EdTech Service and UX Design for a New Product Used by Educators Teaching 900k+ Students Nationally

Scope of Map

I first created a stakeholder system map to build an inclusive, shared understanding of which stakeholders are part of services, both internal and external to the business, so that we could:

• Understand their role
• Visualize relationships between groups
• Have a team reference for collaboration
• Uncover design and research opportunities
• Help our teams understand the problem space
• Improve team communication when discussing complex topics

Learning About Deciders

For this activity, I created this slide to help guide conversations between colleagues. We wanted to learn who is part of a new customer’s decision-making process when the product is purchased when they are deciding from established vendors.

High-Level Map Overview

A school district begins looking for the right solution by considering vendors.

• Initiator roles vary but are generally on the Superintendent’s Cabinet.
• An initiator, such as a Director of Curriculum, evaluates vendors and brings options for committee review.
• The local Board of Education may also review proposals before the final decision.
• External role titles may change, depending on the district or school.
• Internally, customer relationships are driven by account executives. Other roles involved depend on the sales stage.

Stakeholder System Map Summarized

High-level stakeholder system map overview to quickly visualize how standards are set, who the decision makers are, and key roles in a school building during implementation.

When a school district decides they need to purchase a curriculum, they begin their customer lifecycle journey. A prospective customer will likely be familiar with the company’s go-to-market messaging and campaigns that captured their interest.

• Customers initiate the purchase of products and services by first responding to the company’s proposal requests or piloting/sampling the product to make a decision.
• Their account executive works through several phases with them, possibly years in advance.
• After many rounds of proposals and negotiations, an account executive’s goal is to be selected and get a contract signed. This kicks off the next phase of the customer lifecycle with services and order fulfillment (after this section, below).
• Through this work, I identified 10+ opportunities to improve the service design and customer journey.

Academic Director/Coach Proto-Persona

I created a quick proto persona from documents made by our research team to bring focus to the evaluation process and to facilitate cross-team collaboration.

At the time of this project, the product was new and just starting its first year of renewal cycles. We learned the process consists of meetings, reviewing data, and presenting options for expansion where applicable. I uncovered pain points from multiple account executives including:

• Technical difficulties
• Poor implementations
• Low/no usage not resulting in customer value
• Issues with standards
• Complex upgrades
• Difficulties for schools securing funding

Customer Pain Points Affinity Map

As part of building the customer renewals journey map, I first created an affinity map of pain points for different parts of the product, cross-tagged by coded themes in Miro. I used data from spreadsheets compiled across business teams to build the journey map.

Customer Pain Points Affinity Map

Customer Pre-Sales

• Many customer pain points were discovered: language not meeting state standards, no live data in demo accounts affect realism, screen time legislation in schools, data is hard to use and not easy to understand, account executives don’t have enough information, limited reporting capabilities, and district lack of message understanding.
• From early 2026 onwards, screen time legislation in some U.S. states means schools are less interested in adopting digital technology solutions for their classrooms.
• With the March 2026 expiration of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding in the U.S., many schools could no longer afford to invest in the same products they used to.

Customer Renewals

• Many factors weighed in a district’s decision-making to renew a product are the same as a new customer purchasing a solution for the first time.
• Many customer pain points exist, including: technical difficulties, poor implementations, low/no usage, data that’s hard to understand and not easy to use, issues with standards, complex upgrades, funding challenges, and others.

Design Opportunities for Both

• Even with these challenges, many design opportunities were present for pre-sales, including: driving more awareness through marketing, stronger training initiatives, more technical support, and incorporating teacher feedback into the product and its services.
• For the customer renewal process, design opportunities were found, including: improving training for account executives, enhancing options for demoing solutions in real-time, stronger marketing, more value propositions, and conversation modeling for confident interactions.

In support of the upcoming back-to-school season, product management wanted to understand what customer support looks like for all customers, regardless of dollars spent. In my explorations, I learned there were two new levels of support (Lite and Plus) in addition to regular order fulfillment, based on customer spending threshold.

At the time, our teams didn’t know what customer support was like for customers, a key component to satisfaction and retention. This is tied into the focus on the customer renewal journey, above.

Through this project, my UX design goal was to:

• Map key processes to understand how they work through service blueprinting
• Identify any gaps for joint team resolution
• Find opportunities for efficiency, retention, and any product improvements

Mapping Differences Through Service Blueprints

I created each service blueprint organized by phases including:

• Initiation
• Processing and Fulfillment
• Delivery and Handoff

For every interaction in the customer support journey, time, evidence, technology, backstage actions, support processes, and regulations/guidelines are documented with customer actions.

Regular Order Fulfillment

In support of the back-to-school season, product management wanted to understand what support looks like for customers spending less than $500k. Support is not available for these purchase orders; they simply move through the regular fulfillment process (service blueprint pictured above).

Service Blueprint - Lite Concierge

Lite Concierge Services

The next level of support is Concierge Lite, applying to customers spending $500–999k. This type of support is reactive after receiving a customer’s purchase order of $500k+.

