Category: Product Development

Finding the Balance: Prioritizing User Needs in edTech Product Design As You Meet Business and Curriculum Requirements

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
March 13, 2023

Even if you love the idea of incorporating learning science techniques into your digital learning tool, it’s not always an easy sell for product teams. Prioritizing user needs in edTech product design can cause tension between business requirements or curriculum requirements, even if everyone on the team has the end user’s best interests in mind.

In this article, we offer simple tips for spotting product design plans that skew too heavily toward curriculum requirements or business needs. We know you don’t want to leave your users behind, so you’ll also find simple solutions for course correcting in each of these scenarios. The hope is to meet in the middle!

After all, your editorial and business teams will always have demands you can’t ignore. That’s why it’s so important to balance design and curriculum requirements with what users want, need, and expect from edTech products. The end result is a stronger overall learning tool—and a better user experience.

Balancing Design and Curriculum Requirements with User Needs

Just remember: human-centered design in edTech doesn’t ignore instructional approaches or product requirements. You’re building a learning tool that will be used by students and teachers with very real needs, challenges, and pain points. That’s why it’s so important to recognize when a design team is leaving your users behind. 

For example, your team might feel strongly about designing an edTech product around a specific pedagogical approach. Other project stakeholders might even shut down specific feature ideas because the curriculum has never incorporated them before. Or, you could be asked to focus on business requirements ahead of user needs. Hey, it happens!

Here’s how to recognize and balance all your business needs while keeping your users front-and-center—even if the budget is tight and there are competing priorities.

What are teachers looking for in edTech products? Download our free Teacher Council Report for insights from real educators on edTech tools to find out.

The Risks of Taking an Instructional-Centered Design Approach

If you’re a publisher itching to transform a specific curriculum into an edTech product, it’s tempting to migrate your original print content to a new digital format. After all, you already have a well-loved, well-understood curriculum. Everyone on your team might even assume that your content doesn’t need to change—or that it can’t change and produce the same results.

While many successful curricula work well on paper, it’s often not possible to translate them directly into a digital medium. Trying to make a 1-to-1 print-to-digital product also means lost opportunities for helping students learn your material more effectively. 

Here are a few signs you might be leaning too hard on your original print product as you make the leap to digital. Does your digital learning tool:

  • Recreate, in a one-to-one way, an online workbook or “curriculum under glass”?
  • Reach for print strategies, rather than leveraging digital strategies for student engagement?
  • Require teachers to complete repetitive, time-consuming tasks better-suited to technology automation?

Then it might be time to retrace your steps, starting with any edTech research you’ve conducted on the teachers and learners who will use your product.

Tips for Incorporating User-Centered Design Principles into Your Instructional Tool

While it might seem like a smart move not to change an already-successful curriculum, it’s often a bigger risk to stick to the same content sequence. Integrating user experience research and the best digital formats for your user base is not only a better bet—it packs major ROI.

Here are three things you can do to incorporate user-centered design approaches into a tool that depends on an existing curriculum:

  1. Dig into your user experience research.
    Taking advantage of new developments in digital products makes sense from a user experience research standpoint. Our research consistently shows that users are busier than ever. Teachers have exponential new demands on their time, and students are doing their best to make progress on new concepts while making up for lost ground from at-home learning. Meanwhile, new teachers are joining the workforce with different expectations for digital products in the classroom. A digital learning tool with content sequencing based on a paper format will simply miss the mark.

  2. Reimagine your learning content.
    The best edTech products transform your existing learning content—not just recreate it. Remember: you’re no longer creating a print product with a specific sequence. You’re leveraging a digital medium with an expanded set of possibilities and features. You’ll have many options for content sequencing, developing adaptive content, and integrating learning science techniques, like reflection and “learning by doing,” into your new digital framework.

  3. Take advantage of accessible design practices.
    You’ll also have more opportunities to develop a learning tool that better supports neurodivergent learners. In edTech product development, accessible design works better for all users. When users are able to learn at their own pace or receive immediate feedback, engagement and understanding improves for users across the board.

How to Spot a Requirements-Driven Design Approach

Most edTech product teams are used to working from an initial set of feature requirements. Reporting feature? Check. Rostering? Need that, too. Curriculum. Check and check. 

