Usability starts with U: How your feedback directly informs Blackboard LMS development
A conversation with Jo Packer, VP of Design
Usability in learning technology is often presented with a wide range of synonymous terms, acronyms, and metrics. With so many different measures and expressions of data, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and identify what really matters for users’ daily learning experience.
I sat down with Jo Packer, vice president of design, to demystify this crucial subject. Our conversation spanned the principles of usability, how it’s measured, what really makes a difference for students and instructors, and Blackboard’s approach to being the most innovative, usable, and accessible LMS on the market. As part of our month-long celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Jo also outlined how inclusion and equity are fundamental to our design methodology.
In the simplest terms, what is usability?
Thirty-two-million students, instructors, and administrators use Blackboard every month from Edinburgh to New York to Sao Paolo and Singapore. To put that into perspective, Ben, that's larger than the entire population of Australia! Every design decision we make either helps or hinders these people to get things done. That’s why usability isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the job.
To quote the godfather of usability, Jakob Nielsen, “Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.” Far from an abstract concept, this is defined by five quality components: how quickly basic tasks can be performed, how efficiently people can use it, how easy it is to reestablish proficiency after a break, how forgiving it is when things go wrong, and how pleasant it feels to use.
Now here’s a principle that will ruin how you look at software forever, Ben. As flexibility increases, ease of use decreases. As systems support more use cases, edge cases, unique ways of doing things, they become harder to use, because complexity compounds. While the LMS needs to support a wide range of tasks to suit modern learning, studies have shown that too much complexity can increase cognitive load and interrupt the learning process.
How does your team approach usability?
Here at Blackboard, we're serious about usability. We believe continuous improvement comes from listening deeply to the people who use our platform every day. Usability is a core pillar of how we approach everything we design and build.
We incorporate user insights into every mode of our product development cycle. In Discovery we seek to understand the problem and opportunities for improvement. In Delivery, we build at scale and test flows with real users before we ship. In Operation, we track not just whether it works, but whether it works well, by collecting user sentiment and iterating. We take the job of providing educational infrastructure very seriously.
The impact and insights the Blackboard Community provide are impressive. In the last year they took part in 317 user research sessions, attended 120 office hours, left 6,500 usability survey comments, and submitted 7,500 Idea Exchange votes, of which we released over 400 user-requested features across our teaching and learning solutions.
What is Blackboard’s vision moving forward?
Our goal for Blackboard is to continue to be the most innovative, usable, and accessible LMS on the market. That ambition sits on three pillars: functionality, usability, and accessibility.
Functionality is what the product can do. Our features, our tools, our workflows, our integrations. It's everything we've built over time to support teaching and learning at scale.
But a learning platform is much more than just a list of capabilities; it's where learning takes place. That’s where usability comes in. Usability is about how well our product works for real people, not in demos, but in real classrooms with real instructors and real students under real pressure. It's about how easy it is to get started, how intuitive it feels when people are using it, and how quickly people can accomplish what they came to do so they can get on with their day.
In other words, functionality is what we offer, usability is how it feels to use, and accessibility cuts across both, ensuring that everyone feels welcome, confident, and supported.
Tell me more about the accessibility pillar. How does this fit within the broader theme of usability?
We place a large focus on accessibility. Our in-house accessibility team sits within the design team, which means that we embed accessibility from concept stage all the way through to delivery. Our accessibility experts regularly run reviews with product management, developers, and designers, and we iteratively test for accessibility throughout the development lifecycle.
We also intentionally seek input and feedback from accessibility leaders in the field and our panel of disabled users. Accessibility isn’t an afterthought at Blackboard; it's baked into how we do things. It's part of our DNA.
How is usability measured?
Great question, Ben.
There are three industry standard surveys we can use. The classic “System Usability Score,” or SUS for short, features ten questions and was launched in 1986. The modern “Usability Metric for User Experience,” or UMUX for short, has four questions, and the latest and lightest UMUX Light has just two questions. Each was developed by researchers and backed up with academic studies, and each produces a usability score from 0 to 100. It’s important to understand that these scores are not percentages; a score of 80 doesn’t mean 80% usable, for example.
At Blackboard, we use UMUX Lite. We run a monthly in-app survey for instructors and students worldwide, which gives us a regular heartbeat of what users are experiencing day-to-day. For eight straight months Blackboard has sat firmly in the “good” zone of usability, comfortably above the global software average. The survey includes an optional comment box and my team meticulously read every comment. The single most common comment from students is that Blackboard is easy to use, simple and intuitive.
Of course, the most crucial part is the research helps us identify where we can improve. For students, this includes streamlining login, finding what's due, and optimizing mobile. Instructors want greater assistance with the back-office side of things, including the gradebook.
What usability improvements have recently been implemented in Blackboard LMS?
Our research revealed navigation as a priority area for both students and instructors. With this in mind, we released a significant overhaul to System Navigation in January. The results have been great, driving fewer error clicks, 51 million course switcher journeys and—the number I personally care most about—a 7% increase in student time spent in their courses. That is what usability improvement looks like, and we will be rolling out deeper navigation updates over the coming months.
A second example comes from Jennifer Lee, an instructor at Wake Tech Community College. Earlier this year Jennifer used our new AI automation feature to revise the personalized messages she usually sends out to her students after a midterm. In the past, those emails were focused on low performers, but now the automations tool enabled her to send a relevant email to all her students based on their results. High performers were encouraged to rest, students who struggled were reminded they are more than a grade in the gradebook.
This simple change had a big impact, leading to more student replies than Jennifer had ever received in all her years of teaching. Students shared appreciation, struggles, wins, and things going on in their lives that she would never have known about otherwise. Read more about Jennifer's story in her Linkedin post.
What are some further developments the Blackboard community can look forward to across 2026?
There are a lot of great improvements on the roadmap, but for usability I’d highlight three.
The first significant improvement is the new Gradebook. Instructors will have the same capabilities they've always had, but with significantly better usability. More accessible and actionable, less cluttered, and more performant. Our recent office hours saw a lot of excitement for this one!
Then we've got the new Rich Text Editor. Instructors will benefit from significantly improved support for lists and tables, more accurate copying from external documents, and a more intuitive authoring experience overall. This generated a tremendous amount of interest from our institutional partners during our recent roadmap webinar.
For students we have the to-do list, a direct response to student feedback in our monthly usability survey. We’re providing students with a place they can see all their upcoming assignments, so they can plan their time better and reduce stress and anxiety.
Any closing thoughts, Jo?
My team and I want to thank the Blackboard Community for all their feedback and insights. Please keep engaging and let us help you have the best experience with Blackboard. Keep joining office hours, study halls, roadmaps, and usability testing, and continue submitting ideas and voting in the Idea Exchange. Invite your students and faculty to join our task force, we really want to hear from them also. Your voices are a key component of how we Build Blackboard Together!
Usability will be a hot topic at our Building Blackboard Together in July, and Jo Packer’s Product Design team will be on hand to hear your feedback and answer your questions. Reserve your place today!
