When members of our Teacher Council welcomed students back this fall, they weren’t necessarily excited about all the new edTech products that arrived over summer break.

Yes—even tech enthusiasts get edTech product overwhelm!

That’s because teachers face big challenges integrating new edTech products into their day-to-day teaching.

Not only are these users short on time, but they’re also tasked with making a lot of changes to their lesson plans to accommodate new technology.

That’s why allowing user experience (UX) research findings to shape your MVP is so important. 

Below, we’re highlighting some of the most significant user research findings from our recent report, How to Give Your Users Better Tools for Back-to-School. 

You’ll get the user data you need to design more effective features, make stronger business decisions, and create better product roadmaps.

After all, if teachers are maxed out in the fall, they can’t give your product the time, attention, or engagement you need for your tool to be successful.

Let’s dive in.

USER RESEARCH KIT

Find out where to invest your design and development budget to see the biggest returns—and build the best learning tool for your users.

You'll get validated user pain points, 8 pages of first-person insights from our Teacher Council, and 10 tactical take-aways you can implement ASAP with your design team.

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What UX research findings reveal about teacher pain points during back-to-school

Over and over, our user research findings illustrate that teachers are chronically short on time while they’re at school.

This is never more true than at the beginning of the school year.

In the fall, administrators roll out changes to the curriculum or to district-wide protocols. They also introduce new edTech products or put new expectations for technology use in place.

The result? Teachers scramble to recreate tried-and-true systems in new technologies—or completely change their process for engaging with familiar software.

If you introduce new features during the fall, you can unintentionally complicate this process. This will make it less likely that teachers will be trained to use your edTech product well—or use it effectively at all.

The biggest mistake we see with fall edTech releases—and how UX research can help

edTech companies frequently schedule their product launch dates and feature roll-outs right as the school year begins.

Our latest research report illustrates how challenging this is for teachers. That means it might not be the best business decision for your company, either.

Understanding both teacher needs and edTech buying cycles can help you prioritize features more effectively throughout product development.

Instead of introducing new features at the beginning of the school year, focus your design and development efforts on mastering the basics, including user research and onboarding.

With user research in hand, your product team will be able to improve and iterate on features all year long—making it more likely that these features are understood, used, and loved.

edTech features with the highest ROI for fall release—and beyond

Not sure where to focus your design and development budget to hit an MVP goal or targeted fall release date?

Here are two common product features the teachers we interviewed clamored for—and a business case for prioritizing them as you approach launch.

1. Onboarding

Well-designed onboarding features are never more important than at the beginning of the school year.

Strong onboarding user flows increase your engagement and help teachers streamline workloads. Since teachers will already know how to use your product, they’ll have to take fewer product trainings, too.

Here’s a common scenario: a school administrator—most often the edTech buyer for their district or school—kicks off the school year excited about a new product.

Perhaps they’ve sent several leaders to product training over the summer. Or perhaps they’re planning on holding professional development sessions throughout the beginning of the year.

This approach typically leads to three challenges for edTech companies:

1. Not all staff have “bought in” to the idea of using your product in the first place. (Remember: edTech buyers are typically school administrators who make decisions for everyone.)
2. Not all staff are trained deeply or well on your product.
3. Your end users have to deal with product overwhelm.

Great onboarding features can alleviate the lack of training teachers receive at the beginning of the school year. 

They can also make it easy for teachers to get set up quickly and use as few features as possible to be successful in their day-to-day.

The more your team eliminates frustration for busy teachers who simply need to get started, the more likely your users are to stay engaged—and use additional features as they have the time.

2. Rostering

Well-designed rostering workflows help teachers organize student details and manage their classrooms.

By investing in this feature during your product MVP, you’ll help streamline teachers’ workloads—especially if you leverage existing rostering tools by allowing teachers to sync with products like Google Classroom or Clever.

If you do a good job creating rostering features that support the majority of users, you’ll even reduce the number of support tickets your customer service team receives, freeing up these team members to better support users during their day-to-day experiences.

How UX research findings can help you save on your design and development budget

Investing in the most popular integrations for your user base is by far a better use of your development budget than recreating those tools for your own system.

For instance, while teachers love the ease of collaboration-based tools, like Google Docs, it’s likely not a wise use of limited time and budget to recreate the wheel. 

Instead, put your development budget behind crucial API handshakes, so teachers can continue to use tools they love—while also engaging with yours.

