What 9 NYC public school principals taught me about design research.

Reflecting on the impact of in-the-field research within a growing educational non-profit.

Note: this post was originally written in 2017. I found it in my Medium drafts and was pretty stoked on it, so I’m posting from the archives:

I started working with an organization called NaliniKIDS in 2014. What started as a quick rebranding project has blossomed into a partnership that I’ve learned a ton from over the years. I help with a broad range of design work—from print-based marketing pieces and products (like children’s books and teacher manuals) to digital projects (like an online content portal for teachers, or the NaliniKIDS website).

Oh, by the way—our team is almost entirely remote. Some of our team lives in New York City (where NaliniKIDS started), and some of us are scattered across the country (like me in Columbus, Ohio).

A few months ago, NaliniKIDS received some pretty rad news — the New York City Department of Education was interested in partnering, to bring NaliniKIDS to thousands of kids during the 2017 summer school season (like ~72,000 kids, to be more specific). Since then, we’ve been working hella hard to get things in order. One of the biggest pieces of the NaliniKIDS summer school puzzle is training administrators to facilitate our program.

So, this past week on May 25th, we hosted over 100 principals (each representing a different New York City public school) in a banquet room full of roundtables on NYU campus, for a 6-hour NaliniKIDS Training session. The goal was for each principal to leave the training with the knowledge and ability to then train their school’s teachers on our program.

Thanks to NaliniKIDS founder Rupa Mehta, I was able to attend this training session in-person.

Side Note: Let’s be real…despite the fact that many people fantasize about the idea of working from home, remote work can be stressful and lonely sometimes. So when your boss, your coworker, or your client can sense that “remote friction” and pulls you to the frontline to gain some insight — just for the sake of insight — you should rest assured knowing they truly value you as a team member.

NaliniKIDS had a strong team of employees and volunteers at the training session, each instructed to guide a table of 9–10 school principals through the program.

I, however, was instructed to not play the role of facilitator—but instead to simply observe. I’m a huge user-centered design nerd, so I honestly couldn’t have been given a more fitting and fulfilling task.

For 6 hours, I sat alongside a random group of 9 principals and mirrored their tasks throughout the training session. I followed along with the same printed Powerpoint slides, skimmed the same 156-page training manual, read a 100+ page curriculum book, and filled out the same worksheets as these principals I was observing. And between tasks, I candidly asked them about how they felt along the way:

“What chapter are you on? Are you taking as long as me? I’m a slow reader.”

“Are you having trouble answering any of the questions on page six of the handout?”

“Do you think it’ll be simple to break this program down for the teachers at your school? Do you feel like you have the tools to do so?”

I also was there to hear their casual conversations and candid concerns:

“I’m not that great at reading in big rooms like this with tons of other people. I’d much prefer to be alone in my living room diving into this…”

“I’m confused about the order of lesson plans. When do the students and teachers get to the chapter mentioned in the presentation earlier?”

I also gained insight into each principal’s existence outside of the training session. One of the activities NaliniKIDS facilitates is called the One Word Journey, in which the participants reflect and find a single word that represents their purpose and driving force in their day-to-day. This activity required each principal to be a bit more vulnerable. Everyone at the table shared more than they probably ever thought they’d share about the existential and introspective sides of their careers/work. It was ridiculously enlightening and very inspiring to be a part of.

My experience in NYC was not only personally inspiring, but it was pretty damn efficient in helping me understand design problems that NaliniKIDS can improve.

In the coming months, I’ll be working on a wide range of design projects to help further the impact our organization has on education around the country. Part of that effort includes streamlining a training system in which we can on-board more NaliniKIDS participants #remotely—because depending on the school location or business relationship, our trusty team won’t always be at every school or district to demonstrate how NaliniKIDS works in-person. We’ll have to deliver our on-boarding/training energy in the best way we can. And my goal as a designer is to make any touch-point with NaliniKIDS as easy to understand and as user-friendly as it can be.

I’ll take notes from my group discussions with those principals and build our future design system on solutions that answer their concerns. I’ll also pull from my own experience of working remotely to hopefully avoid any potential friction that could happen in training remotely.

I think good design is about remembering the simple, yet influential things you pick up in research. Like the fact that many principals probably commuted 45–90 min just to attend our training session. Even that commute effected how they responded to reading 100+ pages.

Good design is about remembering that some people just don’t care about how passionate you are about your product or program — some just need the easiest path to completing your day-long training session.

Good design is about designing for the extremes and making sure every user has access to the most important information—from the apathetic principal (who unfortunately left the training early), to the other who’s so excited about the training that he’s taking videos to show his employees and colleagues.

I don’t think there’s a better way to gain that insight than actually being present to absorb it all.

So, in conclusion—

Here’s to understanding our “users” and their “experiences.” Here’s to getting away from our computer screens every now and then and experiencing our design problems in-person. And here’s to clients that give a shit about their designers enough to grant them opportunities for gaining perspective.

Oh, and if you haven’t yet, check out NaliniKIDS!