DIGITAL INFLUX - UX WRITING

Digital influx is a global ed-tech start-up that aims to educate kids and teenagers in all things UX and tech. As a UX Writer and Designer my job was to translate the playful but educational approach of the interactive course into the right language. Supporting business growth by writing teachers resources based on STEM and ISTE standards.

The challenge

There were two main challenges to overcome:

First of all: the actual lesson slides. The challenge here was to create fun interactive lessons with vivid examples, fun games and room for creativity while at the same time teaching the student techy and complex tools. The trick is to find the right balance between technical vocabulary and creating a joyful tone that activates the intrinsic motivation to learn and explore.

The course can be taught by teachers or parents at home. Especially parents (who home-school in times of Corona) are oftentimes new to the principles of UX and teaching. A potential pain point of users is the thought that they lack the abilities to teach the course, as they are newbies themselves. This fear might prevent them from subscribing.

The process

My work covered 4 different areas.

Concerning the lesson slides, I worked within a team of 3 UX Designer. Though we knew the UX process inside out and had some experience of tutoring children, 8-12 year olds were a new target group for us. It took us a few failures to perfect the slides. A key factor to success was the ability to gain testing feedback from kids around the world. A good thing about children is their honesty, if they don’t like a lesson they are not afraid to tell you so ;)

Key learnings:

• Reduce text on the slides to a minimum (Pictures speak louder than words, so I designed some child friendly illustrations)

• Describe complicated methods or ideas with metaphors that are familiar to the kids (e.g Personas are a bit like Pokémon cards)

• Use a consistent and repetitive language and lesson structure for the kids to get used to the course

• Try to use terms that aren’t too technical and easy to understand or provide a definition that is logged into a vocabulary library and repeated at the end of each lesson

The second issue of inexperienced and insecure parents/ teachers was tackled with 3 additional resources.

Teacher info pack

Firstly, I wrote and designed a teacher info pack. This info pack was put together to provide more in-depth knowledge to parents and teachers who are new to the world of UX and design thinking. After reading through it they should feel comfortable about the topic, understand what UX design is, what it is used for, the underlying process and get an overview of the course in form of a roadmap.

Teacher’s notes

Secondly -with this being the most time-intense part of the job- I created detailed teachers notes that lead teachers through every slides of the 12 weeks course.

This document equips the teachers with information about how to teach, provides external links for additional reading and explains activities in more depth.

Lesson Plans

Thirdly, I created lesson plans for each lesson. This document informed teachers about the learning objectives, vocabulary, stage, homework etc. and gives a short overview over the lesson. The difference to the teacher’s notes is that there are no in-depth explanations. The document was designed as a one-pager that can be scanned quickly before each lesson to refresh the memory.

Pedagogical input

To make sure that the course delivers not only fun content but also educates students in a pedagogically valuable manner, I implemented concepts of Maslow and Costa and Bloom.