The Benefits of User Personas for Your edTech Product

After more than 20 years in edTech, I’ve seen how the benefits of user persona research extend beyond better learning outcomes or improved usability. (Although these are certainly important!)

Persona research helps you prioritize features, including the features buyer personas in edTech have come to expect from competitive products.

It also helps you develop more effective learning content, align your team on priorities, and empower your team to produce more effective work.

With a more streamlined approach to product design and development, your organization will certainly see cost savings and more efficient timelines.

But I think that the real value of persona research lies in how it can be used to guide alignment efforts across your entire company, providing a strong return on investment.

In this article, I’ll explain why buyer personas are the key to unlocking your edTech product, so you can get the most mileage out of your research efforts.

I’ll also detail how to extend user experience research beyond edTech product development, so your entire organization benefits.

Let’s dive in.

USER RESEARCH KIT

Learn *exactly* what teachers need from adaptive edTech tools!

You'll get 2 research-backed personas, 1 competitive audit, & 65 pages of insights from our Teacher Council to share with your product team.

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How understanding the school administrator persona benefits your edTech product

For any B2B product, the buyer persona isn’t necessarily the end user. Rather, the end users of B2B software are highly trained professionals who need technology training to perform their roles well.

Even though edTech is a B2B industry, it’s different from other kinds of B2B software design. Our end users are even further removed from the purchasing product.

For example, school administrators typically buy products, while teachers use those products to manage their classroom and assess their students. Students are yet another end user who benefit from the product’s learning experience.

Why is this a big deal?

Even though you’re designing a product for a teacher or student to use, you’re still obliged to design that product in a way an administrator thinks a teacher would like to use it. In addition to the product experiences for teachers and students, administrators will consider questions like:

• Does your learning tool look great and easy to use? 
• Does your edTech product have a compelling data story? 
• Can it demonstrate efficacy? 

More accurate edTech personas help you navigate this complex web of expectations, and reflect these needs in the design and feature choices you make for your product.

The ROI of edTech persona research

Good user persona research is invaluable and has many benefits you can apply directly to edTech product design. 

It also creates a shared understanding about your customers among all stakeholders, from the marketing team to your content and instructional designers. 

This shared understanding is key to aligning your entire organization on what users need. 

It’s always exciting to see the clients and partners I work with apply user experience research to their organization, too. In fact, some of the biggest, most meaningful brand transformations happen this way.

I’ve seen organizations transform their marketing and sales efforts, reach new customers, and build stronger internal teams—all by aligning their teams around the results of user experience research.

In addition to cost savings in UX and UI, here’s how you can use persona research to create “soft” organizational value.

1. Feature prioritization

When you develop an edTech product, there are numerous creative and technology avenues open to you.

edTech personas are the best way to narrow these options down to the features your customer really wants, rather than the features that will simply fit your business needs.

As a short-hand for all of your user research, edTech personas give you an easy way to align customer needs with business goals. This makes prioritizing and developing the right features for your edTech product that much easier.

2. Content design

edTech software serves as an interactive hub for all of your users. The dynamics, expectations, and needs change drastically as students age. The content a teacher needs also shifts from grade to grade, as well as from the beginning of the school year to the end. 

edTech personas help you understand and account for these nuances, which will affect how you present learning content in terms of both UX and UI.

The learning gap created by the pandemic has also made edTech persona work more important for content design. 

As students continue to make up for lost time, the need for content scaffolding keeps increasing. New or refreshed edTech personas can accurately capture these needs from the beginning of your project.

3. Team alignment

Most importantly, edTech personas are key to helping your entire team build empathy and align on a strategic direction. 

Building empathy for users is important because it allows you to delegate and spread out decision making. Empathy also empowers your entire team to make both creative and design choices that reflect user needs and challenges.

No matter what phase of product design you’re in, well-researched edTech personas will help your team design from a strong foundation.

That way, you can build products more efficiently and reap additional benefits from user research as your edTech product grows.

Start the edTech persona research process today

As we head into a new year, it’s time to refresh your existing edTech personas to meet the challenges of the moment.

Whether you conduct new user research, organize a user survey, or hire an external team to do the work for you, updating your edTech personas is a cost-effective way to build foundational success for your learning tools.

USER RESEARCH KIT

Learn *exactly* what teachers need from adaptive edTech tools!

You'll get 2 research-backed personas, 1 competitive audit, & 65 pages of insights from our Teacher Council to share with your product team.

Download Kit

Thank you! Your download should open in a new tab.