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
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.
A personalized learning model students could finally follow
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.
Honest data from teachers who had no reason to give it
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.
A platform where the teacher is also the author
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.
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.
There is no onboarding budget
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.
The people who evaluate it and the people who live in it are different
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.
Abandonment is silent
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.
Questions we get before the first call
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.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.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.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.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.