Designing better, together: stories of pedagogical co-construction (2/2)

At Wooclap, I have the privilege of standing at the crossroads of two worlds: that of pedagogical innovation, and that of product development. What I observe is that the most meaningful ideas rarely emerge in isolation. They are born in conversations, in a message sent between two classes, or during a workshop with learning technologists.

They also require us to do our best to show humility, and to recognize that we cannot, on our own, identify every need.

In this article, the first of a two-part series, I’ll take you behind the scenes of our co-construction method. How do we structure listening? How do our teams get involved? And what does “co-construction” really mean when it comes to designing an educational tool?

In the second article, I’ll share concrete examples of co-constructed features, their stories, what they taught us, as well as other co-design cases around how Wooclap and Wooflash are used.

A collective and structured dynamic

Turning a pedagogical need into a feature is never immediate. It requires organizing listening, confronting ideas, and testing over time. To do this, we’ve set up different forms of collaboration depending on the project and its stage of maturity:

• feedback continuously aggregated by our Care team from user messages received via our chat,
• ideas gathered during more structured contribution campaigns, relayed by our Customer Success Managers in direct contact with organizations,
• individual video calls with screen-sharing, to understand real use cases and pain points,
• in-depth beta-testing programs over an extended period, to test features in real learning situations,
• cycles of themed workshops, designed so that peer exchanges (teachers, for example), facilitated by our team, can generate new proposals thanks to collective intelligence.

This co-construction dynamic involves all roles at Wooclap. As Head of Learning Innovation, my role is to ensure it remains deeply rooted in our team culture. This means promoting a common language between teaching and product development, fostering pedagogical curiosity, and tuning into signals from the field. I also facilitate co-construction workshops to align pedagogical objectives with product innovation.

To give you a clearer picture of what this means in practice within our organization, I asked two key members of the Product team a few questions below.

Interview with our product team

Wandrille – Head of Product

• How do you define co-construction at Wooclap, and why is it essential for product development?
  I see co-construction as a continuous dialogue between the team and the platform’s users. This dialogue can take many different forms, but most importantly, it happens at every stage of feature development! The process is essential because it keeps us anchored in the realities of teachers and learners, and allows us to build a product that is both highly relevant and very easy to use.
• How do we balance user-expressed needs with our long-term product vision?
  Our long-term product vision is itself nourished by this continuous dialogue with users and the whole educational community (researchers, instructional designers, teachers, students, etc.). Among all the needs expressed, the vision helps us prioritize those we want to address, and gives us a framework for how to address them. It helps us build solutions that are coherent and sustainable.
• Can you give an example where user feedback led you to reverse a decision on a feature?
  The toughest decision was abandoning, right before launch, our first integration project with Zoom. We were still in lockdown, and we knew how valuable such an integration could be. But once development was complete, testers found the ergonomics less practical than simple screen-sharing and too different from their habits. Despite already communicating about its upcoming release, we chose not to launch the feature at that moment.
• What user feedback from Wooclap/Wooflash has marked you the most?
  I’m lucky to often interact with students. Quite often, one of them tells me that their grades improved significantly thanks to Wooflash. These moments always remind me why we build these tools: to support learners’ success and to offer a more engaging and effective learning experience.

Anne-Laure – Product Manager

• Can you tell us more about how you integrate user feedback in your daily work?
  User feedback helps me identify the real problems to solve on a new topic, and to understand concrete situations, beyond what we might assume internally. An essential step for me is to compare this specific feedback with my own vision of the problem: it helps me clarify what really needs to be addressed, validate or adjust my hypotheses, and ensure we’re starting from the right foundation before proposing a solution.
• Can you share a moment when user feedback transformed a feature?
  When we first started working on the “Drag & drop” question type, the identified needs were tied to free brainstorming activities, without right or wrong answers. But by talking to several users, I realized this format could also serve other pedagogical purposes, provided we added the notion of a “correct answer.” So we evolved the feature: from a simple X/Y positioning matrix, it became a drag-and-drop on an image, with or without validation, depending on the need.

• What user feedback from Wooclap or Wooflash has marked you the most?
  What strikes me most are the testimonials from users who are not very comfortable with digital tools, often because they didn’t grow up with them, telling us how simple Wooclap feels to use. Each time, it reminds me of the importance of our mission: to create a truly accessible tool that anyone can pick up easily to make their presentations more interactive, without technical barriers.

Coming up in the next article

I’ll continue this exploration of our collaboration with Wooclap and Wooflash users, through stories of co-constructed features.

And feel free to write to me at arlene@wooclap.com if you’d like more behind-the-scenes stories from Wooclap!