NxtPub Access Learning

Serving up school books online via e-readers is more challenging than it sounds, but it wasn’t the main challenge (or unique value proposition) for this project. The question was how to simplify the process for teachers choosing books for their class curriculum. The client was the first in the market to undertake this daunting task and create a platform that served curated content by reading/grade levels, education standards and themed collections. With NxtPub, teachers could create classes, popular reading lists, make assignments, upload their own content, monitor student progress and order print versions of catalog items.

Project Summary: We started with analyzing the market forces and competitive landscape of digital distributors for K-12 schools. Many schools were purchasing tablets with e-books readers, as a means to solve the issue of not being able to afford up-to-date (paper) textbooks. Besides latest content, this digitizing trend provided other opportunities to make educators’ lives easier, mainly creating and assigning reading lists and tracking student’s progress. And on the publisher’s side, we saw an opportunity to rethink how digital content served, as well as how they make money; instead of a conventional method of pay-for-book, we wanted to build a Spotify-like subscription method of pay-for-pages-read.

Role: UX Lead

Deliverables & Activities: Competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews, discovery workshops, page flows, wireframes