Building and Launching a Digital Early-Years Assessment Product

A leading UK educational assessment publisher engaged TDS to design, build and launch the digital version of one of its flagship products: an established, widely used paper-based speech, language and communication toolkit for early years.

TDS took the product from discovery through to launch, providing user research, UX design, full-stack engineering, test automation and product ownership as an embedded team.

The Challenge

For more than a decade the client’s speech and language toolkit had been a market leader, but it was entirely paper-based, and sales of the paper-only product were approaching their peak. Without a digital offering, growth was expected to stall and then decline. The paper format also created real friction for the practitioners who depend on it, such as health visitors, speech and language therapists, early-years practitioners and teachers, and for the settings that buy it:

• Onboarding could take months from purchase to first use.
• Reporting relied on ageing, non-target legacy applications, with data-quality and integration problems.
• There were no national comparison insights to help settings and local authorities evidence need and secure funding.

The task was to create a digital product from scratch that modernised every part of this experience, without losing the clinical integrity and trusted equivalence of the original assessment, and to do so on a technology platform the client could build on for years to come.

Solution and Implementation

Strategic Approach

TDS embedded a full multidisciplinary team alongside the client’s own people (user researchers and UX designers, full-stack developers, automated testers, a scrum master and a product owner) and ran the programme as continuous product discovery: designing with users first.

• User research and co-design: Rather than digitising the paper product wholesale, TDS ran continuous discovery with a panel of engaged practitioners, testing functional prototypes regularly and progressing to a restricted beta. This grounded every decision in how a wide range of users actually work, from health visitors to classroom teachers, and surfaced needs that shaped the product roadmap.
• UX design: TDS designed an interactive one-to-one digital assessment that any practitioner can run without specialist expertise, a digital intervention kit to support children and engage parents and carers, and a reporting suite for individual settings and multi-setting clusters. A fully digital onboarding journey replaced a slow, manual process.
• Build and launch: Working as an agile scrum team across a full-stack .NET and Angular platform, TDS delivered an interim onboarding console first to support new sales, then the core product (child record, assessment, intervention kit and reporting), launching the first digital phase on schedule. The build included a child-record and API layer to resolve long-standing data-quality issues and integrate with customers’ other systems, plus a free tier to sit alongside paper kits, enabling upsell and aggregated national comparison metrics.
• Layered automated testing: To keep a fast-moving build reliable, inclusive and cheap to change, TDS put in place a layered automated test strategy rather than leaning on slow, brittle end-to-end tests. Fast unit tests formed the base. Integration and behaviour-driven acceptance tests, verified features against agreed requirements in language the whole team could read. Automated accessibility testing was built into the pipeline so the product stayed usable for every practitioner and child as it evolved, a first-class concern for an education product rather than an afterthought. Bidirectional contract testing between the UI and API caught integration mismatches early. Each layer catches a different class of problem at the cheapest point to fix it, giving the team the confidence to release frequently without sacrificing quality or accessibility.

Key Deliverables

• A digital, multi-channel product (assessment, digital intervention kit and reporting) built from scratch
• A research-led, accessible user experience usable by non-specialist practitioners
• A fully digital customer onboarding journey
• Child-record and API capabilities for data quality and system integration
• A layered automated test suite: unit, integration and acceptance (Reqnroll), automated accessibility, and bidirectional UI/API contract testing
• A migration path off ageing, non-target legacy applications
• A scalable technology architecture for future products and international expansion

Results and Outcomes

• A brand-new digital product taken from discovery to launch, transforming a paper-only toolkit into a modern multi-channel offering and protecting a flagship product’s future before paper sales peaked.
• Customer onboarding reduced from months to same-day, transforming the buying-to-using experience.
• Quality and accessibility built in and continuously verified, so the product could evolve quickly while staying usable for all practitioners and children.
• A clear path to retire ageing, non-target legacy applications, cutting cost and technical debt.
• New reporting and national comparison insights that help settings and local authorities evidence need and secure funding.
• A reusable platform and delivery approach that positions the client to launch further products and expand internationally.
• A durable, multi-year partnership delivered by an embedded TDS team, with consistently positive client feedback on delivery.