants were often not part of the team that would end up building that feature and the problems identified were not necessarily prioritized in the product strategy. The discovery themes didn’t always align with the development and delivery tracks of the product teams.
In fact, when a concept had been sufficiently de-risked and defined, Product Designers often had to “sell” the concept and solution to a Product Manager in order to get it on a development team’s backlog. When that team did pick up the concept from their backlog, they usually had to spend considerable time trying to understand the context and translating the concept into something that developers could work on, often determining that the solutions were “unbuildable” for various reasons (e.g., complexity, architecture, tech, scope).
Design at Babbel — Now
Three years later and our Product Design team has grown tremendously, both in terms of capacity and capabilities. With approximately 15 Product Designers embedded across 10+ Squads and Tribes (à la the Spotify model), Design is now positioned to help shape the direction of product discovery and development at the team level as part of empowered Product Trios (defined loosely and not limited to only three individuals). At Babbel we call our Tribes “Experiences Areas” (XA) and Squads empowered “Product Development Teams”.
Product Designers are embedded in the Product Teams (squads) and, together with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager, represent the key accountable functions throughout discovery and development and through to product/feature launch.
In addition to Product Designers, our design department includes a UX Writing team of three, a UX Research team of six, and an LX Design team of seven. Each of these design specialists are embedded in a tribe, where they serve as primary touchpoints for one or more product development or content teams.
Cognitive Diversity
With four design functions that are all ultimately responsible for safeguarding a user-centric approach to product design and development, there is bound to be significant overlap in terms of expertise and skill set. A quick perusal of the mission statements and core skills of each function illustrates this fundamental overlap quite clearly.
Product Design
To be tenacious user advocates, and design an effective and delightful experience for our learners that guides them on a transformational language-learning journey.
User Experience Research
With your research expertise you passionately pursue knowledge that brings language learners to the center of our decision making, collaborating along the way to inspire Babbel’s agile teams to build better products.
User Experience Writing
To be tenacious user advocates, collaborating with cross-functional teams to design content across Babbel’s ecosystem in an effective and delightful experience for our learners that guides them on a transformational language-learning journey.
Learner Experience Design
Apply learning expertise in cross-functional settings to discover, define and solve learner problems — empowering Babbel users to achieve their personal language goals.
While there may be overlap in terms of mission and core skills, each discipline brings a slightly different perspective to empathizing with and designing for the user / learner. The result is a level of cognitive diversity that empowers our product teams to focus holistically on user problems and opportunities instead of narrowly on feature delivery and maintenance. The result is a more impactful, cohesive, effective, and enjoyable learning experience for Babbel’s learners.
Product Discovery and Development at Babbel
Just as our design team has expanded both in terms of capacity and capability, our product mindset has shifted away from our former feature team mentality. Gone are the days of siloed Design Sprints and delivery-focused teams. Babbel has since embraced a model of continuous discovery conducted by empowered product teams within our learner-facing Experience Areas.
These empowered teams are driven to solve user problems and explore opportunities to enrich the user experience. We consider our process a Babbelized version of the Zendesk Triple Diamond.
While not prescriptive in the strictest sense, this visualization does seek to highlight the type of thinking and decision-making we endeavor to employ as part of our commitment to exceptional UX/LX. It helps us coalesce around a shared vocabulary and set of expectations. It offers guidance with flexibility, so that a team which might have an embedded LX Designer but no Product Designer or vice versa can feel confident that they are designing the right solutions for the right reasons and in the right way. Likewise, since it is not linear in nature, it allows for teams to cycle back through previous stages as new learnings and insights are uncovered.
Problem Discovery and Definition
The goal of the first diamond is a deep understanding of the problem space and user needs (including assumptions, opportunities, and risks). The gateway is the articulation of an Opportunity Hypothesis, defined by a Problem Statement and related User Need Statements. These should be evidence-informed, relying on primary and secondary research as well as user data.
Solution Discovery and Concept Validation
The goals of the second diamond include de-risking concepts and validating assumptions and identifying risks and requirements. The gateway of this stage is a validated Solution Hypothesis, which requires that the solution concept has been tested with users and the insights from those tests have informed the iteration of the concept and preliminary design and content requirements.
