Photo - Project Archive
My role:
Process Lead • Service Designer • Facilitator • Client: Education Publisher NDADuration:
18months Aug 2022 - Jan 2024The project details are confidential, but I want to describe the main principles and methodology.
Launching a product for students in Poland is complex due to various dependencies. We aimed to link the new digital tool to textbook purchases, which added layers of complexity. Key factors such as licensing, marketing, timing with the school year, logistics, and customer service all intertwine. Additionally, we served four client types, but only one was our target audience
As a Service Designer, Workshop Facilitator and Lead Researcher I worked with client representatives and stakeholders from various teams and silos, bringing together experts from UX, marketing, sales, legal, and content coordination.
Goals
- Create map of services connected to main product
- Create timeline for product launch, promotion, users lifecycle and influences
- Map the product ecosystem
- Creating base for product backlog
- Plan product engagement
Why teachers are more important than students
The educational market in Poland is unique because multiple publishers can offer state-approved textbooks for the same subject. Schools and teachers choose one textbook per class each year, creating competition among publishers to be selected. The challenging part was that among the three client types, only one was our target user:
- Teachers are the main decision-makers for approved textbooks each year.
- Students are the primary users, but parents make the actual purchases.
So, publishers must focus on appealing to teachers and school administrators to ensure consistent textbook adoption, while also targeting parents for supplementary materials like glossaries, tests, and digital tools. The main user is just a small part of customer path.
👉🏻 The challenge was fascinating: a unique market, multi-channel, and multi-user experience, combined with a new approach to building product attachment.
How we build a map of larger context
Our first priority was to help the organisation understand the concept of the user lifecycle from a broader perspective. Rather than viewing textbooks as standalone resources used for only one school year. Students progress through multiple years: eight grades in primary school and four grades in high school. This means they have an long lasting journey through our products, which requires long-term planning.
👉🏻 A twelve-year user lifecycle for a product that changes every year. We need a map!
Second, we realised textbooks are more than just books. Teachers need extra tools like virtual boards, exercises, tests, journals, and ways to communicate with parents. Students often need answers, repetition, tutoring, and additional support. All of this should fit together in a complex system that repeats every school year.
To even start mapping process we needed strong preparation.
Milestone 1: Product Ecosystem
Preparing for Service Blueprinting involved managing complex stakeholder network and mapping the product’s wider ecosystem, a challenge in a siloed organisation with a narrow user view. Over time, my team grew to include new experts: a legal team for licensing, content creators to understand how the book correlates with the digital environment, and more. During the initial weeks, we set multiply working session to coordinate future work.
‘Stinky Fish’ workshop
Each fishbone diagram represents a part of the process or use case (such as login, license code entry, content creation, marketing events, etc.). We gathered feedback on these elements to improve information sharing, connect knowledge, prevent conflicts, and align products and teams.
This process makes it clear to everyone how their work overlaps and interconnects, fostering a stronger sense of shared purpose.
Product ecosystem layers
During workshop we were able to group stakeholders and set goals for them.
Product team stakeholders:
textbook authors, content designers, product owners, research team, UX/UI designers, developers.
Goals:
→ connect product and textbook
→ built product experience
→ establish user engagement path
Sales stakeholders:
sales reps, e-commerce, marketing, website management, webinars/events, logistic, legal (licensing).
Goals:
→ clear sales calendar with product lifecycle and seasonal events to address
→ bulletproof licensing process and onboarding path
→ content rich product landing page
Customer services stakeholders:
customer service department and product informations; users’ and clients’ ambassadors
Goals:
→ seamless communication
→ detailed FAQ and QA
→ well prepared self-service help tools
Complex product ecosystem
To coordinate products effectively and avoid market overlap or cannibalisation, we conducted an ecosystem mapping session.
In this workshop, we gathered all relevant products into a single framework, identified key milestones, established a timeline, and defined focus areas to ensure each product connects strategically within the overall ecosystem. That was also a first step to detailed timeline.
👉🏻 Textbooks and aligned products have a year-long lifecycle, but since their use follows the school year, planning must begin more than 10 months in advance.
Each stakeholder has their own timing. Ex. to launch product in 2025/26 school year:
- Content designers, bound by ministerial restrictions, need to finish their work in November 2024.
- Marketing starts engaging teachers by preparing materials no later than January, presenting samples in March/April so decisions can be made by summer for September implementation.
- Customer service deal with signup issues from August, but in time it turns with forgotten password or system errors.
And so on…
Milestone 2 – Research And Personas
Before we started building the journey map, we looked at existing data and filled the gaps. We created Proto-Personas to identify our target users and clients, then planned to explore them further in detailed research.
Building personas and customer/user journeys
We gathered data from company to compose basic players in our customer journey. Developing personas for teachers, parents, and students was crucial for mapping their interactions and the product flow effectively.
Research on teenagers’ shopping habits
The company had some insights into the goals and expectations of teachers, but students remained something of a mystery when it came to understanding the motivations behind their purchasing decisions, so we planned in-depth interviews with teenagers and their parents.
👉🏻 see here
👉🏻 see here
Research on teachers preferences
How teachers use existing tools? What our competitors offered?
- 12h of interviews with teachers
- 3 competitors solutions tested
- 2 workshop with designing team and marketing
Milestone 2: Mapping and building base for engagement
To set the stage for our actors, we first needed to define where the action happens. The Service Blueprint is my favourite tool because it captures the complexity of user paths and shows four equally important layers of work. With this understanding, we moved forward to start building the map.
Detailed Multi-User Journey
As a map of events and touchpoints with detailed scenario for every player and streamline. After discuss it with stakeholders we establish a template for roadmap to fill with events for every layer.
Service Blueprinting and engagement scenarios
You can think of Service Blueprinting like a theatre production: there’s the play, the script, the stage, the backstage crew, and all the prep work that brings it together. Our players was mainly:
- users: students, parent, teachers
- sales, marketing and content creators
- customer support, logistic and printing
- app production and implementation, including UX and UI
- legal team and business strategy
As part of this process, we wanted to help other teams like marketing, sales, and content creators better understand UX and user engagement. My role was to coach them through a series of hands-on, educational workshops. At the end we could present a skeleton blueprint to answer basic questions: when, what, who and why. From this point company decided to extend blueprint with detailed scenarios for every department separately, having in mind how all it connect together at the end.
How to proceed and what we learned
First of all, as we moved forward, we faced a change in ministerial rules in 2024: no digital product directly linked to a physical textbook could be sold as a separate paid product. After the pandemic’s online-school phase, things went back to normal, and education became analogue again. Bummer. But with all the data and insights we gathered, there was still room to shift direction and use the work to build a broader digital platform.
The second challenge was the strong position of tutoring companies and freelancers. Once the pandemic was over, online tools stopped being so valued. Parents were not ready to trust a fully digital product to guide their children through school tasks and exams. Among many learning platforms like Brainly, eduelo.pl, or squla.pl, even educational publishers — though more trustworthy — were not the first choice. Uncle Google and Aunt YouTube were asked for help more often. The market remained fluid and uncertain about the future.
Here are a few lessons I took from that project:
- When there are several similar products, there are usually silos in the company. The first and toughest job is to get them talking to each other and build bridges.
- If the gap between client and user grows wider, the product plan becomes more complex. In the age of free trials and subscriptions, these two groups are no longer the same, and our approach should reflect that.
- Educate before you start mapping. People want to know why — and we, UX Designers, tend to speak in our UX language instead of the client’s. Building a shared vocabulary made a big difference.
Joanna Barbara Sabak • j.b.sabak@gmail.com • tel. (351) 924-706-735 • Linkedin Profile
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