Education needs to hire a new role: Student Experience (SX) Designers
In the world of education design and innovation, experts often borrow ideas from other models, especially outside models. We discuss how Google, Apple, Uber, Starbucks and others disrupt markets, and then we think about how to apply those lessons back to education. After all, the best ideas occur at the intersection of unrelated ideas. For instance, if Starbucks customers can customize their own drinks, how can students customize their learning? Or, if Google provides 20% unstructured time to employees through Genius Hour, how can that happen in schools?
Working in the field of education redesign, my team used five critical innovation levers, which were: time, talent, technology, space, and money. Similar to Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation, a framework that equates business innovation to a spectrum of possible shifts beyond product development, we found that in talking with school leaders and teachers, we needed a way to wrap their minds around innovation on joint levels in order to achieve a comprehensive innovation plan.
Educators who are new to innovation, and even veterans who think they get it, tend to have a narrow focus on certain solutions, hence radical collaboration and frameworks are essential to push people out of their comfort zones. Commonly, initial thoughts in education are to implement new curricula or to build more modern classrooms. While those can be innovative remedies in some schools, those ideas are akin to adding new products and do not address systemic or cultural root causes. A framework of innovation helps solve complex educational problems because it builds strategy. If we think about how schools use time, talent, technology, space, and money as an interconnected ecosystem, then we can be more intentional about shifting each one to effect the whole.
Why the “Talent Lever” is underutilized
One lever that stands out to me as the least utilized in education innovation is talent. I’m not exactly sure why, but schools do not regard this aspect with as much creativity and energy as they do with other levers. Maybe it’s because this is an area that lacks innovation models in general, or maybe it’s because we focus so much on teachers as the core talent and get stuck on revising teacher roles and responsibilities.
Of course, it is important to rethink how we hire, train, support, and retain teachers and school leaders, but it is also important to consider what new roles are needed in the 21st century education paradigm. What roles are yet to exist in education? How could current roles be combined or even put to other uses like the notion of teacherpreneurs?
With the advent of personalized learning (PL) and next generation learning, I’ve seen the addition of PL coaches and PL coordinators. In recent years, The Future Project, an organization whose mission is to unlock the potential of youth, created a role called Dream Directors, individuals who are transformational leaders that inspire curiosity and new purpose in schools. These are examples of necessary and exciting additions to the field of education because they are solving real needs of learners and schools. Yet, there are still roles to be invented. No one has been hired to focus specifically on the entirety of the user experience of the student, the primary customer of education.
Time to borrow from the UX Designer’s playbook
In the push towards student-centered learning models, there is one role that we have not filled. It is time we hired the Student Experience (SX) Designer or the Learner Experience (LX) Designer, both titles work. This is a nod to the User Experience (UX) Designer, a relatively new field that has blown-up in recent years and is in high demand because every company must address customer needs in order to stay competitive.
The UX designer is obsessed with human-centered design, uses design thinking, and considers every aspect of a user’s experience from interactions to behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. The work a UX designer does informs critical decisions, product development, marketing, operations, and budgets. This is because the UX designer makes sense of all the touchpoints a customer has with a company and their services. While a company may think what they do makes sense and is well received by their customer, quite often, they discover through UX research that it doesn’t make sense at all.
About a year ago, I arrived at the insight that SX design is missing in education, and in my research, I only found one article by EdSurge News that identifies a similar conclusion. It is titled, UX to LX: The Rise of Learner Experience Design, and it was published less than a year ago. The article states that LX designers are unique because:
“LX designers, in contrast, merge design-thinking principles with curriculum development and the application of emerging technologies to help faculty tailor content to student behaviors and preferences.”
The article speaks to the overall theme for which I’m arguing, except I’m taking it beyond tailoring content and technology. I believe SX design should transcend the technical landscape of learning management systems, instructional design, and any technologically-based platforms, including social media. In my vision of SX design, the term student or learner is a proxy for user or customer and the term experience includes all points of contact and interactions a user has with a school, the staff, wraparound services, curricula, and policies — these include online and offline offerings, either with staff or independently.
