Connect with the Product Roadmap to learn more about the changes coming to Brightspace, Wave, and Creator+ over the next 6 Months!
Written By: Lindsay McCardle, Senior Manager, User Experience Research
At D2L, the user sits at the center of our product development process. We strive to build a learning platform that’s both useful and easy to use. We need to hear from you to prioritize your needs as we design and build products to transform the way the world learns.
While we connect regularly with our D2L customers, it’s also important that we understand the needs and challenges of our end users. That means we want to connect directly with the people who are in our products on a daily basis: educators who are building, delivering, and supporting learning experiences; and learners who are engaging with materials, activities, and assessments to reach their learning goals. We serve educators and learners across the lifespan, so we connect with users in K-12, higher education, and corporate organizations.
How We Collect and Use Your Feedback
We have three key methods to collect feedback from our end users: the Product Idea Exchange (PIE), user experience research, and in-product feedback. The feedback from our end users is considered alongside inputs from our customers via conversations with Customer Success Managers, Technical Account Managers, and advisory boards.
In-Product Feedback
We collect end user feedback in Brightspace using question prompts. This allows us to collect ratings about Brightspace, teaching and learning goals, or specific workflows. Collecting this kind of data is part of our commitment to continuously improve our products and services. These ratings help us understand areas of the product that might be challenging and assess the impact of changes as we release new updates to Brightspace. We’re excited to finally offer this feedback mechanisms to our customers, as is common in the software industry.
We care deeply about ensuring that our question prompts have minimal impact on learners’ and educators’ experiences in Brightspace. We have five key principles that guide how we prompt for our end users’ ratings:
- No user account is prompted more than once per year. You won’t keep being asked to provide feedback.
- Responses are anonymized. We track who has been prompted but responses are not tied back to particular users.
- For K-12 clients, we do not prompt users in learner roles.
- Responding to the feedback prompt is optional, which means you can easily close a feedback prompt and keep working towards your goals.
- We avoid prompting during workflows to minimize interruption of task completion. For example, we do not prompt during learner quiz taking or during instructor assignment creation workflows.
Currently, our questions all have rating options with no open-ended response options. If you’ve got ideas for features or pain points to share, please consider posting to PIE.
Each month, our UX research team analyzes data collected via our in-app prompts and updates key product teams and leaders. The trends in these ratings help us prioritize what parts of our products or services we should focus on improving and inform additional UX research.
Privacy and Accessibility in In-Product
We do not collect any personal identifiable information (PII) as part of our feedback; our queries do not have any open-ended questions. We use a unique user ID that is anonymized before being stored. This ID is used only to ensure we do not prompt any user more than once per year.
If you would like to opt-out of In-Product Feedback, please contact your account team.
User Experience Research
We conduct user experience (UX) research studies to gather our end users’ perspectives related to particular topics in teaching and learning, and to test new workflows for educators and learners. In UX research sessions, we take a systematic approach to asking questions and observing participants completing tasks in product prototypes. When all sessions are complete, our UX researchers systematically analyze data to identify key goals, pain points, and needs that inform product direction and design decisions.
UX research studies are conducted throughout the product development process. Learn more about signing up for our Participant Database so you can be contacted to participate in relevant UX research studies.
Privacy in UX Research
When you sign up for our Participant Database, your information is used solely for the purpose of contacting you regarding UX research studies and rewarding participation in these studies. Data collected in UX research sessions is confidential and participation is always voluntary. You will be asked to sign an NDA prior to each research session.
Product Idea Exchange
The Product Idea Exchange (PIE) is a place where educators, academic administrators, and LMS administrators can submit new feature requests to D2L as well as promote and comment on existing feature requests from other users. PIE is found within Brightspace Community and is a continued source of ideas for improving and extending Brightspace.
Our Product Management team reviews new PIE requests each month. Relevant ideas from PIE are curated and shared with Product Design and Engineering teams as they consider and begin work for projects. In addition, as we engage in Roadmap Planning, each Product team finds, reviews, and consolidates relevant PIE requests. You can see the status of any PIE request in Brightspace Community.
Integrating Your Feedback
We take many inputs into account to shape our Product Roadmap and inform the design of our product. None are as important as hearing from our end users, and we appreciate you taking the time to contribute to PIE, participate in UX research, and respond to in-product feedback!
