Resources

Dec 15, 2025

7 Trends in edTech Product Design You Should Know for 2026

From the rise of AI product integrations to alarming upticks in chronic student absences, 2025 gave us...

Oct 31, 2025

A Product Owner’s Guide to How Generative AI is Changing Education

When we first surveyed educators about their use of generative AI tools in 2024, teachers were lukewarm...

Sep 26, 2025

What Teachers Want: How Tailoring edTech Features to Educator Workflows Boosts Product Adoption

For edTech companies, the consequences of poor UX and disconnected tools are clear: if educators can’t...

Aug 31, 2025

How Teacher Content Creators Are Changing edTech

Digital platforms where teachers create content and connect with one another about lessons are scooping...

Jul 30, 2025

Using UX Design Prototyping at Every Stage of Your edTech Product

The design prototyping stage for a learning tool is exciting. You start to envision how students will m...

Jun 30, 2025

How User Research Findings Guide edTech Product Strategy

User experience research, or UXR, is the key to understanding your primary users without losing valuabl...

Jun 12, 2025

The Power of Simplicity: Making Learning Design for Everyone

When it comes to building edTech products, it can be challenging to design a complex product with an el...

May 30, 2025

How to Leverage Design Thinking in Education Products for Better Learning Outcomes

As edTech product designers, we have a unique window into empathizing with the teachers and students wh...

May 16, 2025

Best Practices for Onboarding Users to Your edTech Product

It’s happened to all of us. You’re in a product planning meeting, discussing features for your digital...

Apr 18, 2025

Designing a Better Learner Experience in edTech: How to Reflect Pedagogy through UI

Menus and navigation systems are easy to overlook in edTech products. If you want to design a better le...

How Competitive Audits and Analysis Ensure User Centered ed Tech Products

Apr 04, 2025

How to Identify Market Gaps & Drive Product Strategy with Competitor Analysis

You’re ready to develop a new learning tool, and you’ve pulled inspiration from consumer platforms and...

Mar 20, 2025

Working with Authors as edTech Product Stakeholders

Creating a new edTech product based on original print material from an author or publisher is a complex...

Mar 07, 2025

4 Failproof Ways to Improve User Engagement in Your edTech Product

It can happen to any edTech brand. Your learning content is helpful and effective, but users bail on a...

Feb 21, 2025

How We Improve edTech Usability for Teachers Year-Round

Teachers are notoriously busy, which means perfecting product usability should be a UX priority. In our...

Feb 07, 2025

7 Best Practices for Testing Digital Products in Schools

Conducting user experience testing for your digital product in a classroom setting is exciting. You fin...

Jan 24, 2025

How User Experience Goals Change in edTech Products with Alternative Inputs

When SoapBox Labs launched in 2013, they set the bar for speech recognition in learning tools. By train...

Jan 19, 2025

What to Include in edTech Data Dashboards

As new edTech products crowd the market, school administrators and other technology buyers judge learni...

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Strategies for Chronic Absenteeism Cover Photo

Jan 10, 2025

Strategies for Addressing Chronic Absenteeism through edTech Product Design

As the pandemic’s impacts on education become clearer, our user experience research uncovered a challen...

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Nov 15, 2024

8 Accessibility Best Practices for edTech Products with Alternative Inputs

Whether you’re designing a learning tool that uses voice recognition or you’re planning the UI for a st...

Nov 08, 2024

How to Develop Effective edTech Personas

If you’re used to glossing over persona work because you haven’t seen a return on investment, think aga...

Oct 04, 2024

3 Product Planning Tips for Alternative Input Devices in edTech

We all want our edTech products to be accessible. But strategic planning for edTech products that use...

Sep 25, 2024

4 Tips for a Flawless edTech Product Development Timeline

How do you get an edTech product over the finish line on time—and on budget? Why, develop an incredible...

Aug 30, 2024

Design System ROI: The Value of Building a Design System in edTech

When you design an edTech product for the first time, part of the fun is developing the visual styles y...

Aug 15, 2024

AI in Education: Identifying Best Practices by Examining How Teachers Really Feel

Since ChatGPT’s release in 2022 and the subsequent boom in artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, an i...

Jul 26, 2024

5 UX Design & Business Challenges edTech Companies Get Wrong—And What to Do About It

Editor’s note: This article is based on a recorded conversation between Sean Oakes and Jessica Millston...

