Design Research for SMART Technologies

Overview

SMART Technologies builds educational technology that helps teachers deliver lessons interactively. Their flagship product is the SMART Whiteboard, an interactive whiteboard that is used by teachers in classrooms across the US and Canada.

The Context

Early market research had indicated a greater number of schools adopting the Chromebook with Google classroom inbuilt in it, and SMART wanted to understand how their product suite compared with other competitors out in the market.

Investigate how SMART Technologies could improve the in-classroom experience, and gain an edge over competitors.

The team also wanted to understand how their software actively enabled or detracted from the teaching experience.

My Role

I worked with 3 researchers, to conduct interviews with 8 teachers across grades 1-12. I also shaped the competitive analysis to arrive at the larger level insights for the team.

The discovery process

User Interviews to understand usage

We asked the following questions to understand how the whiteboard was used in the classroom:

What were they primarily using the SMART product suite for?
What competitor products did they use? What did they like about it?
When was the last time they presented? What was the experience like?
Did they edit content on the fly? What was their experience like?

Understanding how the board was placed in the classroom

In addition to understanding workflows, it was also important to understand how the students interacted with the board:

What we learned:

Kindergarten classrooms had more room for children to move around and play. The SMART board was central to that interaction.

Teachers teaching older children had laptops, and would use the board less frequently.

Insights from competitive analysis

Google Classroom was identified was identified as a top competitor. Several teachers also spoke about using the Google Education suite (Google Classroom, Google Drive, Forms and Slides) extensively for teaching. From the research, we were able to arrive at some themes for comparison:

Cost
Compatibility with other software and hardware
Ease of access to training.

Where SMART's technology stood out

What set the SMART Board apart was the feeling of community and engagement students had within the classroom.
They liked that they could lead the discussion by actively encouraging students to interact with content.
Teachers also liked using the interactive features of the SMART Board to teach science concepts visually.

Where SMART's technology fell short of expectations

We noticed several areas where the technology could better meet teacher’s needs, and classified them as:

High Severity: Problems that derail classroom productivity indefinitely.
Medium Severity: Problems that temporarily derail classroom productivity.
Low Severity: Problems that affect classroom productivity to a minor degree.

Outcomes

We approached the research with the idea of restricting it to usability, but we also uncovered larger level product issues that would hinder purchases over the longer term.

We recommended considering competitive pricing, being software agnostic and improving ergonomics to make the board accessible to smaller children.