How I redesigned an edtech product to boost retention and user experience

This is the process I used to redesign an edtech product and help them improve their onboarding process. Just to give you a bit more context, we are talking about an edtech company in Romania that at that moment served 650 schools and had over 100,000 users. Their challenges were around streamlining the onboarding process for teachers, which was quite challenging for them and it took a lot of time. And helping the company to improve the overall user experience of the platform for all the key stakeholders. And here we are talking besides the teachers about students, about parents, about administrators as well. During our collaboration, we used the same 3 milestone process that we use today, though it wasn't that well defined at that moment. The first step was around understanding the business and the product context. And for this, we ran a bunch of workshops with the product leaders. The second one was about bringing ideas to life and testing them. And during this phase, we gathered their team together, we defined the concepts, created a prototype, and tested it with teachers. And the third one was about designing the assets for development. So for understanding the business and the product context, we ran a couple of workshops with the product leaders, which in this case were the founder and the product manager. And we used a bunch of exercises and frameworks to gather as much context as possible about the business and the product. So as you can see, Miro was kind of our playground, and we filled it up with a lot of information. You can see here all the boards that we used. We started with taking a bunch of notes, focusing on a couple of key areas of the product and the business. And here we are talking about goals, challenges they have, defining what is the product, talking about the core features of the product, looking at opportunities and advantages they can explore, but also having a better understanding about the key stakeholders and how they monetize the whole thing. Then we spent time to look at their competitors, both direct and indirect competitors as well. And though we are talking Romanian market at this stage, we also looked a bit outside to see what other options are on the market. We also wanted to see how they compare to the products that are on the market, and for this we've done the positioning map to see kind of how they position themselves on the most important features they thought at that moment. But also we've done a competitor's matrix to have a proper understanding feature-wise where they stay when it comes to the competitors. Now, at this stage, we tried out different frameworks. As I said, this was kind of the first setup that we've done with this workshop way of doing product design. So we tried out SWOT analysis, 4 Ps of marketing, value proposition, defining the value proposition, positioning statement. All this to gather as much insight and context as possible about the business and the product from the founder and the product manager. We also did the business model canvas to understand the whole business structure, but we didn't stop there. Then we moved towards user personas and customer journey maps. So we defined the main user persona, in our case being the teacher, and then we mapped out the customer journey for the teacher. And you can see here on this area regarding the onboarding and first part of using the product, that was kind of the main area that we had to impact. Those were the main challenges that we had to solve in a way or the other. So this was the focus for the rest of our collaboration as well. We briefly defined the student too, to keep it in mind while we designed the product. Then we started to map out flows to have an overview of the product and how all the sections are connected. So you can see here a simple version of that, but then we went even more in depth. So you can see all the sections here and how those sections are connected and how you can go from one section to another section. We also created a mood board with the main competitors to have a starting point for the visual direction of the product. The outcome of these first workshops were mostly a clear overview of the product's context, strong points, weak points, the challenges in general the business is facing. Then we also had a redefined or a clearly defined user persona and customer journey, which they didn't have at the beginning. And what was really important, a precise understanding of the customer's biggest struggle regarding the platform, which was around the onboarding process, as you could see on the customer journey map. With all these insights and knowledge in one place, it was easy to onboard the rest of the team to help us move from these insights and challenges to actually create solutions. And this is what we've done during the next phase of the product. So creating solutions and testing it with customers. For this next phase, we invited a couple more people from the company besides the founder and the product manager. That means somebody from marketing, from engineering, from customer support. And that helped us to get even more perspective and insights in one place in order to shape that solution that then we wanted to test with the customers. So the first step was to transfer all the information from what we've created in the first 2 workshops into the whole team, if you want. So have an alignment regarding the insights and the challenges. And this is what we've done in the first phase, basically having a discussion and taking notes. Then we wanted to set some long-term visions of where the company's going in the next 2 years, but also to uncover some challenges that might stop us to get there along the way. Now, once we defined the customer journey map in the first 2 workshops with the product manager and the founder, we revisited it here and added all the stakeholders on the map in order to have an overview of the whole context, how these stakeholders interact with the product and how these stakeholders interact with each other. And we also highlighted the area that we wanted to focus on. As I mentioned straight from the beginning, it was around the signup and onboarding process. Now, once we had all this information, insights, knowledge in one place, we started to look out for other companies' products competitors, but even products from other industries that solved similar challenges, and they might serve as a good inspiration for what we want to do. So we took screenshots, we recorded short videos, and added everything in Miro. Then each of us spent time to actually draft a concept, a pen and paper sketch basically, of how we think the solution should look like. And we used that as a starting point to define the prototype that we want to test. You can see here the concepts, very basic pen and paper stuff with a bunch of boxes and arrows and some Post-its to explain what's happening on the screen. Then together we defined some key steps that we wanted the customers to go through, and we used the concepts to show kind of how those steps should look like. So it was quite easy to transfer all this into a prototype. At that moment, we used Sketch. So we created a prototype in Sketch, and I guess we uploaded it in InVision or something. And that's what we actually used to test with some teachers and gather their feedback to figure out next steps and areas of improvements. So the outcome of these workshops were a validated new design direction. We redesigned the whole product look and feel and flows as well. And we spent a good chunk of time to make sure that the onboarding flow works for the teachers and they understand what they have to do. And they have somewhat a guide of the steps they have to take. And there was also a clear understanding of the customer's problems and possible solutions. So we simplified the onboarding process. We also figured out a way to let users into the platform even if they don't have an email address, which was a big problem for some teachers that they ended up creating email addresses for their students in order for them to join the platform. And we reorganized the sidebar based on feedback from the customer interviews. Once we had all the insights from the teachers, we started to update the prototype and create the designs and all the assets for development. So as you can see here, we have the create account and sign in. Then we have the onboarding process where we also added some steps to guide the teachers in how they should set up the classroom and add the students, and also to make the most out of the product. And there are also all the other features that you need to run a classroom, from testing and grading students to tracking different stuff and uploading documents, everything in one place. I also created a list of components, typography, color, icons, and everything that was used in design in one place to help the developers. In case you have any questions or you would like to maybe work on something like this together, feel free to reach out. Thanks.