Jun 27, 2024

The Value of UX Discovery Sessions in edTech Product Design

If you want to create an edTech product that learners love and teachers love to adopt, UX discovery ses...

Jun 03, 2024

Designing edTech Products with Digital Literacy in Mind

Digital literacy can mean the difference between a student using your edTech product to fidelity or fal...

May 17, 2024

7 Telltale Signs of a Messy edTech Product Suite & How to Fix Them

As companies merge, their suite of edTech products evolves. New learning tools—all built at different t...

Nov 09, 2023

How UX Research Findings Can Shape Your Fall MVP and Maximize Your Budget

When members of our Teacher Council welcomed students back this fall, they weren’t necessarily excited...

Oct 06, 2023

Teacher Council Report: How to Give Your Users Better Tools for Back-to-School

Year after year, we see edTech companies set product or feature launch dates for the fall. But user res...

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Jul 12, 2023

User Journey Mapping in edTech with Illustration and Infographics

When you design a new edTech product, you know how important it is to start with research. In particula...

Jun 30, 2023

UX Strategy: How to Create More Inclusive and Effective Designs

As the first billion-dollar edTech product, Scholastic’s Read180 is often cited as one of the most succ...

Jun 15, 2023

How edTech Can Support Educator Burnout: edTech UX Tips Vetted by Teachers

There’s a crisis brewing in education: teacher burnout. In fact, in a 2022 survey conducted by Gallup,...

May 31, 2023

Why UX Design Strategy Is Important for the Success of Your edTech Product

You already know that deep discovery into the needs of teachers and students sets your edTech product u...

Mar 29, 2023

Design for Education: How to Optimize UX and UI for Better Learning

It takes a lot of planning, research, and skill to design an incredible edTech product. In addition to...

Mar 13, 2023

Finding the Balance: Prioritizing User Needs in edTech Product Design As You Meet Business and Curriculum Requirements

Even if you love the idea of incorporating learning science techniques into your digital learning tool,...

Feb 27, 2023

Using edTech Research and Trends for Smarter Product Design

The edTech industry is growing rapidly, and competition for investment, product development, and school...

Feb 24, 2023

Accessibility and Inclusion in edTech UX Design

Inclusive design draws on the experiences of people from many different backgrounds to make products st...

Jan 18, 2023

Self-Directed Workshop: Using Game Mechanics To Boost Teacher Engagement in Your edTech Product

Quizzes. Badges. Levels. Leaderboards. We design these features for students who use our edTech product...

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Dec 07, 2022

How Human-Centered Design Creates Better edTech Products

In industrial design, considering how the human body interacts with objects has led to incredible, intu...

Oct 28, 2022

A Teacher’s Take: How edTech Can Help Us Close The Learning Gap

It’s one thing to read about the learning gap in news and media outlets, but it’s another thing to expe...

Sep 23, 2022

Designing edTech for the Long Term By Staying Ahead of Trends

Trends in education don’t always stick around. That’s why they’re trends! From debates about the best w...

Sep 02, 2022

3 Effective Ways edTech Products Can Support Professional Development

So many digital professional development offerings are very linear. Teachers take courses, watch video...

Aug 16, 2022

Beyond Reports: Better Ways to Use Data in edTech Products

Because of pandemic learning outcomes, now is a crucial time to use data in your edTech products to ref...

Jul 27, 2022

Designing Interactive Educational Technology for Better Learning Outcomes

One of the most important principles of learning science is to move away from more “traditional” modes...

Jul 22, 2022

ToolKit: The Best Features for Remote Learning Products

Are your products remote learning ready? It's about more than designing learning tools kids can use on...

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Jul 19, 2022

Competitive Audit: Comparing SEL Features in Epic, Lalilo, and Khan Academy Kids

Assess the marketplace and prioritize your next feature roll-out with our mini competitive audit, where...

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Jul 07, 2022

8 Tips for Planning Your edTech Tool Like a Pro

Whether you’re leading your company’s entire product division or managing a specific product, you know...

Jun 17, 2022

Not Just for Kids– Gamification is For Teachers Too

In edTech product design circles, we often talk about gamification as a way to reach young learners. Af...

