Community for Educators
Transforming students’ learning by supporting educators everywhere
Context
As the pandemic was disrupting everyone’s lives, many educators struggled with this newfound requirement to teach remotely and use technology in new ways.
A large consumer tech company came to AKQA with the hopes to expand upon their existing learning center to become a hub to support educators, whether they were already skilled at using technology in the classroom or a reluctant adopter.
Approach
I partnered with another strategist to plan and run the stakeholder interviews. Then I took the lead on designing and conducting customer research, as well as creating the experience vision and principles. Below are the findings:
Company: Stakeholders wanted an online hub to support and connect educators.
My strategy partner and I asked 5 stakeholders about greater business goals, specific objectives for this project, priority audiences, hopes and dreams for this work, and what success would look like.
Customer: All educators were motivated by serving their students better while managing their own time and energy.
Over the course of 13 1:1 interviews, I asked about motivations for teaching, attitudes + needs with technology in the classroom, attitudes + needs from professional learning, and needs from an educator community. I took the findings and separated them into motivations (which would impact messaging) and challenges + needs (which would impact content + functionality).
Recommendations
Experience Vision + Principles
Taking into account all of the data from stakeholders and educators, I developed a vision statement and experience principles that continue to act as the north star.
KPIs
Based on stakeholders’ definition of project success, we developed a KPI framework with near-term objectives in order to measure impact, focusing on:
Enrollment
Engagement
Connections
Quality
Diversity
Content + Information Architecture
I worked with our UX designer and content strategist to translate the vision and principles into the specifics of content, functionality, and information architecture. I am not including those here, but I’m happy to discuss them if you’d like to learn more.
Outcomes
It’s alive and well
The client team loved the strategy work so much that they asked me to come back and present it to senior leadership and the engineering team.
After being live for 3 years, the community hit the milestone of 1 million users.