content-ap – netinspire.com

Case Study: Intel Education Content Access Point

Role: Lead UX Research & Product Design
Company: Intel

Netinspire's founder, Ryan Palmer led E2E research and product design for an innovative platform designed to deliver learning content in education environments with little to no Internet connectivity.

Context & Background

In 2008, Intel began manufacturing small, low-cost laptop computers that could be sold for as low as $120USD. This created an opportunity for ministries of education around the world to establish initiatives to equip students and educators with affordable access to technology and digital learning resources. Governments invested aggressively in funding these low-cost laptops with the goal of enhancing the quality of education and prepare learners and educators with the skills necessary to succeed in the global economy. Some education systems went as far as promising a free laptop for every grade-school student in the country or province. By 2011, 50 million of these laptops were sold worldwide, primarily in the education market.

Contextual user research in South Africa.

The Problem

School systems were poorly prepared to accommodate the rapid influx of digital learning devices in the classroom. In 2010, only 28.8% of populations globally had equitable Internet access (Source: Unesco World Bank). In developing countries, access to broadband Internet connectivity was estimated to be just 6%. Frequent electricity blackouts further exacerbated the efficacy of using digital technology in learning environments.

Discovery Research

Contextual field research with school systems, ministries of education, content publishers and local OEM manufacturers on five contents where low-cost laptops were being distributed to K-8 students quickly revealed that:

Unreliable access to digital learning resources resulted in learning devices not being utilized routinely to engage with the learning process.
Educators struggled with engaging students to achieve inquiry-based learning objectives such as conducting research for a project.
Poor or absent Internet connectivity was perceived as a hinderance rather than facilitator of the learning process.

The images below summarize this problem in two different schools in Macedonia, one without reliable connectivity, and one with reliable connectivity. Notice the difference in technology impact between these two images.

Product Definition

I concluded from my fieldwork a solution was needed to engage students with rich, interactive learning materials and foster group participation in collaborative projects when the Internet could not be relied on as a resource.

The next step required me to define the UX vision and effectively pitch the opportunity with executive stakeholders.

High-Level Design Requirements For Poorly Connected and Unconnected Classrooms

Establish a simplified means for educators and school system administrators to store, manage and distribute digital learning materials.
Enable school systems to tailor their own local e-learning content.
Empower educators to curate lessons for specific classroom activities and focus students on relevant content.
Engage students with rich, interactive learning without a reliance on Internet connectivity or stable electricity.

Establishing the vision - Design Storyboarding For Concept Testing

To visualize my initial research findings, I developed storyboards and product concepts to further test with potential external customers in the education technology ecosystem. I then conduced focused interviews with ministries of education, content publishers, non-profit organizations and IT service providers.

Macro Goal: Scale adoption in classrooms by increasing the relevance of personal learning devices as teaching and learning tools.

Design Research Toolkit

Once the concept was user tested and validated with product stakeholders internally and externally, I worked closely with a product manager, industrial designer and technical architect to author a PRD, design requirements and product opportunity proposal. Once the product proposal was approved, my team was given the green light to prototype and develop the product. The following are the tools and UX processes I employed during the design phase:

Meta Analysis

Deep-dive research with publishers, content providers, school systems, and online resources to understand how comparative/competitive solutions were being hobbled together to fulfill the unmet need of poor and absent Internet connectivity.

UX Requirements

I developed a UXRD (under NDA) to articulate the full E2E scope of design for the platform. This included personas, use cases, wireframes and design requirements for a platform consisting of hardware, software, firmware and service delivery.

User Testing

Iterative testing of interaction flows prototyped in Axure were conducted with a focus on scaled deployments and managing content for classroom instruction.

Product Design

Focused coordination with engineering, industrial design and UX design partners to drive 0-1 development. Throughout development, I relentlessly advocated for product design requirements to enable a solution that could be easily managed by even the most non-tech savvy educators and students so the focus could be on learning rather than IT.

Target Users

Students

Teachers

IT Admins

Publishers

Students are automatically directed to learning content when a Web browser is launched from their devices. Content accessible directly from the home page of the Lesson Planner saves valuable classroom time by focusing student on materials rather than requiring them to search and navigate.

Teachers must have unfettered access to educational resources and be able to deliver those resources to students at the right moment without taking up additional time managing the classroom or technology.

IT administrators are responsible for ensuring the content access points are accessible throughout a school system and the content is relevant and up-to-date for teachers needs. IT administrators in emerging markets are often not formally trained and may be volunteers with other job responsibilities.

Publishers are seeking a simple means to distribute interactive learning materials to school systems via SaaS-based revenue models. Unavailable or unreliable broadband Internet connectivity has been a barrier to actualize that vision until now.

Design Features Based on Research

Lesson Planning

Built-in software to simplify the curation of lesson materials for classroom instruction. Students simply launch a browser on their devices to access.

Hardware Design

A portable, slim device with battery, 1TB of storage and ability to simultaneously connect 50 students to learning materials

IT Management

Integrated software to distribute content modules and manage fleets of access points across a large area. Integrated 3g modems provided connectivity to sync content remotely.

Contextual Research

Once an E2E prototype was developed, pilots were deployed with Ministries of Education around the world. I traveled to South Africa, India, Mexico and even US prison systems to observe how the platform was being applied to facilitate learning. Insights from research were then brought back to the team to establish features such as remote trickle-down content delivery, improvements with the teacher interface for lesson planning and sideloading for publishers as features for both initial productization and software updates post product launch.