Development, Validation, and Rollout
The goals of the third diamond include designing, developing and launching the right solution for the right segment of users. The gateway includes a clearly defined Experiment Hypothesis and experiment design, developed in partnership with our Product Intelligence & Experimentation Platform Team, as well as a Go-to-Market strategy to support a full product launch.
Accountability vs. Responsibility
As embedded functions on empowered product teams, the Product Manager, the Product Designer, and an Engineer (a.k.a. The Product Trio) are the ultimate “accountable functions”. They are present throughout the entire discovery → development → delivery process and represent the core decision makers.
They assess the big risks of product development before, during, and after the discovery phase, assuring that what we design is:
- valuable for the user,
- usable by the user,
- feasible to build, maintain and scale, and
- viable for the business and market to support.
We view these accountable functions as “generalist roles”, which are supported by specialists. For example, the Product Designer is a design generalist and the Learner Experience Designer, UX Writer, and UX Researcher are design specialists. Thus, “accountability” doesn’t mean that the Product Designers need to possess all the expertise and skills needed to build a language learning product, but they should be comfortable enough to understand what they don’t know or where their assumptions could be biasing their thinking. Likewise, they should be confident enough to know where specialist expertise is needed, so that they can bring in those specialist roles at the right times.
This understanding of when, where, and why to incorporate a specialist is critical when building a language learning ecosystem like Babbel. Evaluating the value and usability of a feature, service, or experience requires that the team view opportunities and solutions through the lens of cognitive science, behavioral psychology, teaching and learning science, and linguistics and language acquisition.
This means that it is not only UX / UI that we need to keep in mind, rather we need to approach our work from a Learner Experience (LX) perspective. At Babbel, we equate great LX with the delivery of genuine learning value, which requires that the team focus equally on the UX, the PAH (Pedagogy, Andragogy, Heutagogy) Continuum, the UI, and learner-appropriate and engaging content.
Ultimately it’s about ensuring consistent high-quality learner impact. While the accountability for delivering that impact will sit largely on the shoulders of Product Trio, they have the support of the rest of their cross-functional team, who share in the responsibility.
The key here is trust — the specialists need to trust that the generalists will loop them in at the right times and for the right reasons, and the generalists need to trust that the specialists will share the responsibility throughout the process as needed. No one should feel like they need to chase after the process and just “be in the room” or else no one is caring for the needs of the learner or ensuring the quality of the learner experience. And no one should feel uncertain about the scope of their role, which could result in friction, loss of trust, or even duplicative and cross-purpose efforts.
Thus, our design functions collaborate closely with each other and often together represent “Design” within the “Product Trio”, partnering to ensure the fidelity of the process. The experience, expertise, capacity or even seniority of the design functions on each product team are balanced against that team’s remit and the problems they are endeavoring to understand and solve. What this means from an operational perspective is that on any given team one of the design functions may drive the process a bit more directly at times, while others play a supporting role.
So, it could be that a UX Researcher is leading the creation of a user journey map, while the Product Designer is conducting user interviews, or a UX Writer is developing a card sorting task for user interviews while the LX Designer is mocking a low-fidelity prototype. It’s about collectively deploying our skills and expertise to fit the needs of the discovery and development process of that team, learning from each other along the way and, of course, ensuring that our learners have an enjoyable and productive learning experience with Babbel.
👉 Job Openings: UX Roles in EdTech
👉 Podcast conversations on UX in the EdTech industry
About Babbel
Babbel is a language learning company founded in 2007 that was one of the first to take language learning online. Today, millions of people around the world use Babbel to learn a language and connect with another culture. Babbel is driven by a purpose: Creating mutual understanding through language.
This means building an ecosystem of language learning offerings that helps people connect across cultures. Babbel, Babbel Live and Babbel for Business provide users with the most effective solution to be able to communicate meaningfully with real people, in real situations. The key is a blend of humanity and technology. More than 60,000 lessons across 14 languages are hand-crafted by 150+ linguists, with user behaviours continuously analysed to shape and tweak the learner experience.
And it works: studies with Yale University, City University of New York, and Michigan State University prove its effectiveness. From headquarters in Berlin and New York, 750 people from more than 65 nationalities represent all the differences that make humans unique. Babbel is the most profitable language learning app worldwide, with more than 10 million subscriptions sold and counting. For more information, visit www.babbel.com.