No matter which features make the cut for your fall MVP, take the time to ground your ideas in qualitative user research. Collect additional feedback from sales and customer service, so you get a full picture to inform your decision making.

When it comes to giving teachers the product features they’ll want to use, the answers are out there. Most often, the solutions lie with users themselves.

Researching and creating user personas for your edTech product is crucial to its success, with benefits that extend beyond better learning outcomes or improved usability.

After all, the relationship between edTech buyers and end users is complex. Your entire team must align on user needs, buyer expectations, and the marketing goals that will drive how your product is positioned and sold in order to break through the noise.

Thankfully, a well-researched user persona can do just that. edTech personas give you the insights you need to align your team, identify feature priorities, and streamline product development.

Below, we outline the four edTech personas central to any learning tool, so you can see a quicker return on your investment (ROI) in user experience research.

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.

Opt-In I want free edTech resources!

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What is an edTech persona?

A persona is a user experience tool that reflects the roles, motivations, needs, and pain points of an edTech user. These tools are developed through qualitative and quantitative user experience research (UXR), including user interviews, surveys, and testing. 

Sales teams and customer support teams also have great insights into the needs of edTech buyers and users. However, it’s best to validate these observations through additional UXR. This way, your team will make the most informed decisions for your edTech product and its features.

4 edTech personas for any product

There are 4 edTech persona categories product teams should consider before designing features for any learning tool. They are:

1. Students or learners. This is the largest and most nuanced category, which covers K-12 learners, college students, adult learners, and students with special needs. Your design challenges will change drastically depending on which age group your learning tool supports. Persona research provides a crucial foundation for addressing these challenges with empathy, efficiency, and rigor.
2. Teachers. Teachers, including specialists, face a range of challenges in the classroom, from integrating technology to proving efficacy. Their biggest overall concern is saving time. Your persona research should provide an accurate picture of their day-to-day working environment and account for a range of attitudes toward edTech products.
3. School administrators. This buyer persona is typically an infrequent, but very important user of edTech products, making it a challenge to design for their experience. Your learning tool must demonstrate value to someone who may almost never log in—but who holds enormous power over purchasing and software adoption decisions. Ultimately, administrators should feel confident giving your tool to teachers who didn’t have a say in purchasing the product.
4. Parents. At home-learning accelerated the need to consider and design for the parent persona. It also made parents more sophisticated consumers of edTech products writ large, expanding design possibilities. In addition to supporting student log-ins at home, parents also regularly share home technology with their school-age children. They expect to receive detailed reports and communicate with teachers using edTech tools.

With additional UXR, you can uncover the nuanced needs and challenges of your own target users and buyers. From young learners to reading specialists to the parents waiting at home, each of your users deserves to be supported by the UXR findings that will make your learning tools more effective.

The real benefits of accurate user personas in edTech product development

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? 

Even if administrators never log into the experience, your learning tool must appeal to their needs. Without accurate edTech personas, this complex web of relationships is nearly impossible to navigate successfully.

The ROI of edTech persona research

Good user persona research is invaluable and has many benefits you can apply across your organization. It creates a shared understanding about your customers among all stakeholders, from the marketing team to your content and instructional designers.

In addition to cost savings in UX and UI, personas create “soft” value in three areas:

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.

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, and the content a teacher needs will shift from grade to grade or 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 content in terms of both UX and UI.

The learning gap created by the pandemic has made edTech persona work even more important for content design. As students continue to make up for lost time, the amount of content scaffolding only continues to increase. 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, spread out decision making, and empower 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 school year, it’s time to refresh your existing edTech personas to meet the challenge 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.

Opt-In I want free edTech resources!

Download for Free

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When you design a new edTech product, you know how important it is to start with research. In particular, user experience research will help your team develop a strong user persona and a detailed, visual narrative of your product experience, also called user journey mapping.

Sometimes product teams need a little extra support imagining—and empathizing with—the day-to-day realities of students and teachers. Visual aids can be a great tool for illustrating human-centered design principles, creating stronger user journeys, and supporting your entire product team’s understanding of your user base.

Below, we discuss what makes a good user journey map, demonstrate how illustration tools make these narratives even stronger, and explain the relationship between user journeys and strategic design decisions.

Let’s dive in!

What Is User Journey Mapping?

To help product teams deeply understand their users, UX designers combine insights about a user’s environment and their mindset into a narrative tool called a “user journey.” This tool illustrates what users are doing in the moments before, during, and after interacting with an edTech product, as well as how users feel at each stage.

