Ken Burns in the Classroom

For over thirty years, Ken Burns has written and directed documentaries known nationwide for depicting historical events from different perspectives. Thousands of middle and high school social studies teachers have leveraged these famous documentaries from Ken Burns and his collaborators to help students emotionally connect with what they are learning in class.

While teachers have leveraged Ken Burns content in the classroom, it usually involved finding a DVD or other source and fastforwarding through it to find that one clip to show to their students. PBS worked with Florentine Films, WETA, and other organizations to design and develop a better experience for teachers. We set out to create a Ken Burns Experience on PBS LearningMedia that provides a rich, well-branded, and engaging experience for teachers and students. 

In order to do this, I led the team as product manager to create a web experience that responded to teachers’ needs. We reviewed and curated Ken Burns educational content for the classroom and developed new, dynamic experiences for upcoming films. I also led research to better understand teacher and student needs in the classroom. And finally, we designed, built, and iterated on new site functionality to better serve teacher and content contributor needs.

Performance Goals

I took the lead defining the process for this project as product manager. We were awarded the grant to work on this experience for teachers in June and decided we wanted to launch in time for the National Council for the Social Studies annual conference in November.

As product manager, my process leans heavily into the design thinking phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. I also utilize Lean UX and Agile methodologies to help projects run efficiently and stay on schedule.

To help with stakeholder expectations and collaboration, I created a high-level timeline, along with a shared calendar noting milestones.

The discovery phase of our process helped us to empathize with both stakeholders and end-users. I led stakeholder and teacher interviews in this phase and worked with our UX designer Chris Raymond, who created a stakeholder survey and a usability review of existing Ken Burns sites.

After better empathizing with teachers and understanding the goals of our stakeholders, I put together documentation of user stories to document decisions we made as a group and define the priorities we wanted the new user experience to reflect. These user stories outlined and prioritized how we wanted the product to function and identified which ones were critical to create a minimum viable product (MVP).

As we developed content for the site and defined functionality, I created a diagram of the taxonomy we would use for this experience within PBS LearningMedia. One of my biggest goals for this project was to build this in a way that would use the metadata that already existed in the content management system and to also build it in a way that we could use the new functionality for other PBS projects as well.

Through several collaborative group sessions and iterations, I worked with Chris Koth and Chris Raymond, who created wireframes that would turn these user stories into a rough user interface. We used this and the next phase to ideate on different ways the product could behave. Within this phase, Chris tested the wireframes with our target audience by creating a clickable prototype.

After iterating on those wireframes, I worked with Iko Gabay and Trisha Cruz from our visual design team to create visual mockups of the website. This phase had two rounds of visual designs and also included user testing a clickable prototype with teachers. Throughout this phase, I also worked with Iko and our content team to coordinate image production.

I used these visual designs to put together functional requirements. Additionally, I created wireframes of how the admin side of the content management system should function for our content contributors.

Using these functional requirements and design specs, I worked with our engineering team and tech lead to create milestones we would meet within the next six weeks. From there, we did three, two-week sprint cycles to develop the MVP. Working within milestones allowed me to test the product throughout the six weeks and work with content contributors to start the content migration and curation process.

After we launched the product update, we not only had a retrospective, but also a celebration to recognize the hard work we all did together.

While we tested prototypes throughout earlier phases, we knew that this is only the MVP of Ken Burns in the Classroom. I worked with two teammates to go to NCSS and test our live product with social studies teachers and curriculum specialists at the conference. In order to do this, I put together interview protocol and task scenarios and led the usability testing itself.

This testing process was incredibly rewarding. I not only had the opportunity to see teachers interact with the product in person, but I also had the opportunity to learn what worked well and what we could improve. This information helped me to prioritize my product roadmap for phase two and phase three updates.

Ken Burns in the Classroom was an instant success. It received thousands of accolades and shares on social media from enthusiastic teachers and even had a spotlight in the Washington Post. Every teacher we interviewed was overjoyed at how this would make their lesson planning process easier. 

The analytics we track on the product are also promising. We have more than a 400% increase in traffic to Ken Burns content on our website. The bounce rate is over ten percent lower than the average bounce rate for other collections on PBS LearningMedia. Our new historical era pages also have the second lowest bounce rate out of all pages users can view without logging into the site. This is only second to our site search results page.

Overall, this project was highly successful. I look forward to tracking how we align with our original key performance indicators and improve the product moving forward.