The Art of Building EdTech: How UX Research Drives Success
A bunch of excited folks who had relocated from different parts of the world like the US, Australia, London, Bangalore as part of the team, sat down at lunch. They chattered, like hummingbirds on a sugar rush, discussing the pilot findings in Uttar Pradesh, India. The findings revealed that 64% of children showed improved reading skills after using Bolo (Read Along), along with the app launch event featuring Sundar Pichai.
I had just joined this team to lead User Research(UXR) at Google. While I was wrapping up my head around who is who, the livewired PM and the designer were already discussing with me that what new features could amplify this impact. And is how I got on to work!
In this memoir, a mini journal, I will use Read Along – an app that helps children learn to read through the magic of it’s speech recognition and AI to speak more about UX strategies, UXR methods and cross functional collaboration tactics we used that enabled a moonshot project to grow from it’s early days into a mature product.
Read Along’s Early Launch Days
Everyone was supercharged with a great release, attention from our leadership and the love we were getting from the consumers. The engineering team was swiftly enhancing speech recognition accuracy, expanding language options, and the PM was working tirelessly to scale us up the product at a rapid pace.
Early Release of Bolo-Read Along - The app had multiple global Indian languages and kids could read in english Sundar Pichai in the app launch event
with real time feedback in their native language
Users Won’t Talk to Us and Product Wouldn’t Wait for it
Our primary users-the children, were barely accessible for research. Within our limited participant pool, I noticed their reluctance to engage with traditional research methods such as surveys or interviews.They were either shy or answered gibberish to get rid of us quickly. The UXR team and I were frustrated and without crucial user insights.
The product team was ok to make decisions on limited feedback and my pushback raised doubts, corners and even tensions on occasion.
Way Forward for Weekly Insightful, Actionable User Inputs
I decided to take small steps - My team had access to some kids, and the teammates had kids too.
On the field researching with children
My first goal was to improvise methods to gather natural feedback from them. So, I proposed and designed interviews into “pretend games-where children acted as teachers, showing us how they would use the product” and Focused group discussions turned into 'fun group discussions,” where kids discussed our testing assets with each other as if they were toys." We wrote the discussion guides carefully and started seeing some success
With that, the second goal was to find ways to enroll schools and local communities in our “trusted tester program - participant pool that gave access to new and old users alike” to co-develop the product with us on a weekly basis. This took a few weeks but it gave us weekly access to our user pool to talk to them.
Back at the office, to enhance rigor and speed up feedback, we created a calendar of weekly and biweekly rapid research and opened it to all teammates to lead, including engineers, designers, and PMs. The UXR team took charge of synthesizing field findings by triangulating them with academic research and analytics.
To sum up our learnings, we organized weekly "UXR hours'' for presenting back our insights cross-functionally
Baby steps, Same Steps Every Time - And I got rolling
In the next 6 months UXR helped to improve 19 features, said no to building 5 new features and helped boost the engagement from 5-37%(different pages/different features).
That was the critical self validation I needed for my ways but honestly, the joy was in seeing the team warm up to my approach and UXR process, findings & recommendations. Team began trusting if UXR said no, they were engaged in UXR hours and every time we discussed business and product metrics, user problems became front and center.
Product Roadmap and Future Strategy
Shortly we released the app in 9 new countries and the US was next and became top runner in the category against the best like Duo Lingo and Khan Academy. But our analytics indicated that children reading on the app would not finish the books, they may play but not read enough. UXR gathered - that requiring reading for rewards didn't excite the kids and they would drop off early.
With this, a key questions lingered: How to sustain young learners' interest in reading books and spending more time on the app
Ambiguous UXR Proposal for Strategy was the Hardest Sell
To truly grasp why users behave the way they do, we needed more than just repeating feedback loops,usability tests, and evaluations. If we didn't understand their actions and motivations, we couldn't tell if a feature would succeed. That's why UXR had to dive into 'foundational research’ observing users for a longer period than just asking questions. This process took about 3-4 months to really see how users act and what interests them.
The long timelines, unsure outcomes of the study made it challenging to convince everyone to allocate budgets and UXR bandwidth to it, particularly given the numerous upcoming studies focused on product-market fit and concept evaluations.