Service Blueprint - Plus Concierge

Plus Concierge Services

The maximum level of support is classified as Concierge Plus, which is proactively aligned with the sales team before the customer’s purchase order of $1M+ arrives.

Levels of Service Delivery

• I found the biggest difference between the different types of customer service was order initiation. Lite is reactive and Plus is proactive. No special service exists for thresholds below a certain amount; orders are simply processed as received.
• The possibility of an increased workload for account executives was discovered if they must shoulder everything themselves on accounts with regular order fulfillment.
• As the teams get used to a new work process, it may impact the customer experience for those with regular order fulfillment through errors and possible delays.
• Not all customers receive surveys after their order is fulfilled, meaning pertinent feedback may go unheard or require account executive involvement. This is challenging because their time is scarce.

Technical Issues/Risks

• No automatic technical system checks require close manual coordination across teams which is prone to user error.
• With two separate systems of record sending customers automated messages, there is a risk of human error in sending the wrong information.
• Customers frequently face risk of data loss, possibly surprising them in the middle of fulfillment which puts customer satisfaction at risk.

Siloed Systems and Service Delivery

• There were two other teams that should be involved in the process but weren’t.
• Possible gap in customer experience to begin onboarding if the success manager must spend extra time ensuring their set-up in two systems are similar. This effort could extend time for reaching out to customers from 3–5 days to 1½ weeks.
• Depending on when a customer receives their order, they could be left wondering for a few days about what’s next, negatively impacting their experience.

Administrator UX Goals

By understanding what admins at high-usage schools do to get teachers to use the product, it helped us design processes and materials to increase teacher adoption to support product renewals.

Our UX design goal for administrators was to:

• Learn how administrators get teachers to use the product.
• Discover themes and patterns across implementation team feedback and other research sources.
• Make recommendations on what our teams could do to increase school usage and implementation quality.

Teacher Onboarding UX Goals

I wanted to learn from company trainers where teachers get stuck during onboarding. This helped us determine steps to create a bite-sized onboarding experience for teachers.

Our UX design goal for teachers was to:

• Learn where educators get stuck during onboarding and why.
• Discover themes and patterns across trainer feedback and other research sources.
• Determine steps we could design to help them during onboarding.
• Make recommendations to different business teams on how they can support the teacher’s onboarding experience.

First, I wanted to get a baseline understanding of what the current onboarding journey was like for administrators and teachers new to the product.

I learned that teachers were introduced to the product with multiple trainings consisting of a 2-hour Getting Started session followed by three 1-hour sessions. Their trainers encourage them to complete other self-guided learning materials within 30 days after the first session.

The current state onboarding journey map:

• Lists each training, key activities, and topics by phase
• Lists factors leading to positive implementation
• Lists factors leading to confusion and non-usage
• Types of touchpoints for each phase

Meeting to Discuss Teacher Experience

Working session board to discuss where teachers get stuck during product onboarding. We discussed teacher pain points, behaviors and emotions, training and support, classroom realities, and other feedback they had to share with us.

Meeting to Discuss Administrator Experience

Working session board to discuss how school administrators with high usage rates get their teachers to use the product in the classroom. This was a starting point to learn how to get more teachers to use the product at other schools with lower usage rates.

Mismatches with Traditional Business Processes

• School districts purchase the product, not individual school principals. This means that when it’s implemented in schools, the principal doesn’t have the same frame of reference as the district customer in knowing the product’s features and capabilities.
• Teachers are often overwhelmed by the information they are given in training. Session one happens before school starts when teachers are first returning from summer and busy preparing their classrooms for a new school year.
• Public school teachers are often contracted to work during certain times and hours. With not enough time in the day, training gets deferred unless there is a professional development incentive.
• Self-guided training requires personal opportunity and enough time, which is scarce for teachers already working in an underresourced, stressful environment.
• Four months of time pass between a teacher’s third training session and final one. This is a significant portion of the school year where they will not have all of their training completed. This makes it hard to see product usage benefits through much of the school year and to keep any momentum from the beginning of the year.

Factors Leading to Customers Not Using Product

• It can be very difficult to get administrators to attend offered leadership success training. They are usually scheduled in the summer when they are on vacation, or they are too busy with running an entire school and preparing for a new year.
• Teachers struggle with translating their virtual training of an overwhelming system to a real-time classroom environment. The product also had usability issues further adding to this difficulty.
• Many teachers go all school year not knowing they have the product or what it does.
• Absent a clear rationale for using the product, teachers feel the product is pushed on them rather than a way to help them, so they disengage early.
• The overall product is overwhelming to them, meaning key features go unused, even though they were trained on them.
• The product’s built-in professional development tool is also unused because of scheduling difficulties, time constraints, and a preference for quick answers instead.

Factors Leading to Positive Implementation

• Administrator involvement ahead of implementation before the new school year. This varies widely between schools, requiring extra time and a level of privilege that not all school leaders have.
• Administrators having a plan to support implementation and encourage usage.
• School support for attending training and professional development.
• Successful student rostering in the system.

