THE PROBLEM

K-12 teachers and administrators don’t have time to sift through data and complicated charts. They need actionable insights.

With this project, we aimed to answer the critical question: “I have the data—now what?” To ensure relevance and utility, data must be delivered with clear, actionable next steps. By prioritizing insights over raw outputs, we shift from sharing data for reporting’s sake to delivering focused, digestible information that drives decision-making. This approach empowers users to take meaningful action and fosters a culture of purposeful, outcome-oriented data use.

Results

This project led to a 200% increase in administrator engagement on our platform. By redesigning reports to highlight clear takeaways and actionable insights, we significantly boosted site traffic and deepened usage among district personnel—demonstrating the value of making data more accessible, relevant, and easy to act on.

Understanding our primary customer:

District Administrators

Problems to solve:

  • Administrators need to verify that use of the product is helping teachers to cover required skills and standards to ensure that students will make meaningful academic gains.

  • Administrators need to be empowered to make data-based decisions on product purchases, use of professional development days and license/resource allocation

  • Administrators need to see the value that an edTech product adds in their district.

Understanding the problems

How might we…

  1. Create concise, actionable insights that surface key student needs across classrooms, grade bands, or demographics

  2. Build visual summaries (e.g., trend arrows, red/yellow/green indicators) that make interpretation intuitive

  3. Answer the question: "so what, now what?" with a layer of recommendations or questions to guide next steps

  4. Provide consistency and simplicity across platforms with no need to learn a new interface for every report

  5. Give users the ability to zoom in and out to see big and picture patterns, but drill into specific schools or programs if needed

Defining our plan

Disrupt the status quo for EdTech reporting with an insights that tell a story rather than deliver data.

For administrators, a reporting experience that goes beyond raw data, delivering clear, actionable insights and next steps to support timely decision-making. Instead of overwhelming charts and static metrics, admins receive concise, digestible summaries that highlight what matters most, empowering them to take informed action without the need to interpret complex datasets.

Project Challenges

Disrupting the status quo

One of the core challenges of this project was disrupting the status quo of reporting, where traditional dashboards and static charts often prioritize data volume over data clarity. Shifting toward a model that emphasizes actionable insights required rethinking entrenched norms, both in how data is presented and how it’s interpreted. Many stakeholders were accustomed to complex visualizations that felt “comprehensive” but ultimately obscured the story behind the numbers. Designing data visualizations that are both meaningful and simple posed a unique challenge: how to strip away noise without losing nuance. Striking that balance meant navigating conflicting expectations—delivering sophistication behind the scenes while maintaining a clean, intuitive front-end that empowers busy administrators to quickly grasp what matters most.