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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ARTICLE: Annie Hensley & Allie Lozinak

How to prioritize user needs as your product team tackles feature requests & business demands

As a product owner, you’ve been trained to put your users’ needs first. But you also know from experience that you don’t have the luxury of developing EdTech products in a vacuum. While your users should ideally drive everything you do, you must also contend with a host of competing pressures, from budgetary constraints to compressed timelines. The truth is that your feature requests and production timelines are often driven by business needs. But your users are the reason you created your product in the first place.

Photo of an EdTech product team conducting a remote discovery session

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

How to host a remote discovery workshop — and get the most from your EdTech team

When your team decides to build a new feature for your EdTech product, you likely start by holding a discovery workshop. You use the workshop to bring all the necessary stakeholders together, brainstorm ideas, and come into alignment about the underlying user needs and business objectives driving the new feature. The mechanics of putting on a virtual discovery workshop may seem overwhelming. But with a little planning and a few best practices, you’re sure to get the most out of your team — wherever they are.

A UX designer reviewing new onboarding features for an EdTech product.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley & Allie Lozinak

How superior onboarding wins over EdTech users from sales to product evangelism

Using a new product for the first time is a little bit like meeting a new friend or coworker. In fact, users assess new products in much the same way we assess new people: with personality, looks, and ease of interactions all coalescing to form a positive or negative association. Those initial interactions quickly add up to a powerful first impression — one that can be hard to dispel over time.

A student performing tasks on an EdTech product during a user testing session.

ARTICLE: Annie Hensley

The right people at the right time: Building a best-fit user feedback panel for user tests

User testing is a critical component of the product development process. You need your users’ feedback to shape your EdTech offering in a way that meets their needs and creates an enjoyable user experience. But when it comes to following the best practices of effective UX testing, not just any users will do. The reliability of your tests depends on your ability to recruit the right mix of users at the right time.

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.

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Annie Hensley

Director / UX Design

Biography

Qualifications

Articles and Resources from Annie Hensley