The multilayered process of using analytics layered with behavior mapping drove insights for the product strategy and roadmap
Thinking back - persistent open conversations helps find common ground
It was a bold move for UXR to propose for an ambiguous long study considering how nimble things were for the product back then. Any small trigger could change our product strategy and throw us off from showing impact through UXR strategy or UXR expertise alone could have potentially led to the study's failure.
Firstly, I genuinely heard team concerns, brainstormed on solutions together and advocated through emails, 1:1s and team meetings for a few weeks to get the approvals.
I learned that it was imperative for me to reiterate how feedback studies and fundamentals were different and break down the ambiguity. I mapped UXR tracks against the product roadmap to carve bandwidth.
We wanted insights to guide the roadmap, so I dedicated several weeks in meticulous planning for methods and outcomes before venturing into the field. Our aim was to guarantee that our insights were supported by more than 1 method and that we examined them from diverse perspectives.
Flash Forward - We were informing Strategy
Read Along had no predecessors in the market and there were so many possibilities our app could go, especially with all the leadership attention on it. This study helped show how our core audience was in the age group 6-10, not under 6 or above 10. We uncovered crucial insights from our core users, focusing on gamification, visual preferences, and the in-app reading assistant avatar. This prompted a strategic pivot in our feature roadmap to better serve this age group.
Additionally, we gained a strategic advantage by being six months ahead in product development, elevating user voice and enhancing our influence.
Product maturity for Sustained Business
Few years into the product, my influence and role expanded, a topic worthy of further discussion in the future. Our team was experiencing turnover with both long standing members departing and new ones joining. This transition emphasized the importance of passing down our insights about Read Along's users, nurturing empathy and critical thinking skills within the team. Concurrently, we observed a shift in our product focus towards sustained business.
A Setback Came Before We Tasted Success
We were now exploring concepts and product market fit for school and educators to scale up the product reach and impact. Unfortunately, we experienced a setback when one of our experiments failed to replicate our earlier success. The idea designed to distribute reading homeworks didn’t provide educators with enough value.
The experiment was to provide a tool to give to educators in distributing reading home work
We Reimagined our Development Process - UXD UXR PM Eng Symphony
What was drastically different this time was that we had access to “adults”, which meant that we could meet them often, test often and co-create a valuable outcome. We were yet to leverage that for better outcomes.
By this time, collaboration was natural to the team. Everyone was constructive, eager to identify and solve problem
The design and research team came together to evolve the design process to progressively go from low-fidelity to high-fidelity concept. The idea was to sketch out low fidelity concepts, meet users for feedback and reiterated to eliminate or add offerings which were valuable to them. This cycle is repeated every 5-7 days in an agile manner.
Along with this, for the first time, we introduced UX metrics (helpfulness, usefulness, and usability) against business objectives to map how each iteration moved them
We baked in PM and engineering reviews at strategic points to ensure that we were narrowing down our value proposition based on feasibility. s
We finished the concepts by publicly testing a build model over 6-8 weeks layered with Quantitative Research to bolster confidence in feature development.
The PM, Research, Design and engineering teams together, confidently, built alignment with leadership, wrote PRD and set us up for build and production.
Design Time Reduced by 40% - User Satisfaction was Up at 79%
It was the team’s success ultimately. A large-scale, pre-release tests with several schools and educators revealed high user satisfaction of upto 79% and promised high positive adoption trends. Educators continued using the product even after the official test period.
By applying UX Research-inspired, user centric principles throughout the development of Read Along, our entire team gained valuable insights into user needs and preferences, leading to a more successful product.
This iterative approach helped us avoid costly engineering mistakes, build a strong team consensus around user- centered design, and ultimately create a product that users love and continue to use.This proactive investment in UXR resulted in significant cost savings and a more enjoyable experience for our users.In contrast, neglecting UXR can lead to poor product design, user dissatisfaction, and increased costs in areas like marketing, partnerships, and engineering.
Looking ahead, the insights gained from this experience will continue to inform my UXR strategies in new organizations, fueling meaningful experiences and driving positive outcomes in the tech world
