Teachers and Technology: A field study
Scope
This project was carried out under a period of four weeks. The team consisted of 5 UX designers / UX researchers.
My role
My role within this project was to conduct UX research together with the team. Tasks that were included in this were;
Write interview scripts
Conduct interviews (in person and over phone)
Transcribing interviews
Creating a user survey
Distribution of the user survey
Analyzing the gathered data and creating user personas
The Brief
Project description
The goal of this project was to help ClassQs validate or discard the following hypothesis about the needs and drivers of teachers in schools with 20+ students per class.
First hypothesis: Teachers often feel overwhelmed by their workload and can’t find the time to help all the students as much as they would like to.
Second hypothesis: A large group of teachers are reluctant to try new digital tools (any tools). We (ClassQ) think that it has to do with them either finding it hard to learn the new tool or that they think that they don’t have the time.
Target Audience
The target audience for this project were teachers with classes the size of 20 or more students. Upper elementary, high schools and post high schools (Komvux, YH, University) were all of interest.
The Reserch
Exploratory Expert Interviews
At the discovery phase of the project, the team conducted exploratory expert interviews in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the Swedish school system.
This method in order to approach the study in an unbiased way and to attain a deeper understanding of what the school system currently looked like and understand what larger challenges the system faces.
The team conducted three in-person interviews with people of prominent roles within the school and administration sectors with a connection to technology and Edtech. Including:
An IKT pedagogue
The head of a Swedish Edtech organisation and incubator
An IT developer working with the education sector of the Municipality
Using the findings:
We used the insights we gained from these exploratory interviews as a basis for structuring the teacher interviews. The exploratory interviews gave us important insights into what larger challenges the school system faces, and a better understanding of the role of teachers within that system.
Teacher Interviews
We conducted interviews with teachers in order to get an understanding of the current challenges that they face.
We chose to conduct interviews as the main body of the research because we wished to gain insight into what teachers experiences on a personal level.
We were the most interested in finding out:
Do they have the time to help all students in the classroom (If not, why?)
What the process of learning new digital tools look like today
What pain points are there with learning new technology
Do they have the time to learn new tools
What digital tools are they using already
Seven teachers were interviewed in total. One interview were carried out in person, six were made by phone.
The questions
Based on these points we created an interview script with questions focused on four main areas:
Motivation and characteristics
Technology proficiency
Workload
Desired solutions
Analyzing the interview results
In order to find common themes in the interviews, the interviews were first transcribed in full, then printed out. They were then color coded according to subjects relevant to the hypothesis.
Together, the team also looked for other recurring topics and insights that might be of interest.
The findings were them compiled together in a document. These findings were then analysed together to find common themes. These themes were used as the basis for proving or disproving the hypothesis.
The Survey
In order to back up our qualitative findings we reached out to teachers with a survey.
The purpose of this survey was to get quantitative results that would complement, and strengthen our findings in the interviews and to reach as many people as possible within the target group.
We reached out both to principals of local schools and through relevant facebook groups and saw the most success in the later. Close to 80 people answered the survey.
Delivery
Personas
Based on our findings in the interviews and survey we identified several distinct personality types. From these findings we set up personas.
The personas, as well as the findings of the interview and surveys made up the final delivery to the client, ClassQ.
We chose to craft personas as a part of the summary of our findings to humanise the data.
The purpose of making personas was to identify different needs within the target group and look at what solutions these different personality types desired.
The information that were included in the personas were:
A bio
Pain points
Level of technological literacy
Desired solutions
Preferred implementation process of new tools
"You were spot on with the personas. I had a conversation with a 'Larry' just yesterday, haha!"
The client
Survey results
In order to make the survey data easy to understand at a glance, we created graphs that illustrated the results. These graphics were a part of the final delivery to the client along with a detailed summary of the findings and conclusions.
Graphics by Freddie Sjögren
"I'm amazed at how accurately your findings lines up with our own research, some of these things we found out just last week."
The client
Learnings
Transcribing
One of our main learnings from this project were that fully transcribing entire interviews from audio recordings of meetings can either be incredibly helpful, or to big of an investment in time. And are only to be used when necessary. A more time efficient method is to have the note-taker take down the most interesting conversation topics and quotes from the interview. And to keep audio files for backup.
Time management, Interviews and the Survey
We were very concerned that four weeks would not be enough time to find enough teachers to interview, as teachers are generally very busy people. This proved to be rather manageable as we were able to do most interviews by phone and after school hours, and reached out early in the process.
We did however run into problems when it came to dealing with the administrative process. When we reached out to principals we would generally not get any replies, or get them several weeks later. This forced us to rethink our methods of how to reach out to teachers. It where the main reason we reached out with the survey through facebook groups (and not to schools directly). Which proved very successful.