UX Research & Design for EdTech Companies

Annie Hensley

Director / UX Design

Biography

As Director of UX Design at Openfield, Annie is responsible for ensuring the team continues to deliver superior client and user experiences that result in tangible business outcomes. That includes fostering collaboration and crossover between our design and research teams, mentorship and career guidance, stewardship of Openfield’s culture and values, as well as, contributing to strategic decisions that ensure the company continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of EdTech clients and users. Annie is a lifelong runner who completed the Boston Marathon for a second consecutive year in 2023. She is an avid lover of parks of all sorts – theme parks, ballparks, and National Parks (even revisiting Parks and Recreation too many times to count).

Qualifications

As Director of UX Design at Openfield, she brings a wealth of experience with a B.S. in Design from the University of Cincinnati. With 10+ years in the field, she excels in facilitating design thinking sessions, fostering collaboration, and driving superior user experiences. As an IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, she is committed to ensuring accessibility standards are met, creating equitable product experiences for all users.

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Microcopy is an essential element of good UX design

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

Top 10 tips to produce effective, user-friendly microcopy

Chances are, your product team already pours ample resources into making your products as user-friendly as possible. You work hard to get the user flows and UI elements just right. But what about the verbal components of the interface?

If you’re like many EdTech companies, microcopy — or the many verbal cues found throughout your product, from buttons to prompts and instructive overlays — may be a last-minute consideration. This often means that microcopy is written on the fly, without rigorous guidelines or user testing.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

All hands on the ball: a collaborative approach to building new product features

The launch of a new product represents a huge leap, but it’s really just the first big step in a series of many. Over the course of a healthy product’s lifespan, your team will continue to work inside the product for years to come, fixing bugs, pushing out updates, making UX improvements, and adding new features. New features require efforts from UX, engineering, and product teams with each leading at different times.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

‘Good enough’ usually isn’t: Avoiding traps that sabotage MVP success

Minimum Viable Product. Minimum Awesome Product. Minimum Loved Product. No matter what you call it, your product needs to delight users on the first release and every iteration beyond that, or it will fail.

Product release dates for classroom software.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

Makers of classroom technology must align product releases with academic calendars

In general product design, frequent releases is accepted as the best way to update products. But in EdTech, timing can be the difference between success and failure. Learn the best practices for product design and development release cycles that consider the natural cycles of academic calendars.

A user is confused about how to use an EdTech product due to its lack of onboarding features.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

How onboarding helps users get up to speed on your EdTech products quickly

Improving the on-ramp to your product makes users confident in their choice and increases their satisfaction. The bottom-line benefit of a better onboarding experience comes from both greater customer retention and reduced customer service.

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Annie Hensley

Director / UX Design

Biography

Qualifications

Articles and Resources from Annie Hensley