Objective
Increase engagement with our products by including moments of meaningful visual delight and celebrating our users' achievements.
Purpose
Often teachers would take our content and put it different presentation material, such as custom slides or things like Nearpod or Peardeck. We saw this as an opportunity to retain users and prove we could provide an equally engaging digital experience.
Outcome
By creating moments of celebration that tied into both student engagement metrics and a meaningful overarching narrative, we were able add a layer of visual engagement that tapped into intrinsic motivators and showed strong approval in user testing.
Chocolate Covered Broccoli
Education has a bit of an engagement problem. On the one hand, we've all been through school and we all know how boring it can be, so anything to add a bit of fun can surely be welcome. On the other, study after study shows that extrinsic motivators (like animations and rewards), while good in the short term, have quickly diminishing returns. The key way to engage and delight students is to make the content as fun and interesting as possible. Visual delight is welcome, the problem is where, how, and especially how much.
Where, How, and How Much
The first thing to do was to figure out was where in our product flow we could capitalize on these moments of delight without making them feel random or unearned. To do this we mapped out our product and user experience and identified key opportunities throughout our student, teacher and whole-classroom journeys. This gave us an engagement eco-system of sorts and let us figure out where we might get the most bang for our buck.
Hands-On or Hands-Off
We identified five primary targets, each providing teachers and students with different levels of control over their engagement experience. Once again there were conflicting priorities to contend with: from a motivation point of view, stronger engagement is derived by teachers and students setting their own goals worthy of recognition and celebration, but from a planning perspective that puts more responsibility on teachers to define and implement those goals into their day to day planning. We needed feedback to help steer our direction and to do so we provided teachers and students with storyboards that illustrated each concept.
Celebrating the Narrative
Our testing revealed that while some users wanted control, the vast majority preferred a hands-off approach, and all users preferred making the celebratory moments as meaningful to the content they were working on as possible. In order to achieve both of these goals we went with a narrative approach that tied recognition to achievement. By creating a narrative through-line across the lessons, we could thread our celebratory visuals throughout, tying them to classroom success, and creating an on-going journey that the whole-class could participate in.
Feedback and Next Steps
Teachers and students alike both strongly approved of this new feature inclusion, so much so that we are looking at next steps in how to give users increased control (for those that want it) and add more opportunities throughout the platform.