Conducting user experience research, or UXR, helps your product team develop an accurate picture of edTech users’ needs and pain points. These needs, challenges, and demographic details are typically gathered into a specific research tool called a persona.

If you’re used to glossing over persona work because you haven’t seen a return on investment, think again. In my experience, developing accurate personas is one of the best ways to minimize the risks associated with building product features that may not resonate with your customers.

After all, edTech is a unique B2B industry. Its user roles are more nuanced, and the tactical needs for edTech software vary widely from school to school and district to district. Below, we’ll unpack what makes edTech persona categories special, how to research your personas effectively, and how you can scale your UXR efforts.

4 UXR Categories You Need for Any edTech Persona

Whether you’re a B2B software developer or an edTech marketer, you’ll recognize the four categories for developing an edTech persona, outlined below. 

While the categories for an edTech persona will look familiar to marketers, there are also crucial differences. That’s why edTech personas pose a unique challenge for B2B software designers, especially if you’re coming from a different industry. 

For starters, roles in edTech rarely align to common B2B personas. (We’ll get into it. Don’t worry.) 

Here’s everything you need to know about researching each of these UXR categories in edTech, so you can develop a more accurate persona.

1. Roles

The complexity and nuance of edTech users distinguishes edTech from other B2B software. The buyer of any edTech product is not the primary user. 

Instead, the user is either another adult—a teacher—or a student. (Remember: Students range in age from K-12 to college, and each age group has its own needs, challenges, and complexities.) 

Typical roles include:

• Administrators. Often the buyer, rarely a primary edTech user.
• Teachers, including speciality teachers. May use a mix of administrative and user features. This category can have many important sub-categories.
• Students. Typically the end user, or implied end user (for edTech products designed specifically to support instructional needs of teachers).
• Parents. A secondary or tertiary user that supports the needs of student users and may interact with teachers via your edTech product.

Any insights you gain conducting interviews with one user typically only reflect that user’s situation. This is why it’s crucial to ask questions that shed light on a teacher persona‘s classroom technology, and planning needs, as well as their level of interaction with your parent persona.

Ultimately, your qualitative and quantitative research data should create a clear picture of your user’s working and home environments.

2. Motivations

In the course of researching, you’ll likely identify three to four motivators that are key to understanding your primary user. 

For instance, the teachers who use your product may want to improve reading scores or introduce social emotional learning skills into their science curriculum.

Typically, however, edTech product owners can only champion one of these motivations or goals in each product. Narrowing your user motivations to a single north star will help your product team make critical decisions in terms of road mapping, design, budget, and more.

3. Needs

Thinking about edTech products in the abstract results in designing solutions for an ideal scenario. Learning tools are never used in ideal ways. There’s rarely enough time for students to interact with learning software in the classroom, or for teachers to learn how to use a complex administrative feature.

Instead, teachers and students have needs that drive how they use edTech software—not the other way around. Those needs are almost always tactical. They include:

• District requirements, like aligning with SEL curriculum needs or a funding source
• State standard alignment
• Security clearances for working with students, especially for products that require student participation or the sharing of student work
• Technology requirements and barriers
• Licensing requirements for multiple teacher users, including specialist teachers
  

By focusing on how to meet these basic, tactical needs, you will reveal the existing gaps in your personas and user experience research. Then you can work to address those gaps by conducting more targeted UXR!

4. Pain Points

In order to paint an accurate picture of an edTech user’s pain points, you must thoroughly understand their role. If you’ve drawn broad assumptions about user roles, now’s the time to get specific. You should aim to understand the answers to questions like: 

• What’s your teacher persona’s day like? 
• How many students do they see each class period? 
• How much time do they have to use your learning tool?
• How will this tool fit in with what they are already doing in their classroom? 
• What other digital products or edTech products are they using? 
• What issues do they have with the school WiFi?

These UXR questions will reveal user pain points in a hurry! 

In addition to establishing details about your user’s day-to-day challenges, you should also spend time establishing existing pain points around curriculum and content.

• How is the subject currently being taught? 
• Do teachers have all the resources they need? 
• If not, what work-arounds are they using? For example, if the school doesn’t have access to a science lab, how do they conduct science experiments? 
• What’s the state, district, or school standard for that subject matter?