These requirements come from sales, customer service, or customer success reps. They can also be driven by technology constraints, as publishers attempt to optimize their approach to digital formats.

Here are a few signs that your product team might be overly focused on business requirements rather than user needs. Your edTech product strategy might:

  • Focus on meeting business needs rather than addressing user pain points
  • Depend on optimizing for specific platforms like WordPress, rather than engaging with a range of technical and engineering needs
  • Be overly constrained by narrow budget parameters

Every product design team has to contend with a budget and technology needs. However, focusing too intently on business needs over the needs of your users will result in a product that doesn’t adequately solve a problem—and likely isn’t very pleasant to use.

Tips for Balancing Business Requirements with User Experience Design

Ideally, everything you learn about your users should align with your business needs and your final product requirements. Or, at the very least, there should be a healthy compromise between user expectations, your brand’s goals, and the product budget.

Here’s three tips for how to get there:

  1. Start with a clean slate.
    If you can start designing your tool by setting preconceived notions about learning content or business requirements aside, you’ll have an easier time identifying creative solutions to real user problems.
  2. Define the primary user challenge.
    Identify your user’s biggest challenge—and how your product will solve it. That way, you’ll be able to marry your solution to any content or business requirements—not the other way around. This approach guarantees your solution will be compelling to users. After all, no one wants to sell users on a solution they’re not interested in!
  3. Re-balance “blue sky” ideas with your business needs.
    Sometimes you have both an incredible pedagogy and an exciting creative solution to offer in your digital tool. But you’re just not sure how to make it profitable. For example, say you came up with a great new feature idea, but it requires your content team to completely overhaul their work. Does this fit into your budget or timeline? Probably not! Once you’re done brainstorming, don’t forget to factor business back into the equation.

3 Ways to Scale User Experience Research to Your Budget

One of the best aspects of user experience research and design is that it’s scalable to an edTech product’s specific needs—and budget. Below, we sketch out three approaches to getting more bang for your buck when it comes to making room for UX in the budget.

Even if you’re constrained by the parameters of a specific curriculum or your business needs, you can get a great deal out of user experience expertise at every price point.

The “Room to Spare” Budget

User experience research can help you validate content, or validate the usability of print content in a digital format. Conduct discovery sessions with your editorial and business teams to identify opportunities for transforming existing curricula into a digital experience that’s easy and delightful to use.

From a user experience standpoint, you might even decide to incorporate formative assessment into your product. With a specialized UX team in your corner, you can use learning science techniques to develop these features without creating a heavy lift for your design and engineering teams.

The “Just Enough UX” Budget

Can’t budget for the complete overhaul of your content and a major user experience discovery? Keep things affordable by conducting just enough user research to support future decision making.

For example, maybe you interview and test three user representatives rather than conduct a longitudinal study. Or maybe you validate hypotheses about user needs based on team experience and the input of your user success or customer service teams. There are simple ways to check your decisions that don’t have to eat into your entire product budget.

The “Budget Is Tight” Budget

Even with a limited budget, you can put user experience dollars to good use. For example, have your UX team ensure that your user interface has common patterns to help users navigate your learning tool easily. Your UX team might also help you effectively scale down your content presentation. This way, you can deliver some learning content very effectively, rather than design an overall clunky experience no one will use.

No matter what the price tag winds up to be, leaving your users out of the equation isn’t a risk worth taking. You’ll wind up with an edTech product that won’t help students learn—and won’t support teachers in the classroom. 

It’s better to introduce just enough UX into your product development plan, so you can ensure that you’re solving real challenges and creating a learning tool worth investing in. 

Are you looking for more ways to center the needs of your users? Contact our team to find out how we can help!

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Got a Plan? Everything You Need for Your edTech Product Development Timeline

Milagros Montalvo bio picture Milagros Montalvo
January 11, 2023

How do you get an edTech product over the finish line on time—and on budget? Why, develop an incredible product development timeline, of course!

No matter what tool you use to plan or create, your product timeline has everything your team needs to stay on track. This includes:

  • Major project milestones
  • Links to deliverables
  • Roles and responsibilities
  • Due dates for feedback, design, content, and more

Because they’re the best tool for keeping your team focused and on task, it’s important to spend the time to make timelines right. Whether you’re an experienced product owner or leading a team for the first time, here’s what you should know about developing an edTech product timeline your entire team can count on.

