5 UX Design & Business Challenges edTech Companies Get Wrong—And What to Do About It

Editor’s note: This article is based on a recorded conversation between Sean Oakes and Jessica Millstone. Backpack Interactive also surveyed teachers on technology use in the classroom, including our Teacher Council.

Whether you’re trying to help a legacy product stand out in a crowded marketplace or looking for a new investor for your edTech startup, there are five common UX design challenges your company must be ready to tackle.

Miss the mark, and you risk the possibility of not reaching your users, designing an incompatible learning tool, or never rising above the noise.

edTech startup investor Jessica Millstone and design agency founder Sean Oakes have worked with edTech companies across the country for decades. 

Below, they share the challenges they’ve seen edTech companies face in both the design and investment worlds—and what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes.

Challenge #1: Getting Too Trendy

edTech may be a fast-paced and growing industry, but the education world moves much more slowly.

Before you hop on the bandwagon with tacked-on artificial intelligence or unnecessary voice-recognition, know your learning tool will likely be met with skepticism from busy educators, says Millstone.

“You can’t discount how resistant teachers are to really new products,” Millstone explains. “Nobody wants to bring in a new technology, adapt an entire curriculum around it, and then have it disappear overnight.”

“You can’t discount how resistant teachers are to really new products. Nobody wants to bring in a new technology, adapt an entire curriculum around it, and then have it disappear overnight.”

For Oakes, choosing the best technology solution for a learning tool—especially a trendy one—should be grounded in user needs and pain points. Essentially? Make sure you’re doing your user experience research homework.

“If you’re working backwards from a pain point that you know teachers have, and it happens that a way to solve that pain point is through leading-edge technology, then great,” says Oakes.

“But if it’s not accompanied by a use case or pain point, then [your product] might attract investment or attention, but it probably isn’t going to attract the attention of the people it serves,” he cautions.

Millstone agrees, suggesting that using new technology is all about being authentic to the edTech industry—and its users. 

“Something like speech recognition—now that could be added on at the last minute, a kind of nice-to-have on top of a very powerful literacy product, for example,” she suggests. “Or, it could be truly ingrained and integrated and creating the value prop for using that product.”

Ultimately, when it comes to integrating technology into learning tools, intent, use case, and value all matter most to your users—not how flashy your technology happens to be.

Challenge #2: “Walled Garden” Syndrome

Does your edTech product play nice with other common tools in the marketplace? Or are you trying to lure your users into a “walled garden” they can never leave?

edTech startups and legacy companies should both beware of the closed-system product, says Millstone.

“The impetus is to say: we do something really well, and we want to create an entire ecosystem or own the customer experience from start to finish,” she explains. “There’s a lot of reasons to do that from a business perspective.”

“But I think what we are discovering is that the more interoperability, the more integration that you have across products, the better,” Millstone adds.

“Think about ways that you can actually play nice with the systems that are already in place.”

Oakes is even more direct about the pitfalls of stand-alone products. Even if your company has an incredible offering, he suggests, “it’s very difficult to do that in a way that is as comprehensive as most teachers or schools need.” 

When you consider how many educators already use large, common platforms like Google Classroom or Clever, you may actually be shutting yourself off from sales, Oakes points out.

“Think about ways that you can actually play nice with the systems that are already in place,” Millstone suggests. 

“I’ve seen this in my portfolio, too. It’s a challenge distributing a stand-alone product, but once it’s a plug-in to something else, you’ve got a real pipeline into existing customers.”

Challenge #3: Safety Dance

If your learning tool is too disruptive to the status quo, you risk educators shying away from product adoption. Conversely, if you play it too safe, your edTech product might never get off the ground.

That’s because there’s currently so much competition in the edTech marketplace. “The post-pandemic market is super saturated,” says Oakes. “There’s tons and tons of products all competing for the same space in the classroom.”

To stand out, edTech startups and legacy companies alike need to take bigger, bolder swings. 

“The post-pandemic market is super saturated. There’s tons and tons of products all competing for the same space in the classroom.”

Oakes is especially excited to see creative solutions emerging from the nonprofit sector. “There are gigantic investments being made to try and figure out how to solve some of the biggest problems we have in the school systems that are the most underserved,” Oakes says. 

