Education

One education partner, from user research to the classroom.

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

  • New Classrooms
  • EdTech Evidence Exchange
  • Sprouting

What we’ve built for education companies

Three products, each of which needed a different mix of the same team: research, interface, content modelling and the platform underneath.

What changes when the user didn’t choose the product

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.

Questions we get before the first call

  1. Do you work with schools and districts, or with edtech companies?

    With the companies and nonprofits that build the products. Every education project on this site was for an organization whose product is the software: a K-12 learning platform, an evidence-collection platform, a content platform. Institutional implementation is a different business and we don’t claim it.
  2. Do you have education products of your own?

    No, and we’re not planning to. Everything we’ve built in this sector belongs to the company or nonprofit that commissioned it. We’re not going to end up on a shortlist next to you.
  3. What does the team actually look like?

    Multidisciplinary from the first week, and smaller than that usually implies. The person deciding how a lesson reads on screen and the person modelling the content behind it are in the same conversation, not in sequence. There is no phase where the work changes hands and has to be explained again.
  4. Can you work inside our existing platform?

    Usually yes. New Classrooms had a model and users before we arrived, and the work was structure, visual system and interface inside what already existed rather than a rebuild around it. Sprouting is the other shape: a platform built from scratch, around the course material the team already had somewhere else.
  5. How long before something is in front of a teacher?

    Sooner than the roadmap usually allows. EdTech Evidence Exchange went out as an MVP under a tight timeline, which is the normal shape of this work: the calendar is set by a school year, not by a release plan.

Tell us who has to open it on a Monday.

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.