Jun 06, 2022

5 edTech Innovation Examples with Long-lasting Impact

Remote learning needs, pandemic learning loss, and changing personas have re-shaped the edTech industry...

May 19, 2022

How UX Design Wireframes Solve Creative Problems in edTech

In UX design, wireframes are considered a product “blueprint.” Think about a traditional blueprint for...

May 05, 2022

Why User Flow Testing Matters—and When to Use It

We always want to know if the learning tools we design for teachers and students will work for them. Do...

Apr 03, 2022

Using Wireframes to Power Decision Making and Your UX Design Strategy

Product wireframes are one of the first strategic milestones of the design process. Designed intentiona...

Mar 31, 2022

User Research Findings are the Key to Designing More Adaptive edTech

As teachers returned to in-person instruction this year, they reported unprecedented learning gaps betw...

Mar 24, 2022

5 Innovative Trends in Educational Technology that are Changing the Game

As much as we’d all like to be “post-pandemic,” reality says otherwise. Teachers understand this better...

Feb 25, 2022

Defining and Designing for the Parents User Persona

The rise of parents as an edTech user persona represents a major shift for edTech companies, and there...

Feb 11, 2022

Using EdTech to Teach SEL— Both Remotely and In Person

As schools returned to in-person learning last fall, teachers identified both a student learning gap an...

Feb 04, 2022

How to Develop Smarter edTech Tools for Collaboration

When it comes to “smart” edTech tools, we tend to think of artificial intelligence and powerful algorit...

Jan 24, 2022

Better Teacher Personas Lead to Better Product Design

If you’re still designing edTech products based on user research conducted before the pandemic, it’s ti...

Jan 11, 2022

UX for Kids: Designing Inclusive, Engaging edTech Experiences

As the edTech market becomes more competitive, your digital learning tools have to tick a lot of boxes....

Dec 21, 2021

One Year Later: Two Teachers Discuss Shifts in edTech & In-Person Learning

When teachers turned to edTech products to support at-home learning last year, we wondered whether the...

Dec 13, 2021

Design for Education Toolkit: Why User Needs in Higher Ed Are Changing

The market for edTech in higher education is changing fast, and edTech product owners can do more to su...

Dec 01, 2021

4 Tips for Designing Content in Your Learning Management System

Whether your LMS helps users review videos, work through interactive experiences, or read .PDF resource...

Nov 17, 2021

How to Level-Set with edTech Product Stakeholders throughout the Discovery Process

You’re about to design a brand new edTech product, and you know the first step is to align internally w...

Nov 11, 2021

Self-Directed Workshop: Design Thinking for edTech Product Teams

Uncover innovative solutions to persistent user challenges or align on a new direction with a design th...

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Nov 11, 2021

How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop for edTech Products

EdTech is in the middle of a major transitional moment, and the stakes for education have never been hi...

Nov 09, 2021

Outsourcing Your edTech UX Design: Everything You Need to Know

Weighing the benefits vs. challenges of outsourcing UX design is an important part of developing and la...

Oct 11, 2021

15 Ways Universal Design Improves User Experience for All Students

This fall, most schools are back to in-person learning. But the rise of the Delta variant means virtual...

Oct 05, 2021

UX/ UI Designer

We’re hiring! Backpack Interactive is a small but mighty edTech strategy, UX, and UI design studio. We...

Sep 10, 2021

What Your Development Team Needs to Know to Convert Print Content into an edTech Tool

Transforming a print product into an edTech tool is a big undertaking. To make it all happen, you’ll li...

Sep 01, 2021

Shifts in EdTech: What This Top-Level Hiring Trend Means for You

Tech-focused edTech startups are ramping up their hiring, especially for roles at the intersection of U...

Jul 28, 2021

UX in Education: Why UX Designers are the Learning Engineers of the Future

When it comes to designing UX in education, a generalist approach to product design and user experience...

Jul 27, 2021

What Shifting Back to In-Person Learning Means for EdTech

Fall 2021 is still up in the air as school districts around the country consider whether to permanently...

Jul 09, 2021

A Guide to Turning Your Successful Print Product into a Digital Learning Tool

Your company has a successful print product on its hands, and you’re on the hunt for ways to turn that...

Jun 10, 2021

Translating Teacher Suggestions into edTech Product Features

When you work in a specialized industry like edTech, you get comfortable with the lingo. Product owners...

