National Geographic Learning

Here’s how Mightybytes helped National Geographic Learning transform their enterprise product strategy to account for digital-first educational practices.

The National Geographic Learning team employed a traditional publishing process in which digital products were created based on their print counterparts. Yet K-12 students increasingly learn in digital-centric classrooms.

To address this shift and meet important organizational business goals, the company wanted to flip their process and put digital learning at its heart. This would require a fundamental shift in how they produce products.

To kick off our engagement, Mightybytes conducted extensive research into which existing internal processes worked, which needed a redesign, and which could be dumped.

Based on results from dozens of stakeholder interviews and a deep assessment of current processes, the Mightybytes team set to work designing a new process that centers user experience (UX) design and digital learning.

This included:

• Detailed tasks and dependencies based on customer feedback and industry best practices
• Recommendations for improving collaboration among team members and between teams
• Recommendations for staffing and managing a new UX team
• Detailed program and planning guides, plus checklists to help teams navigate the new process with ease

Designing the new process was iterative and dependent on feedback from several internal committees to get buy-in and make improvements. The entire process was reviewed several times by a variety of key stakeholders.

Once the process was approved, we also ran two workshops to train the entire National Geographic Learning team on differentiations between print and digital projects and common UI/UX design practices.

Mightybytes created an entirely new UX design process and trained stakeholders to help the company improve adoption and build capacity over time.

Regular project reporting and conversations about re-prioritizing deliverables when necessary helped us keep the project on track while also identifying new opportunities.

Including presentations, guides, and checklists, the final deliverable for this project was a comprehensive roadmap to help their team integrate the new process into existing product workflows.

During our work with National Geographic Learning, we redesigned the company’s internal publishing processes to prioritize user experience and help them transform into a digital-first developer of high-quality educational products.

Encouraged by the productive partnership, their team extended our engagement and contracted us for several other UX-specific projects as well.