4 Things Every Strong edTech Product Timeline Should Do

Project timelines are an easily overlooked element of edTech product design, but they contain a real blueprint for success. (Plus, it’s disastrous when you don’t have them!)

Here are the four things your product timeline should do:

1. Reflect Real Milestones and Dates

Begin by brainstorming the needs and priorities of both your users and your team. This will help you align on deliverables, feedback sessions, and overall constraints or parameters for your schedule. Even a tentative launch date gives you something to work backwards from to begin your road map.

Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as you begin building out your calendar:

From recruiting for user interviews to working around vacation schedules, a thousand different variables can affect your milestone dates. 

Not sure whether you have the right deliverables on the timeline? Set a meeting to hash it all out with your product owner and make sure everyone on your team is aligned with the final results.

Is it still unclear how long it will take a specific team to turn around their part of the project? Get an estimate and refine the timeline from there. The fewer assumptions you make about milestones and timing the better.

2. Consider Availability & Resources

As with most design projects, the biggest factors impacting your timeline will be money and people. For example, you’ll have to build in time for your edTech product stakeholders to review and approve work. It should be clear from the outset who provides feedback and how much time they need for review.

Similarly, other schedules or constraints around workflow can eat into your timeline. Share your team’s out of office dates with the project manager as soon as possible, so the timeline reflects availability.

And don’t forget to consider the impact of other decisions, including contracting out work and methodology. For example, is your designer working with a new illustration resource? Is your developer exploring a new workflow? Pad your timeline to account for new people and new methods.

3. Use the Budget as a Guide

Once your team has a strong understanding of how the budget affects features and other priorities, it’s easier to make strategic decisions about your learning tool. 

Typically, a larger product budget means you’ll have more time to iterate and design. A smaller budget means your entire team will need to move quickly. Does your timeline accurately reflect the budget?

4. Give Everyone Access

Product timelines shouldn’t be a mystery. If you’ve just finished the first draft of your timeline, schedule a walk-through to discuss it with your entire team. 

Be sure to share the document across internal and external teams, refer to it regularly, and format it in a way that’s easy for many different people to understand. You may even want to try out different versions of the same timeline in different formats to see what works best for you and your team. (More about choosing a format below!) 

Keep your timeline handy throughout the product development process, too. This way, you can re-share it in emails or include bullet point reminders about milestones as needed. 

After all, the timeline ultimately tracks current process and progress. It indicates where the project is in real time—and which dates or milestones have changed to accommodate new user research findings, design challenges, or shifting priorities.  

Example edTech Product Timelines

edTech product timelines take many different shapes and forms. From spreadsheets to fully designed Miro boards, the most important quality of a timeline is that it works for your team—and your project.

Miro Boards

Miro is design software that supports meetings, product work, and more. In terms of product timelines, it’s easy to map out each deliverable on Miro. If you’re working on a product that involves many milestones, or you need a way to collaboratively develop a timeline, this is a great option. Because it’s incredibly visual, it’s easier to align your team on each step of discovery or concepting work.

 

Example Miro Project Plan/ Product development timeline
An example Miro timeline and project plan.

Asana

Asana supports agile design frameworks exceptionally well. Agile product design uses the requirements for your MVP as a starting point and works backwards, identifying all the milestones it takes to reach the finish line.

This planning software also provides different views of your timeline, from a list of milestones to a kanban view. Kanban timelines, which reflect tasks that are either upcoming, in-process, blocked, or done, might work especially well for teams that are comfortable with ticketing systems like Jira.

Last but not least, Asana also allows you to add dependencies to tasks, which is helpful for both internal and external stakeholders. When dependencies cause a slow-down, Asana automatically updates your product development timeline across stages. So helpful!

Example Asana Product Development Timeline
Asana’s timeline feature. Note the many other view options in the top menu!

Spreadsheets

There’s nothing wrong with a good, old-fashioned spreadsheet. If your edTech product timeline is straight-forward, this is a great tool to use to help your stakeholders know when design or content is ready for review. Spreadsheets are also incredibly useful if deadlines are moving hour-by-hour, especially as the engineering team becomes involved.