May 28, 2021

Educational Resources for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month & Beyond

This is part of an ongoing series about edTech industry shifts in at-home learning. You can read our re...

May 21, 2021

How Good UX Design Provides a Safe edTech Environment for Online Student Interaction

We all saw how challenging it was for teachers to keep their students engaged during remote learning. I...

May 14, 2021

Two Ways to Support User Journeys in edTech Products

As we begin to apply lessons from remote learning to new product roll-outs, edTech product owners have...

Apr 14, 2021

Team Spotlight: Pantea Parsa

Welcome to our Team Member Spotlight! Every month we interview a member of our team and highlight their...

Mar 26, 2021

Why an edTech Specialist Should Conduct Your Next Competitive Audit

You’ve likely asked your product team to conduct a competitive audit before kicking off the design proc...

Mar 10, 2021

4 Benefits of a Rapid Approach to Innovative Prototyping Product Development

Agile product development can be an efficient way to design and produce edTech products, but it leaves...

Feb 24, 2021

Team Spotlight: Monica Sherwood

Welcome to our Team Member Spotlight! Every month we interview a member of our team and highlight their...

Feb 22, 2021

What’s the Future of edTech in the Classroom? Two Teachers Weigh In

From tech to teaching strategies, educators are doing their best to reach students in remote, hybrid, a...

Feb 12, 2021

Change Your Approach to edTech Product Design with Persona Resonance

No matter who your digital tool is for, that tool should reflect your user’s environment. This includes...

Feb 12, 2021

Self-Directed Workshop: Designing edTech Products for Your Primary User

Identify your resonant persona and unlock the look and feel of your next edTech product....

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Jan 28, 2021

How to Pivot Your edTech Product Directly to Consumers

As an edTech firm, you’ve already seen the push for learning products that work in the home. Does that...

Jan 28, 2021

Three Ways to Leverage UXR Before You Build Your edTech Product

You know how important it is to get feedback on your product from your users during user testing. So wh...

Jan 19, 2021

How to Integrate Your Development Team into the Creative Process

As remote learning becomes the norm, your UX design and development teams need to be even more thoughtf...

Dec 07, 2020

Why You Should Invest in Accessible and Adaptive edTech Tools Right Now

With limited access to their teachers and peers, the shift to remote learning is especially disorientin...

Nov 24, 2020

20 Years of Insights from the Front Lines of edTech

For the past 20 years, Backpack Interactive has partnered with museums, universities, publishers, and m...

Nov 12, 2020

Teacher Council Report: How to Design Better Adaptive Learning Tools

In an ideal world, adaptive edTech products provide students with personalized support based on their n...

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Nov 12, 2020

What Teachers Really Need in a Remote Learning Product

The rapid switch to remote learning this past spring revealed major gaps in digital learning tools. Tea...

Nov 11, 2020

Teacher Council Report: What Teachers Want in Remote Learning Tools

Validate your next round of feature designs using the insights from Backpack Interactive's Teacher Coun...

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Nov 09, 2020

How to Build and Launch an Online Course in a Crowded Market

When we work with brands to develop an online course from existing content or from the ground-up, we kn...

Oct 26, 2020

How to Leverage Peer Learning Features and Foster SEL Growth in Remote Learning Tools

Peer-to-peer learning has numerous benefits for students. It provides students with practice collaborat...

Oct 14, 2020

UX & UI Product Designer

Thank you to everyone who applied. We are no longer accepting applications but keep your eyes open for...

Oct 05, 2020

Introducing Backpack Interactive’s Teacher Council

At Backpack Interactive, we love teachers. In any user experience research (UXR) we conduct, teachers f...

Sep 29, 2020

What’s Your Baseline? How to Make UXR More Valuable for Your Next edTech Product

UX designers in the edTech space are specialists who participate in a community of educators. To design...

Sep 11, 2020

How to Design Impactful Digital Experiences on a Small Budget

Nonprofit and community organizations are already working hard to support their communities with few re...

Sep 11, 2020

Self-Guided Workshop: Creating Digital Experiences with a Small Budget

When you’re a small nonprofit or mission-driven organization, redesigning your digital presence is ofte...