The building block of any user journey is the user persona. Personas illustrate who your users are, and what they’re concerned about. With a research-backed vision of your users’ learning environments, you’ll be able to envision how your edTech product solves their challenges. You’ll also be more likely to empathize with their day-to-day experiences and better anticipate their needs.

This empathy exercise is especially important for developing accurate edTech user journeys. Our users face barriers we aren’t accustomed to, from slow internet connections in schools and homes to classroom management challenges. That’s a far cry from digital agencies with new computers, fancy design software, and no students to wrangle! 

Once you’ve uncovered all of this contextual information through user experience research, you’ll be better able to identify your users’ mindset as they interact with your learning tool—and create a meaningful user journey for your product team.

An Example User Journey for a Teacher Persona 

Whether they’re highly designed or a narrative sketch, user journeys offer a glimpse into real-world scenarios that can be validated by additional research and testing.

A teacher’s user journey takes into consideration all the steps a teacher takes, from the moment they consider using your tool to the moment they log off and transition into a different lesson. A simplified version of a teacher’s user journey might look like this:

• Before using your learning tool: Arriving in the classroom, getting students logged on
• While using your learning tool: Keeping students on task
• After using your learning tool: Understanding student performance through reporting features

Teachers, in particular, face a range of challenges in their individual classrooms. These challenges include corralling tech-savvy students who race ahead within software, or supporting young learners who need extra help just to log in to a product. Supported with UX research, your user journey should reflect these realities.

The same user journey will also map the teacher’s emotions onto each stage of the experience:

• Before: Anxious, excited
• During: Challenged, delighted, in a state of flow
• After: Reassured, confident, supported

Unlike other forms of UX research, user journeys also attempt to paint an ideal. After all, every edTech product owner wants their users to feel “reassured, confident, and supported.” 

Only additional UX research and testing will validate if your assumptions are correct. This makes user journeys a beginning point for design—not the final destination.

4 Ways Illustration Tools Help You Create Better User Journeys

While UX research can paint a picture for your product team, sometimes it’s more impactful to offer an actual picture. 

Illustration tools like Flowchart, for example, offer a quick shorthand to help product teams better understand user needs, challenges, and environments, so they can create a more human-centered product.

At Backpack, we’ve found that illustration supports the creation of better user journeys in four ways:

1. Visuals help product teams develop empathy.
Part of the purpose of creating a user journey is to help the product design team develop empathy for your users. This is an emotional process, and an illustration that depicts the entire scenario at once helps product stakeholders build empathy.

2. Visuals help translate UX research into narrative.
By tapping into visual representations, your team will also have to do less work translating data into a powerful user journey. Visuals help teams imagine and tell a richer story, organizing all the details of your UX research into a narrative whole.

3. Visuals help identify edge cases.
Illustration is an especially great way to determine user challenges or edge cases. If your visuals ultimately reflect the ideal state of using your experience, discussing what isn’t pictured will help your team identify the edge cases that might throw a wrench into the works.

4. Visuals build product stakeholder consensus.
Last but not least, early illustration efforts can build consensus among your team and inform the written narrative of your user journey.

Because user journeys are a crucial tool for aligning product stakeholders, it’s important to ensure that everyone understands what your research has uncovered about the learning environment. Illustrations are a great way to improve this understanding. This way, you can create even stronger user journeys that impact the edTech product design process for the better.

How User Journey Mapping Affects edTech Product Design

As you map the stages of your user journey, your product team will begin to uncover the extrinsic factors that exist outside of your control. In edTech product design, it’s crucial to recognize and account for these environmental factors as you create an experience. 

Say you’re designing a learning tool for Kindergarten teachers to use in real time in their classrooms. One extrinsic factor you’ll have to account for is time and student age or grade level. Realistically, it will take an incredibly long time for a single teacher to log each of their Kindergarten students into an app. Is your product still effective if used in very short amounts of time, say 5 to 10 minutes?

These are the kinds of design decisions you can only make when you understand your users in an in-depth way. In addition to any constraints or challenges your product might pose, you’ll also have to consider the value-adds, from printable reports to systems of notifications that build in teacher or student routines.

The strategic design decisions shaped by user journeys aren’t all based on imaginative or empathetic leaps, however. Conducting user experience research will help you validate your assumptions and ideas.

From observing users logging into your product to asking detailed questions in qualitative interviews, your UX strategy paves the way for effective user journeys—and more effective product design.

Are you ready to research user needs for a new edTech product? Contact our team to find out how we can help!