WORKING DEFINITION: An SX designer studies and captures the authentic experience of students or learners before, during, and after any educational transaction for the purpose of reflecting intent versus impact.
An important point to note, there are varying job descriptions and responsibilities of what a UX designer does. In many design firms, UX designers focus on technical and aesthetic components of app and website design in terms of how a user interacts with content and products. I’m not suggesting one-to-one assimilation from the business world to the education world, and I’m not recommending a new type of technological expert for the classroom.
What I’m envisioning is an expert responsible for studying the student experience as a holistic picture from bus drop-off to soccer practice pick-up, and everything in between. This entails the objective actions as well as what the student feels and thinks at each stage. The reason this is necessary is that teachers, administrators, family, and the community operate under different assumptions, often unwittingly, of how an educational system functions. Who is uniting these unique perceptions and showing what is actually occuring?
The student journey is complex and largely disjointed. How might we better manage this aspect of the educational puzzle? We know that multiple staff, teachers, parents, guardians, and after-school organizations have touchpoints with each student, but how does that feel from the point-of-view of the student? What is it really like to go from class to class every 45-minutes, shuffle through crowded hallways, get in and out of buildings, navigate the playground, and find time to take care of personal needs? In my mind, this is a missing data point in solving how to implement new models of student learning.
Take a look at the image below. It is an experience map for a Starbucks customer. It shows how Starbucks thinks about customer experience, specifically repeat customers. Notice that it starts with anticipation, the moments before a customer has even arrived at a Starbucks and is merely thinking about a cup of coffee. It ends with reflection — what happens after they left the store. Are they enjoying the coffee or do they feel annoyed by the barista?
Experience maps can be drafted in many ways, but usually they have standard aspects such as a timeline, chronological interactions, and mood points (those are the points when a customer feels really good or feels really frustrated). There is an art to creating journey maps or experience maps, and that is why someone who is talented in UX or SX design should do this type of work. Imagine how this could improve the overall student experience and allow us to implement better processes if we could visualize cross-sections of school days.
The work of an SX Designer
Below, are a few ways the SX designer could provide value to the field of education, and why schools should create and hire this new role if we are to move into 21st century learning.
I believe student experience designers could help…
- Realize the aim of more student “voice and choice”- I’ve heard the expression “voice and choice” used religiously since personalized learning took root in K-12. It means allowing students to have more agency in what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. To realize this goal, every element of the learning experience needs to be considered holistically. Achieving this requires bringing together school leaders, teachers, staff and other individuals to discern how they are delivering and managing their educational system as well as having an appointed specialist, the SX designer, at the table. The SX designer will be trained to synthesize and translate this information into a cohesive data visualization with multiple points of view.
- Provide accurate empathy data to inform decision making- In order to create the cohesive visualization mentioned above, the SX designer will spend time shadowing, interviewing, and observing students at all times of the day and in all kinds of contexts, in and out of school. By following students from start to finish, doing the same worksheets and online assignments, and sitting where they sit, the SX designer will gain numerous empathy insights. Furthermore, the SX designer will conduct similar ethnographic research with teachers, administrators, support staff, and families. This empathy data, compiled from the user’s actual point of view, will inform the creation of designs such as journey maps, flow charts, and storyboards. Visual and kinesthetic representations will allow educators to see where students, and staff, are thriving and where they are frustrated. Graphics are more compelling models for analyzing pain points than verbal or quantitative formats.
- Identify areas of opportunity to align theory with practice- Experience design is about showing where ideas and processes breakdown or succeed because they display what users actually say, feel, or do in response to stimuli. The designs created by the SX designer will expose how and at what point theories of practice are received by the user. This way, ideas can be realigned or shifted to produced desired results.
I’m sure there are more reasons, and I’d love to hear what you think this role should be. It’s time we create a new role in education that focuses solely on the student experience from the students’ point-of-view.