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Aug 18, 2020

What’s Next in edTech: 4 Trends You Need to Know

At Backpack, we believe the best classroom technology amplifies a teacher’s ability to help their stude...

Aug 06, 2020

Remote Learning Puts Teachers in the Role of UX Designers. What’s Next for edTech?

Teachers have always recognized how valuable in-person instruction is. In fact, they rely on these rela...

Jul 22, 2020

Are Your Products Remote Learning-Ready?

The data is in. According to The New York Times, the last four months of at-home learning have only hig...

Jun 22, 2020

How Teachers Can Connect with Students & Families During At-Home Learning

This is part three of our ongoing series about edTech industry shifts in at-home learning. To check out...

Jun 18, 2020

Parents Are edTech’s Next Big Users

We were 10 minutes into a Zoom call with my 13-year-old daughter’s school when her teacher asked us for...

Jun 11, 2020

Educational Resources for Talking to Your Kids About Race and Anti-Racism

This is part two of our ongoing series about edTech industry shifts in at-home learning. To check out t...

May 29, 2020

How Parents Can Weather the Storm of At-Home Learning

This is part one of our ongoing series about edTech industry shifts in at-home learning. To check out t...

May 15, 2020

Where Does Your edTech Product Fall on the UX Threshold?

If you’ve ever tried to sign your child up for a PlayStation or Nintendo Switch account, you know how c...

May 15, 2020

ToolKit: How to Improve UX for Complex edTech Products

When developing an edTech product, it's important to determine how to push your product to be both easy...

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Mar 19, 2020

Build Something Better: The Real Value of a Scalable Discovery Process

If your company has adopted Facebook’s “move fast and break things” approach to product development, yo...

Feb 17, 2020

What Are You Selling? UX Solutions for SaaS in edTech

When it comes to designing software-as-a-service, or SaaS, it can be difficult to decide where your mar...

Feb 17, 2020

ToolKit: Designing SaaS Solutions in edTech

Are you ready to design a new edTech SaaS solution? There are some key questions you should ask yoursel...

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Feb 06, 2020

Addressing Design Feedback: How to Keep Your Project Moving Forward

Seeing the visual direction for your edTech product for the first time is nerve-wracking. After all, yo...

Jan 28, 2020

Digital Product Design Lead

We believe in teamwork, complex projects, and elegant solutions for digital products. How about you? We...

Jan 15, 2020

User Testing: When Technology Insights Solve UX Problems

Systematic user testing is a key part of developing any user experience strategy. Everyone on your prod...

Jan 14, 2020

How to Incorporate SEL into any edTech Product

Over the past decade, the education world has embraced the idea that respect, social awareness, and rel...

Jan 14, 2020

ToolKit: How to Build edTech Features That Strengthen SEL Skills

Students need help building their Social Emotional Learning skills, now more than ever. Can edTech prod...

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Dec 11, 2019

Visual Design Strategy: How to Make Stunning edTech Products Users Will Love

Strong visual design strategy is crucial for creating an effective edTech product that engages your use...

Dec 03, 2019

EdTech Product Design: How Smart UX Saves $$ on Technology & Creates Efficiencies

We know that adding a UX or UI team into the mix at your company can be scary, even if you have lots of...

Oct 01, 2019

The edTech Designer's Creativity Toolkit: Deep Listening

“Deep listening” is a process of engaged inquiry and openness crucial to design work. When you truly li...

Sep 26, 2019

How Intuitive Onboarding Can Replace Costly Teacher PD & Support

Onboarding systems — which help users understand how to navigate your product — can be the difference b...

Sep 19, 2019

How to Design the Best Data Dashboard in edTech

Student data is an extremely powerful tool for educators. But training educators to use complicated edT...

Sep 01, 2019

UX + UI Designer

At Backpack Interactive, we believe in the bigger picture. We’re a small but mighty strategy, UX and de...

Aug 07, 2018

LINK App for Learning Ally Gets Top Rating

EdTech Round Up, the industry’s premier source for educational technology news & reviews, honored t...

Jul 25, 2018

Personalized Digital Rewards Are the Future of EdTech

“I’m missing basketball,” a student called out, interrupting our demonstration. I was with my design te...

Jan 23, 2018

Meet Backpack Interactive!

SOS Brooklyn, an award-winning creative design and strategy agency that creates interactive and persona...