ABOUT
Education Exchange is a community of 850,000 educators worldwide, housing free teaching resources and professional learning courses for educators at all levels, enabling them to bring creativity into their classrooms.
OVERVIEW
The purpose of this project was to determine the best way forward to incorporate a template feature in Education Exchange and how it would connect with Adobe Spark (now Adobe Express.) Working closely with product, research, content design, and 2 design peers, I explore the conceptualization of a shared template feature.
RESEARCH
Given a limited amount of time to work on this project, I distilled previously conducted research and looked at how our competitors handled the design of templates targeting new users. This allowed me to identify discovery problems with Education Exchange’s current way of attracting new users and identify opportunities to conceptualize designs for a joint template resource.
Preliminary qualitative research
Through the education content and UX research teams’ preliminary findings, I learned about users’ general sentiments toward templates. This helped me determine what factors to dive into for the competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis
A competitive analysis showed an opportunity to differentiate Adobe educator templates from its main competitors by leaning into the concept of creating lesson packets including an editable template. Drawing inspiration from other template providers, it also identified ideas using SEO to attract new users.
USE CASES & MID-FIDELITY DESIGNS
The research unveiled four use cases for template resources.
The research also unveiled the five phases through which users engage with templates.
RDP = Resource Details Page
The user flows helped visualize the concept designs; above is one of the user flows created for the teacher use case.
TDP = Template Details Page
Above is one of the mid-fidelity concept designs created for the teacher use case.
SEO STRATEGY
A keyword search exercise surfaced the SEO strategy competitors practice through landing page interconnectedness. Adobe education resources did not make an appearance, so I made four recommendations to formulate a competitive SEO strategy for the template resources.
RESULT
As of August 2022, Adobe Education Exchange has incorporated templates into teaching resources, and of which the editable templates are hosted on Adobe Express (previously Adobe Spark.) The research, strategy, and design concepts for the initial phase of this project and which I contributed led to the launched designs now seen on Education Exchange.
LEARNINGS
Editable templates save educators time
The research surfaced that educators are limited on time and prefer resources they can modify to meet their needs.
Users edit templates in 3 different manners
Three different ways of editing surfaced which aligned with the three main use cases utilized to formulate the user journeys.
SEO is the key entry point for user engagement
There are four main ways users discover templates, SEO entry being the most popular. Since Education Exchange and Spark provide a very inconsistent SEO experience, improving the SEO strategy became key.