“The ethos there is: how do we do this in a way that’s fundamentally different? Let’s build something new for this, from the ground up.”

For Millstone, bigger creative risks not only encourage behavioral change around tool adoption—but they create demand for change, too. “With tiny, incremental change, oftentimes it’s just like, why should I replace what I’m already using?” she reasons.

“[If] it seems to meet a much bolder, bigger vision than what a purchaser of a school district might already be buying and implementing into the classroom, it can really differentiate you and create demand,” Millstone adds.

Challenge #4: Stale Sales

edTech products are typically developed and sold using a top-down approach. Companies sell to schools or districts, then push learning tools into the classroom—often without the input of the teachers who will use their tools.

Product-led growth, on the other hand, takes a more bottom-up approach, says Millstone. 

“You create something that is very easy to pick up and use for the first time,” she explains. “It’s probably free to use at the beginning, and you get your ideal customer persona to use this product with high fidelity in the environment that they’re working or teaching in. That way, you get true customer delight and usage at the earliest stages,” she adds.

This is also a great way to scale the design of your product. Facilitate product-led growth during the product development process by considering how other users might interact with your learning tool and designing for those use cases. 

This could look like adopting a co-design model, in which you work with teachers or learners to develop features that fit a need, says Millstone.

By mixing product-led growth with a top-down approach to sales, you reduce your risk in the marketplace.

Oakes has found success taking a similar approach to agile design and phased product roll-outs. 

“If you think, ‘Ok, our MVP that we’re going to go to market with, can we create that in a way that is tailored to how product-led growth works?'” he muses. 

“If you start to tailor it and say, ‘Here’s our batch of features that are absolutely going to be free. How do we start to think about the enterprise version of this? We don’t even necessarily have to build it yet, but it could be on our road map.”

Ultimately, this is an agile way to design and grow your learning tools. Not only do you build switching from free to premium content into your product roadmap, but you also incorporate user feedback as you go and identify product market fit as you build your tool.

By mixing product-led growth with a top-down approach to sales, you also reduce your risk, Millstone points out. 

“You’ve already done the research, and you have the data to show the efficacy or the fidelity of your product,” she explains. “Then you go in for a top-down sale.”

Challenge #5: Ignoring Your Users

Millstone comes from both an education and a technology background and has seen her fair share of learning tools built based on the existing beliefs of product teams.

“Even now, anywhere from small startups to enterprise companies are building their products based on their own beliefs and their own content—not on going to teachers,” she says. 

“When I was working at tech companies, there was not a culture of having a UX research department because so many of us were teachers in classrooms, and we have that personal experience,” adds Millstone. “But that personal experience could have been five, 10, 15 years in the past. It’s not fresh.”

Oakes agrees. “Everyone understands that UXR is important, but it doesn’t always get planned in,” he says. “If it isn’t a fundamental part of your process, then I think it becomes something that gets tacked on, and, as a result, becomes self-validating. It isn’t going to give you the tough news about direction changes,” he adds.

“If UXR isn’t a fundamental part of your process, then it becomes something that gets tacked on, and, as a result, becomes self-validating. It isn’t going to give you tough news about direction changes.”

User experience research and teacher feedback is especially crucial for content teams working in edTech. 

Learning content that’s been developed for print must completely transform for digital learning tools, Oakes explains, and this needs to be tested with users to determine when the best time to introduce information or functionality might be.

While both Oakes and Millstone agree on the importance of user experience research to product development, they also caution that there’s an art to conducting that work. 

“You’re not just going out and asking a teacher what they want,” says Millstone. “There is a filtering process that happens in between the insight that’s delivered and the way in which that’s visualized or built into the product.”

That’s what makes the person leading your user research process so essential, Oakes confirms. They “take what you hear, analyze it in a way that doesn’t filter out the bad news, then also consider it as a recommendation product teams can act on,” he says.

If you’re ready for your learning tool to succeed, it’s time to center the needs of the teachers and learners who use it.

You can address all five of these common UX design challenges with a combination of user experience strategy and research—plus, a healthy dose of creativity. 

Mitigate risk by understanding what edTech users want, so you can take the big swings that will get you noticed in a crowded marketplace.

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