Example EdTech Product Development Timeline Spreadsheet with drop downs and columns for deliverable links
A spreadsheet works well for tracking deliverables and design status, as well as feedback due dates.

 

Product Development Timeline Spreadsheet Example
A simplified edTech product timeline.

Whether you use a custom spreadsheet or fancy planning software, your timeline is the place to house a list of your deliverables, including links to your edTech product designs. Designed well, your product development timeline is the one-stop shop for everything related to your project.

What to Do When Your edTech Product Timeline Changes

Panic! Just kidding. Knowing that your edTech product development timeline will shift is like knowing the sun will rise in the east. It’s inevitable. And, if your team is used to working in an agile framework, they already know that milestones will likely change.

From a product planning standpoint, it’s crucial to allow for revisions to the timeline from the very beginning. Pad, pad, pad those milestones with extra time. As your project manager tracks turnaround times and deliverables, it’s also important to realign with your team as changes occur. Whether you schedule a Slack message or send a follow-up email, make sure everyone is on the same page.

Even as you make room for changes, remember that your timeline is a kind of contract with your external teams. It tracks feedback rounds, dependencies, and deliverables—all of which affect scope and budget. The more deliverables that move within your timeline, the further back you may have to push your potential launch date. And the more of your project budget you eat up with changes!

As the project continues, review and re-evaluate your timeline at least every two weeks. Is everyone on your team meeting their deliverable due dates? How about those feedback and review sessions? You might be excited and anxious to see your edTech product hit the shelves, but it’s more important to be realistic about time and resources. That’s what a product timeline is for!

Whatever shape your timeline takes, it’s a vital project planning tool. Not only will it help you keep your edTech product on track, it’s also a quick and easy way to communicate with your team about needs, deadlines, and next steps. Happy planning!

Are you about to kick off design for a new edTech product? Find out how our expert team can help you design an incredible user experience for teachers and learners! Contact us below.

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The Product Owner’s Guide to Designing Onboarding in edTech Products 

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
November 23, 2022

It’s happened to all of us. You’re in a product planning meeting, discussing features for your digital learning tool. Your product manager wants to invest in a resource library and “Help” section for teachers using your product. But your UX team is advocating to use the design budget for onboarding features. What do you do?

With budget and resource constraints, it can be tempting to downplay the importance of onboarding. After all, if the user experience is strong enough, how much onboarding support will teachers and students actually need?

The answer might surprise you. edTech products are complex tools, and users need support as they learn brand new concepts all while navigating an entirely new product. This makes onboarding a crucial feature for any edTech tool, one that deserves a chunk of your budget for research, design, and testing.

In this article, we’ll help you understand why onboarding in edTech is so high-stakes, review the two types of onboarding every edTech tool should offer, and help you “re-think” your “Help” section, so you don’t run out of budget. Let’s get into it.

Understanding Onboarding in edTech through User Personas

All product owners want their users to navigate software with ease and engage deeply with the app’s content. But, in edTech, the stakes for onboarding a user are incredibly high—even higher than product engagement! 

A student’s grades might depend on how well they learn to use your product, for example. Or a teacher’s ability to manage their classroom and track learning outcomes might be deeply affected by how many features they master in your tool. The stakes mean that onboarding teachers and learners to your product successfully is essential to its use—and to its success. 

There are other persona-driven factors that will affect your onboarding strategies, too. Because teachers are given very little training for using technology in the classroom, they are often left to their own devices to learn how to use edTech. 

How will your product give them all the context they need to implement the tool on their own in a limited amount of time? If your tool is difficult to use, or it isn’t properly supported, teachers will likely use your edTech tool less effectively or efficiently.

This is also why it’s important to keep onboarding as brief as possible without sacrificing clarity. There’s a reason onboarding pop-ups have a ‘skip’ button. Most users—especially busy teachers—feel like they don’t have time for lengthy videos and practice tasks. If you show them your experience is tight and interactive, they’ll be more likely to engage.

Designing onboarding with your personas in mind isn’t just a design challenge—it’s an extreme empathy challenge. It can be difficult for product teams to get into the mindset of a teacher or student starting from step zero. After all, you’ve been working diligently on your brilliant, elegant solution—how could anyone be confused by it? 