After meeting with stakeholders, the universal themes of overwhelm and the need for flexibility were considered top priorities in how we design implementation processes.

Administrators, teachers, and staff are part of a community. Every school community has its own environment, processes, and needs. While training isn’t a substitute for lack of usability, it is still important to feel grounded in a solution.

I saw the opportunity to improve the existing UX in small design steps to test, measure, and iterate throughout the school year.

Designing for communities:

• Uses a systems approach to influence solutions, equipping schools with tools to self-support their training.
• Builds on unique strengths and abilities of people in communities using what they already have, being people-centered vs. only technology-centered.
• Provides needed flexibility for schools to implement in a way that works for them.

People in Communities Need Support Systems

When teachers are onboarded, they often feel overwhelmed, viewing it as another task.

• How can we guide admins on how to support their teachers?
• How might we help admins lessen their workload by delegating implementation tasks to school community leaders in support of teacher adoption?
• How might we break down this concept to test and iterate?

School Support System Example

This diagram shows how a principal can delegate implementation tasks to school leaders on their team to support teachers. This system serves as a complement to the product’s built-in but underutilized professional development tools.

Types of tasks that an administrator can delegate include who:

• Checks data
• Answers questions
• Leads model lessons
• Reports to progress to administrators on a cadence

This journey incorporates:

• School year terms with activities and milestones such as assessment periods.
• Business leaders meeting with schools during the year about progress.
• Success measurement points.
• Tasks for admins, teachers, and support roles.
• Small learning steps for using the product in the classroom.
• Admin and teacher training sessions.
• Beginning, middle, and end-of-year conversations.
• Key times during the school year that factor into routines.

The school year journey is organized by month, factoring in:

• Teacher’s regular instructional tasks and meetings with supporters to rehearse how to use the product, plan units/lessons, and help each other; i.e., their coach, curriculum specialist, and professional learning community.
• Teacher analyzing growth data before planning and preparing based on best practices.
• Flexible steps and practice for teachers, including classroom rehearsals.
• Curriculum specialist checking data and meeting with administrators on a cadence and following up with teachers.
• Administrator checking data, viewing reports, taking classroom walkthroughs, meeting with curriculum specialists, teachers, and highlighting successes.

School Year Journey Zoomed-In

Zoomed-in view of the support system routine for January–February; includes key parts that happen during the winter term including teachers preparing for assessments.

Through researching, I also learned about Active Implementation Frameworks (AIF) that are widely used in education. Developed by the National Implementation Research Network (NIRFN), they offer tools to identify implementation drivers that enable successful change, including: organizational, relational, leadership, and competency drivers.

I saw a lot of parallels between their framework and the work I was doing. By understanding the different types of drivers, we can create UX jobs-to-be-done, personas, journeys, and other services that need to be explored and designed for, too.

I created a planning board to list the initiatives that the design team and I could focus on by breaking down the school year concept into design activities. This kept the work focused and less overwhelming since we were working on a very large service design concept.

The board is organized by:

• Initiative: Strategic theme spanning multiple epics
• Epic: Large feature or capability representing a business problem or user outcome
• User Stories: Specific user-facing need
• Design Tasks: Discrete piece of implementation work
• Collaborators: People we can work with in the organization on design tasks

Design User Stories for Administrator Onboarding Problem Space

Design stories for the administrator onboarding initiative, broken down into epics, user stories, and design tasks. Our key collaborators were listed as a point of reference for the team. This was a helpful way to stay organized as new designers were onboarded to collaborate with me and product management on design work.

After analyzing these messages, I discovered in the first email message:

• The session was only mentioned once at the bottom.
• Contained many other tasks for the reader, burying the content about attending the training.
• Did not have a clear call-to-action.
• Lacked content design and hierarchy.
• Did not follow brand voice guidelines or plain language.
• Had a low-scoring subject line, potentially affecting open rates and awareness.

Cross-Functional Collaboration Improves UX

This was a great opportunity to optimize the entire email message sequence and call attention to the leader training sessions. It’s possible customers were missing it entirely!

To support the customer success team during their busy season, I revised seven communication documents to improve them by:

• Following brand voice
• Incorporating plain language standards for readability and accessibility
• Increasing the average email subject line score by 13%
• Improving the grade level readability score by 1.4 grades.

Accelerating Impact Through Iterative Design

Introduce incremental design across teams through continuous learning, measurement, and iteration for positive human and product outcomes.

• Factor modern school realities and real-world environments into service/UX design concepts.
• Build shared understanding to design within complexity.
• Demonstrate practice of design learning, testing, measuring, and iterating.

Building Strategies for Measurable Outcomes

• Build trackable design and research backlog with themes and design tasks beginning with research teams’ end-of-year findings.
• Visualize planning and design activities through organized increments.
• Create a solid design strategy from research broken into clear initiatives tied to measurable outcomes.
• Develop outcomes/metrics framework to measure design iteration progress.