Education
We work with the companies and nonprofits that build these products, most of which have to hold up for a student, a teacher and an administrator at once.
Clients include
Three products, each of which needed a different mix of the same team: research, interface, content modelling and the platform underneath.
Teach to One Roadmap adapts to each student’s path through K-12 maths. The model had grown stronger and the experience hadn’t kept up: navigation wasn’t obvious, options had multiplied, and students and teachers couldn’t always tell what to work on next or why. We redesigned the navigation, the visual system and the way progress is shown.
EdTech Evidence Exchange collects structured, anonymous evidence on how education technology actually performs in classrooms, so institutions can evaluate tools before adopting them. The platform had to be rigorous enough to trust and anonymous enough that educators would tell the truth, and usable by people with very different roles and comfort levels.
Sprouting needed educators to create, organize and publish learning content without a developer in the loop, and students to move through it without being taught how. We built the content model, the editing workflow and the student experience as one system.
In most markets the person using the software picked it, or their team did. In education the decision happened somewhere else, and three things follow from that.
A teacher gets the platform in a training day and meets a class the following week. The product has to be legible the first time, because the second explanation isn’t coming. That’s a constraint on structure, not a request for a tutorial.
A product can win the pilot and lose the classroom. What convinces an administrator in a demo, all coverage and reporting and dashboards, is rarely what makes a teacher open it again on a Thursday. Both have to be designed for, and they pull in different directions.
There is no moment where it gets declared. Usage drifts, the renewal conversation gets harder, and by the time it shows up in the numbers the reason is a year old. Which is why the interface decisions that look small here aren’t.
In a 45-minute working session we’ll go through who your product has to convince, who has to live with it, and where those two are pulling against each other. Bring the part teachers skip.