In a traditional online education system, teachers are normally treated as internal employees, rather than customers. However, with more and more teachers deciding to leave their jobs, and with the rising complaints about being a language teacher, we decided to take action and find out why. With the world-famous Swedish education brand, EF, we put on the teachers' shoes and dig deeper into their experiences as online teachers.

It is crucial to ask the right questions to the right people. In this step, we need to identify who are the users and set up recruitment criteria and interview plans in order to make sure that we have a solid base for the research.

Gather views and opinions from internal employees/stakeholders/managers. This will help us to gain insights internally and holistically. The interview will be conducted in a formal user interview style with 3 interviewers and1-2 interviewees;

This step is where all the raw data are from. I and my intern conducted semi-structured 1-on-1 interviews and card-sorting exercises. There are more than 30 interviews, including user interviews and internal expert interviews, conducted for the project with video and written recordings.

The data collected from the interviews are then analyzed and defined into a Customer Journey Map (CJM). The method we are using here is to collaboratively color-mark "user needs", "pain points", and "opportunities" in the form where we created to store all interview notes.

After we identified all the "user needs", "pain points", and "opportunities" from the interview and compressed the loose data into "essence", we are ready to visualize the findings and create CJM.

From the interviews and the CJM, we can clearly see that the teachers' struggles come from their daily teaching routine and onboarding.

Teachers need to switch between multiple software during the day.

Teachers are frustrated for doing unnecessary repetitive tasks like copying and pasting classroom comments.

Teachers' salaries haven't changed in almost 10 years.

The on-boarding for international teachers is not really helpful, especially in terms of accommodation.