Understanding and Addressing Teacher Pain Points

Memorisely is a fully bootstrapped, remote, online design education company. Renowned for offering a wide range of live courses in UX/UI design, UX Research, Design Systems, and now on-demand courses.

Having never conducted in depth research into their teachers, it was a perfect place to distill a research process that allows the company to understand and empathize with it's teachers. There was little clarity on what teachers experience while teaching a bootcamp, what their time revising class content is like any goals or pain points they had and why we're apprechensive about returning to teach.

Our objectives included a better understanding of how teachers prepared themselves to teach a class, unvcover gaps in communication, discover potential new opportunities and validate/disprove any assumptions and hypotheses. These assumptions, biases and hypotheses were uncovered during initial brainstorming sessions.

To comprehensively investigate the factors influencing teachers' preferences regarding class schedules and address any underlying issues, thereby enhancing the overall experience for both esteemed teachers and eager students.

In pursuit of enhancing Memorisely's teaching experience, we initiated a comprehensive generative research process, fostering a holistic approach to identify opportunities and gaps within our teaching experience. This multifaceted approach empowered us to generate innovative ideas and facilitate collaborative solutions, addressing our valued teachers' pain points with utmost dedication.

Who was involved: me, teachers, internal stakeholders

My first step was to interview teachers and Bootcamp Managers, who had a large amount of knowledge around our client’s needs, tasks, personality traits, and pain points. I spoke to each person and gathered their insights and thoughts. 

With each interview in Dovetail, I created a tagging taxonomy which consisted of categories, groups and tags before combing through and highlighting/tagging key points made by each person within the transcript that's automatically captured from the interview in Dovetail.

Next I formed an affinity map within Dovetail by filtering the text highlighted by tag to form groups. The groups with the most tags would then become the highest priority of data to sift through. 

The outcomes of this research allowed for me to communicate with the main stakeholder, our CEO, of what the highest pain point that's affecting teachers and in turn preventing them from feeling the incentive to teach.

Armed with these profound revelations, we formulated a series of actionable recommendations, precisely tailored to address the identified challenges. By conscientiously implementing these recommendations, our foremost ambition is to enrich Memorisely's teaching environment, thereby elevating the overall learning path for Memorisely's students. 

Curriculums shared with teachers one week ahead of class

Feedback loop introduced between teachers and class content creators

Resource list provided to help teachers with content

Class time reduced from two hours to 90 minutes

Classes split between two teachers instead of one has eliminated their workload stress

Clearer understanding of incentives and payment