But the better you understand how your learning tool affects your users’ day-to-day experience in the classroom, the more effective your onboarding strategies will be.

Onboarding for Product Training vs. Onboarding for Concept Training

Unlike commercial software, learning tools must accomplish two things for every user:

  1. Concept training: Teach learners a new academic concept, or provide educators with the best tools for teaching subject-matter content more effectively.
  2. Product training: Help all users learn how to get the most out of your edTech product.

It can be a challenge to design just one type of onboarding well. But getting both right in the same product? That takes a lot of thought, great user experience design, user testing, and significant resources.

Prioritizing onboarding features that accomplish both product training and concept training tasks can also be challenging for product designers to remember. Sometimes we’re so interested in our tool’s learning content that we don’t always stop to educate users about how the product works. 

This is especially true for student-facing products. But even young learners need to be trained to use the interface of your edTech tool. No matter their age or role, the users of your product need to understand the relationship between content and design. 

How can teachers expect to use your edTech tool in their classroom? How will students learn while using your product? What will the experience be like? The more you answer these questions through onboarding features, the less likely your users are to be confused by a complex learning tool. 

By providing enough context to understand how the product works and why it’s structured a certain way, you’ll motivate learners to keep going and encourage teachers to use your tool more effectively.

Top Onboarding Features for edTech Products

As an edTech product owner, you already know the types of onboarding features your users respond to. That’s why you gravitate toward just-in-time help for users when you roll out a new feature. Or make sure your product team has an incredible tutorial video ready to roll. 

You can use any of the onboarding features below in an edTech product. The content itself might change based on the onboarding experience you’d like to provide, whether that’s helping a user to understand UI or teaching them a brand new math concept. 

Remember: in order for users to get the most out of your product, you need to cover both types of onboarding.

Product Training

  • Asking users to complete a task in real time. 
  • Providing a user interface tour.
    • onboarding that trains you to understand what each button does
  • Including product tutorial videos, slideshows, or other visualizations.
  • Designing just-in-time help for new or complex features.
  • Helping users run a report or navigate classroom data.

Concept Training

  • Providing expert video content that models specific teaching strategies.
  • Demonstrating what progress looks like.
  • Designing just-in-time teaching tips for new educators.
  • Providing actionable next steps for report data, like how to correct for trends or scaffold content in the classroom.

You can also use personas to further personalize your onboarding features. For example, you might give teachers the ability to engage with onboarding depending on how much time they have. Which onboarding tasks can they tackle in 15 minutes? What should they do if they need to get started right away?

By thinking strategically and intentionally about the onboarding needs of your personas, your learning tools become more customizable—and more valuable to your users.

How Better Onboarding & UX Design Will Make You Rethink the “Help” Section

It’s tempting to divert your design resources to the “Help” section in your product. After all, it’s the one place users go to answer all of their questions. But focusing on “Help” at the expense of onboarding is a big mistake.

Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another. Not only will you better support users who need more context for their learning experience, but you’ll also meet users where they are when it comes to product support. 

Done well, onboarding takes place over many touchpoints, rather than in the initial moments of a user’s first login. Once you lengthen your onboarding timeline, it’s easier to re-imagine what a useful “Help” section really looks like for your users. With a thoughtful onboarding strategy in place, you’ll be able to successfully scope your content creation budget for “Help”—without short-changing your onboarding experience.

Ideally, a robust “Help” section and intentional onboarding features support one another.

This approach works from a user experience standpoint, too. Most users are resistant to engaging with “Help” sections because they want to keep moving through your experience. “Help” slows users down, but onboarding features don’t have to. For example, integrating just-in-time help sequences for complex tasks is far less overwhelming than requiring users to watch a video tutorial in order to use your learning tool.

However, sometimes edTech products are so complex, user challenges simply can’t be solved through better UX. If you find that your UX leans too heavily on “Help,” consider reducing the complexity of your product. Otherwise, you’ll risk users becoming so frustrated that they give up—even with incredible onboarding that supports their needs!

Using Your Onboarding Resources Wisely

Prioritizing “Help” and designing big ticket features often leads to a dwindling budget for an incredible onboarding experience for teachers and students. 

