Backbone Magazine interviewed Edsby on the role of design in user experience.

In an article titled “Edsby: If You Want People to Use Your Software, Make Design a Priority,” the magazine cited Edsby’s focus on increased adoption through a “two-pronged approach: education and, especially, design.”

“Education is part of it, but we think what’s more important, in a way, is the design aspect. So, you’re designing in a way that the users won’t need extensive training,” said John Myers, president of CoreFour, developer of Edsby.

Myers pointed to Facebook’s 1.11 billion users—all with different degrees of tech savvy—as an example of how the need for training can be reduced or even eliminated. “If you do it well, you can find the learning curve, and adoption, are not so hard,” he said. He said the “old way” of improving adoption is expensive training, but while Edsby conducts training, design is its primary weapon of choice in reaching its goal of 95 per cent use by teachers in the school boards who’ve deployed the cloud-based grade book and social learning platform.

Still, it can be an “interesting challenge” rolling the product out to some of the largest school boards in North America, like one that is to begin using Edsby on July 1, 2013. The board, with more than 260 schools, nearly 200,000 students and more than 15,000 teachers, is one of the 10 largest school districts in the U.S.

In the second week of June, three Edsby team members were training 600 technology lead teachers, who will, in turn, train their peers. The design and training efforts rely on the familiarity Edsby founders have with their target market of educators and its reliance on modern practices for cloud-based software, Myers said.

Read the full article here.