3 Trends to Consider If You're Developing Ed Tech For Millenials
As a college student and “education technologist” I’ve spent significant time with my ears to the ground, observing myself and my peers, keeping an eye out for interesting student behavior particularly around our use of technology.Â
Young people's behavior can be tricky to understand. Many students love taking selfies. Why do people do this? I don't know. But this knowledge can be useful. Understanding how young people and college students interact with technology enables us to identify key trends that can be instrumental in guiding our approach to developing effective technology solutions for the unique challenges that “modern students” are facing. Here are 3 important ones:
“Smartphones” are no longer “a thing”. Â
By chance you’ve been living in a cave for the past 3 years, let me be the first to inform you: Obama was reelected, Margaret Thatcher passed, Blackberry is gone*, oh, and “smartphones” are just “phones” now, and virtually every American college student has one. According to a recent study from Re:fuel, today’s student spends more than 3.5 hours every day on their phone, and many students access “essential services” like Snapchat or Instagram, exclusively from these mobile devices. A prescription: technologists working on projects aimed at students should avoid "step-childing" mobile, and actively embrace developing and, for best results, prioritize mobile experiences in their offerings.Â
Staying connected is EVERYTHING.
The second trend is largely consequential of the first, and supporting evidence of the third. For us millennials, WiFi is like air and when the internet is bad, it's not uncommon to hear a friend say they're suffocating. Young people NEED to be connected to the people and things they care about. They're checking their mobile phones an impressive 150 times per day according to Kleiner Perkins' annual Internet Trends report. What's more? A recent study from Nielsen shows that Americans spend 40% of the total time they spend using mobile apps, using social and communications apps. Sustained real-time social connectivity is a fundamental (mind the buzz words) necessity for many of today's students and education technologists have a huge opportunity to leverage students' need to stay linked in to create digital communities and educational environments that can keep students "hyper engaged".Â
We're developing for a different species of user than ever before.
There once was a time when the primary consumers of software applications were middle aged enterprise clients. Employers would sign deals with developers, and shove the clunky unintuitive software down the throats of employees. This was the norm, and it worked well because we didn't really know anything about digital UX design, and employees, never having seen delightful, simple and intuitive design, just believed that technology was intrinsically "hard" and complicated, and that they ought to make the effort necessary to become proficient with the applications. This is absolutely not the case with modern students and, as some are hailing as the birth of the consumer enterprise, is largely less true now than before among large commercial organizations too. Simply: if it's ugly, hard, old or lame, students will not use it. "Let me take a break from the expertly designed, all-around awesome, Instagram app to use this ugly confusing piece of junk", said no student ever. As developers finding new meaning in old wisdom, we can revisit Thompson's Unix philosophy and commit to developing clean, simple and clear applications, that will captivate and engage modern students.