We know how important it is to build critical features for your minimum viable product (MVP), so here are a few solutions for ensuring that you don’t run out of budget before you tackle onboarding:

    1. Create a first-round onboarding experience.

      By prioritizing onboarding features for first-round designs, you won’t run through your entire budget without addressing onboarding must-haves. Build at least some onboarding into your MVP designs and budget.
    2. Test in the field to see where user pain points are.

      Even if you feel confident about the pain points teachers and students face, onboarding should always be informed by user testing. Before designing a full onboarding experience, test your prototype with users. You’ll likely realize that you haven’t given users enough context about the flow of your entire product.

      Once you identify product trouble spots, solve by improving UX or by finding ways for UX and onboarding to work together. Remember: testing solutions requires at least two touchpoints with users, so be sure to build this into your product timeline.
    3.  Continue to design onboarding features over time.

      Like other features, onboarding can be designed iteratively. To create an onboarding experience teachers and students will actually use, strike a balance between devoting resources to onboarding at kick-off and testing along the way.

      For example, one of the major benefits of designing just-in-time help features is that you can always address challenging UX patterns. As you collect user data over time, you’ll identify areas that require new or modified onboarding support.

Onboarding can make or break your product, so don’t leave it as an afterthought—or make it compete with “Help” for resources. When you allocate time and budget to designing the onboarding experience, users are more likely to see the value of your learning tool. This not only increases user motivation, but will also speed teacher adoption in a crowded marketplace.

Are you designing new onboarding features for your edTech product? Contact us below to find out how we can support your research and design needs!

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The Value of UX Discovery in edTech Product Design

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
October 7, 2022

When you’re ready to design a new edTech product, you’re already on a tight schedule. While it might seem like you can’t afford to spend three months on the UX discovery process, skipping or accelerating valuable UX research efforts often results in a less effective product.

If you want to create a learning tool that has deep, lasting value, some version of UX discovery is essential. With the right team of experts, the discovery process can also easily be scaled to your needs and budget.

For example, if you’re designing an edTech product, a team that specializes in UX research for learning tools can help you define your research and testing parameters more efficiently, simply because of their expertise. 

In this article, you’ll learn how UX discovery benefits your product team through risk management, stronger marketplace performance, and an optimized engineering process.

You’ll also learn more about which deliverables to expect at the end of a discovery engagement, how discovery really affects your product timeline, and why hiring an external UX team might be the right move for you.

Let’s dive in!

3 Benefits of the UX Discovery Process

When you begin the UX discovery process for a new edTech product or feature, you’ll see immediate return on investment (ROI). These are the 3 biggest benefits of conducting UX research and competitive analysis before you design a single pixel of your learning tool.

1. Risk Management

If you design an edTech tool you haven’t tested, or create a product you haven’t planned for, you’re less likely to identify a user-centered solution. Even if you have incredible learning content, beautiful design work, and breathtaking technology, you’ll still be making a lot of guesses about what your users actually need.

The UX discovery process is a great way to mitigate this risk and focus on delivering a high-quality tool for your users. Even if you already know a lot about your users, user experience research (UXR) can help you identify gaps in your knowledge and gain insights into persistent user problems.

Desk research helps you narrow your focus as you conduct specific user tests or a competitive audit, accelerating the product design process in the long term.

If you have the resources, you can also conduct UX research internally and identify areas for improvement. You can even outsource your UX team and hire researchers who will identify your biggest risks and help you decide how to use the discovery process effectively.

Ultimately, conducting user research at the beginning of discovery helps you spend your precious budget wisely. It typically costs 10% or less of your total spend for design and engineering—but it will save you plenty of missteps and extra work along the way.

2. Stronger Marketplace Performance

Up-front discovery work ensures that you’re going in the right direction when you begin designing your edTech product or feature. With accurate information about your users and their needs in your corner, your learning tool will compete in an already-crowded marketplace.

After all, both teachers and administrators notice when edTech products don’t reflect their realities in the classroom. If your product doesn’t work well in a school setting, you risk contributing to more user frustration and more administrative overhead. That’s not the kind of learning tool that gets glowing customer reviews—or word-of-mouth recommendations!

