TECHSMITH KNOMWIA: EVALUATING BARRIERS TO ADOPTION
University of Michigan Design Clinic | Fall 2020 Semester-Long Project
Role: Project Manager
Client: Techsmith Knowmia
Background: During the Fall 2020 semester, I worked alongside a team of three other undergraduate and graduate students to evaluate the barriers to adoption of our client TechSmith’s video hosting platform called Knowmia. Knowmia targets higher education institutions such as community colleges and public and private universities by providing educators with asynchronous learning solutions.
Problem: Once the Knowmia is sold to an institution, TechSmith often loses sight of how it is adopted by administrations and faculty
Goal: To identify the barriers of adopting Knowmia with institutions and provide TechSmith with a user journey map and recommendations to improve the user experience for administrators and professors.
Process: Through weekly client meetings, team meetings, design clinic meetings, project manager meetings, and bi-weekly mentor meetings, I guided my team throughout the process of conducting research, creating personas and journey maps, and providing our final recommendations. Our journey maps allowed us to display the emotional ups and downs throughout the process of adopting Knowmia, break down and better understand the user workflows, indicate the key pain points, and identify potential opportunities to improve adoption.
Final Deliverables:
Personas
Journey Map & Opportunities
Overall Findings
Watch the full presentation below:
Personas:
Journey Maps and Opportunities:
Overall Findings:
From our journey maps, our team narrowed down the main pain points that have the greatest opportunity to be solved. Below are the main findings associated with the Knowmia adoption process:
First, because every institution that uses Knowmia differs from one another, there is additional time needed to customize and adapt the training materials that the Knowmia team provides.
We also found that customer support response time are also not ideal and that emailing back and forth with TechSmith can be time consuming.
In addition to this, our team discovered that a common pushback for adopting Knowmia is suggested to be that faculty already have familiar tools to host video. As such, they prefer not to spend time adopting and learning new tools.
The last finding for the adoption process is that universities often need to involve more IT personnel in providing minor support so there is a need to provide different access types. For example, giving IT members the ability to assist in editing but not giving them full administrative level access settings.
Additionally, our team uncovered the main concerns among users when actually using the Knowmia software:
First, captioning and transcripts are one of the biggest value-adds of the Knowmia software for users; however, there are two areas for improvement: (1) making the process of publishing captions more straightforward and (2) improving the accuracy of captions.
Privacy was a major concern for faculty and administrators. Knowmia actually does well with privacy, so it is important that faculty remain on the platform. Other video hosting platforms that faculty may prefer such as YouTube have ads and recommended videos, and it can be difficult to restrict the targeted audience to authenticated students. Additionally, universities want to control access and maintain ownership of these learning materials, and YouTube does not grant them this right. Therefore, if TechSmith can improve upon other parts of the journey, they can keep users on the platform and decrease potential privacy issues for the university.
Video editing caused much confusion for many users. There is a lack of feedback in terms of what stage a user is on during the recording and editing functions. Sometimes a user does not know if what they want to do is actually happening, so this can lead users having to re-make the video or re-do various steps of steps. Additionally, many users did not know that Camtasia and Knowmia were associated since they’re both TechSmith products. Many users did not realize that they could edit video on Camtasia (a platform that users are more familiar with) and then directly upload to Knowmia. Currently, many are editing on Camtasia and then uploading to YouTube.
Knowmia offers data visualization & course analytics, but many felt that it offered too much information and a lack of personalization. Faculty would prefer to have the option of filtering the information retrieved to customize the visualizations and only view specific, relevant data.
Many also discussed difficulties with the Learning Management System Integration. Depending on the LMS, professors do not have the ability to easily select from multiple display options when including the video from Knowmia such as embedding, external links, new tabs, and so forth. Additionally, they have Issues with preventing students from engaging in cheating. The platform currently allows for a student to watch a video or take the quiz after the deadline.
Lastly, device restrictions were an issue for users. While it is easy to get started in Knowmia, it is heavily reliant on device compatibility and proper internet connection. Old operating systems and devices posed issues for legacy faculty.