Nothing Replaces Being in the Room with Users
Kristin Vincent has spent nearly her whole career designing in the education space. Image: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Kristin Vincent has worked in education for 20 years, but she is not a teacher. She is the Senior Director, Product Design at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and she brings deep expertise into how technology makes its way into schools and solves some of the fundamental issues that overwhelm the education system today. This includes the challenges educators face with the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, bringing the latest learning science research into the classroom, and making sure tech tools work seamlessly for teachers and students.
Unlike the regular design loop, where something is designed by an internal team, and then provided to the user for feedback, the CZI team takes the approach of designing with the users in the room. That underscores one of Vincent’s key tenets – you have to be out in the field and spend time with your audience to truly understand, and then solve their pain points.
Here, she discusses the state of education today, where and how CZI looks to make a positive impact, and the unique skillset designers can use to improve the education space.
What do you see when you look across the education space these days?
There is a lot of local jurisdiction in education, meaning the state, the county, the school district, all drive a lot of the experience. And so I'm going to generalize a little bit about what's going on, but I think you can pick out any example across the country, whether it's rural or urban, and probably find some piece of what I'm about to say.
Big picture, we're still recovering from the pandemic and trying to overcome learning loss. We see more student absenteeism than ever before. That is more common in high school, but now it is happening more in elementary and middle school, which hasn’t been as common.
We have more English language learners in the classrooms than ever before, and student test outcomes have not changed much in math and reading over the last 50 years, despite all of the edtech tools being used in classrooms. There are an average of 40 different tools being used in classrooms today. And we have more teachers leaving the profession and fewer entering than ever before in our history.
What is happening at a global level shows up in classrooms, and we have teachers who feel overwhelmed, unappreciated, or not respected, and they are being handed requirements to fix things and that feeling just compounds.
Forty tools sounds like a lot.
Forty tools is a lot to navigate as an adult. It is even harder for an eight-year-old.
How do you and your team view and approach these issues?
We are focused on two areas. The first is learning science, or understanding how learning works and how the brain functions. Instead of accepting that a particular form of teaching is going to produce a specific result, the learning scientists are going to try to answer, why a form of teaching produced a specific result, generated a certain understanding, or improved comprehension. When we understand that, we can start to aggregate that learning science into the infrastructure of the classroom through technology.
The second is, there are many incredible edtech tools as I mentioned, but they are fragmented. One of the hard parts of being a teacher and a student right now is that you have to move across many different tools to complete your learning. And so how can our team develop more cohesion between the tool set so it creates a seamless experience in the classroom?
How is a designer uniquely positioned to tackle this issue?
As a designer, I started out hands-on-keys, moving the pixels around in Photoshop a long time ago, and I still get into Figma occasionally, but so much of what a designer's job is is to sit at the intersection between the users and the product development org. I have this phrase, “Design like you're right, listen like you're wrong.” We are well positioned to be empathetic, ask curious questions, and listen. We want to hear or see something and do something creative with it, which isn’t necessarily how a business person or engineer walks into a room with an end user.
Take us into the classroom and tell us about something you recently saw that led you to design a solution for a pain point.
I remember one experience where I was in a computer lab, and 30 eight-year-old students came in. They each took a seat at their computer and the teacher told everyone to log into their program. I don’t know if you have ever watched an eight-year-old, who is early on in using technology, try to log into an application, but you will notice they can’t remember their username, or their password. Compound that by 30 and, you have a problem. The teacher placed a red cup next to each student, and they were to raise it if they needed help. Almost immediately, you see red cups in the air and the process to log 30 students into their program takes 20 minutes. When a period is 45 minutes, they have just burned half the time before they even start their lesson.
If you are a software provider and it takes students 20 minutes to log into your tool, that is a problem. So, we needed to design a solution that makes it easy for the teacher to direct and orchestrate 30 kids doing the same thing all at once. We worked with a backend engineer to make it so the teacher could control the log-in process for every student by having a log-in link on their computer when they sat down. That took the pain out of the log-in process.
Where else you have used your design skills to make a difference in the classroom?
Most recently, I’ve been working alongside our product teams to build Math Tailor—an AI-powered tool that assists middle school teachers in generating and adapting high-quality practice problems to supplement their classroom content.
Math Tailor's development has been fundamentally shaped through close collaboration with educators over the last year. The tool combines a teacher’s knowledge of their student’s needs with AI to create and adapt math problems built off an already existing high-quality curriculum. In practice, it’s used to help students build mastery through repeated exposure to key concepts, particularly in areas where the class, or a group, may be struggling but the teacher doesn’t have further built-out practice problems. Before Math Tailor, creating further practice equations could take hours of after-school time; with Math Tailor, it can happen in a matter of seconds.
What was the process like to co-design this teachers?
After we built the first version of Math Tailor, we did some early pilots, where we participated in co-building with nine teachers who shared their experiences using the tool. These educators demonstrated how they used the Math Tailor and provided crucial feedback about instances where AI-generated content was too complex or too simple for their students' needs. This is a common issue with AI use in education and something CZI has set out to solve. Our engineering team used these detailed insights to refine the AI parameters, improving the quality of content tailored to specific grades and learning levels.
In another co-building activity later on with over 30 teachers, we observed a significant reduction in concerns about grade-level alignment, validating the impact of our teacher-informed adjustments. While we continue to refine the tool, this iterative co-building process demonstrates how educator feedback directly shapes Math Tailor's evolution into a more precise and classroom-ready resource. Just a few weeks ago, I was able to join a session, where the teacher held up one of the worksheets she created using this tool. It’s incredibly rewarding to build alongside educators and then see our work put into action in real life.
You have shared how you apply design elements to the world of education. But what can design leaders who work outside of education learn from you and your team’s work that they can apply to the world of business and culture?
Nothing replaces actually spending time inside the environment where this work is happening. It does not matter what industry you're in, you have to spend time with the end user.
You might have the usage data or site analytics, but while the data can tell you what is happening, it can’t tell you why. To get the why, you need to talk to people, listen, and engage deeply to understand the problem and wrap that back into your process.
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