UX research also allows you to understand your users’ day-to-day needs and challenges in a more nuanced way. When product teams understand and empathize with these specifics, you design a more valuable product overall. What’s more, both teachers and administrators will appreciate your efforts—and be more likely to buy your tool!

3. An Optimized Engineering Process

Last but not least, thorough UX research ensures a more optimized, less-wasteful engineering process and helps you mitigate risks.

If you think you already know the problem and don’t conduct UX research, you could design expensive solutions based on incorrect assumptions. You risk not solving the real problem at all—or missing opportunities for integration by trying to build something custom. There goes your engineering budget!

But a specialized edTech UX team can save you this headache. Thanks to a deep expertise in edTech products and ecosystems, this team can look at the results of your user research and analysis to make an informed UX strategy. This surgical, strategic approach to solving the most pressing user challenges helps your engineering team build the right tool from the get-go.

And that’s how you get the major ROI of your discovery process!

The UX Discovery Deliverables That Help You Design Better edTech Products

What’s the result of all this desk research, aside from a better edTech product? A strategy backed by evidence! Here are the three discovery deliverables that help this process along:

  • A competitive audit: By researching your competitors, your UX team identifies opportunities and pitfalls for learning tools like the one you and your team are planning to design. 
  • A research deck: This final deliverable communicates highly detailed user research findings, analysis, and recommendations in a digestible way. With these details in hand, you can align all your stakeholders and make decisions quickly.

    The research deck also helps your development team make their recommendations and road map their own engineering timeline. Overall, this document should allow all the teams involved to accurately scope the rest of the work needed to get your learning tool in the hands of teachers and students.     
  • Feature priorities: Now that the evidence is in, your UX team can support you on identifying a clear set of feature priorities for your timeline and budget. Determine which features must be present in your minimum viable product (MVP), and which to prioritize for the first iteration of design work.

By the end of the UX discovery process, these strategic assets will demonstrate what your UX team learned and what they think you should do next.

Together with your internal stakeholders, you’ll begin to collaboratively roadmap your project timeline and make feature priorities based on the results of user research. Then it’s finally time for a project kick-off!

How the UX Discovery Process Impacts Your Project Timeline

We know how challenging it can be to build in time for discovery. You want to get moving and begin the design process ASAP.

While the discovery process is scalable, multiple elements impact how long your discovery process will take. These include:

  • Research methodology. Some research methods, like qualitative user interviews and impact studies, can be time-consuming. Make sure your UX researchers have picked the right methodology for the scope of discovery.
  • User recruitment. Recruiting users for testing takes time and coordination. For example, if you only want to talk to a specialized set of users, like families with students who need speech therapy, the recruitment process will likely take longer.
  • Internal stakeholder alignment. It can be challenging to get all your stakeholders in the same room at the same time. Conducting stakeholder sessions virtually may speed things along.
  • Data needs. Can you use existing Google Analytics for the research at hand? Or do you need survey data that isn’t yet ready to make your decisions?

If you’ve already accounted for some amount of UX discovery in your product timeline, you can expect a UX team to request anywhere from 6 weeks to 2 months to gather all the information they need to provide value.

Why an External UX Team Provides Value During Discovery

Whether you’re designing a new edTech product or rolling out a new feature, there’s value in hiring an external UX team to consult with your product stakeholders in discovery.

This is true even if you already have a UX research team in-house! For example, your internal team might work regularly with users or conduct A/B testing for new features. This makes them extraordinarily knowledgeable about specific challenges and user needs. 

But even the best internal teams don’t always know what to do next to solve a persistent challenge. An external UX team can help your product team develop a plan for using internal research or expanding the scope of your research and testing efforts.

Sometimes the ROI of an external UX team is that they increase the value of your own research! By putting in place research and testing practices that help your internal team succeed, an external UX team uses their expertise to make your existing work more innovative and strategic.

No matter what shape your product team takes, specialized edTech research will help you mitigate risks, align your stakeholders more quickly, and optimize the design process from start to finish. UXR is the key to designing learning tools that perform well—and outlast the competition.

Are you designing a new learning tool or rolling out a new edTech feature? Find out how we can support you! We specialize in UXR in the field of edTech. Contact us below.

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