The more you distinguish between business requirements and user pain points, the better. That way, you’re solving for a real challenge in the education space—not just trying to meet a business opportunity or add a flashy new feature that might not get used.

Tips for Researching Your edTech Persona

Persona research serves as a guidepost for edTech product and UX strategy, including the features and solutions that make your learning tool stand out from the crowd.

Follow these best practices to ensure your edTech personas provide real and lasting value to your entire product team.

1. Word research and interview questions carefully

• Your users only have so much time—and you only have so much budget. Structure your questions to get the information you need, filling in any gaps you might have about logistics or user responsibilities.
• That said, leave time for open-ended questions. Your users have a lot of expertise in the field of education. Very likely they will provide you with relevant anecdotal information and context you could not have anticipated ahead of your conversation.
• Avoid confirmation bias in surveys by framing your questions in a neutral way. Here’s a good guide to writing qualitative survey questions for edTech users.

2. Find a representative user base to survey

• edTech users willing to participate in surveys already have strong feelings about digital products and learning tools. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re most representative of your user base.
• Make a plan to reach the communities who are crucial to your organization’s mission or purpose. If that means finding underserved populations who may not respond to survey calls, give yourself more lead time and flexibility.
• In general, expanding your research to include educators who serve low-income communities will help you solve for most user needs. Solving for outlier cases in edTech makes for a stronger user experience overall.

3. Be intentional about how you’ll use persona insights as a product team

• edTech personas aren’t just a box to tick off your research checklist. Identify the real information needs you have as a team—and commit to using personas to uncover useful qualitative and quantitative data.
• Typically, this requires asking questions that are actionable. As a gut-check, ask yourself: If you get answers to this question, how will it directly affect your UX and UI design choices? Prioritize strategic motivation over curiosity.
• Identify priority and underserved users to get to the heart of your knowledge gaps. Are there teachers who would benefit from your learning tools, but you don’t know much about them or their work? Developing a persona will give you the answers you need.

Avoiding Confirmation Bias in edTech Persona Development

We know our fair share of persona detractors, and we get it. Plenty of personas aren’t useful. But typically that’s because they’re not backed by real user research. Instead, these lackluster personas are developed quickly using confirmation bias.

Here’s how to make sure you’re avoiding confirmation bias when developing your edTech persona:

• Widen your user base. If you’re only talking to 1 or 2 users, then you’re likely only scratching the surface. This is also the fastest way to design an edTech product based on what you wanted to do—not what your users need.
• Identify real challenges and pain points. Don’t confuse your brand positioning or market opportunity for a research-backed challenge. Research is the key to developing empathy for the struggles teachers and students face in the classroom every day.
• Cross-reference your research with quantitative data. Qualitative research, including interview and survey responses, should be referenced against quantitative data from your product or market research. Taken together, how do both types of information shade your edTech personas with more nuance and specificity?

Like other B2B software, edTech success is based on word-of-mouth referrals. Teachers and administrators know when product owners haven’t taken the time to understand their world—or solve their problems.

Conducting in-depth research to create a better persona is the best way to ensure that your learning tool is effective—and adopted by the schools or districts you serve.

How to Scale Your edTech Persona Research

Once you develop a process for creating and maintaining user research, it’s easier to ramp up your efforts. This way, you can distribute a survey or set up a classroom observation quickly—in a matter of days, not weeks.

• Maintain a research database. While this effort requires upkeep, your research database will ultimately allow you to find new research or buy new data quickly. Consider a tool like Coda to help you keep everything organized.
• Work from existing data. A rich repository of desk research and user data can be enough to develop a detailed, nuanced persona.
• Conduct “just enough research.” Every UXR project doesn’t require classroom observation. But developing an effective teacher persona might! Use the parameters of your existing project and research database to help you conduct “just enough research” to fill in any gaps, whether that means a broad research study or boots-on-the-ground observation.
• Hire an external UX team. If your internal team is maxed out, or you’re still building your UXR capacity, outsourcing research tasks to an external UX team can be a great investment. Plus, you’ll get all the benefits of working with industry experts who have seen many different kinds of edTech products cross the finish line. 

Done well, user experience research provides your entire product team with the foundation for understanding your users, aligning on strategic decisions with stakeholders, and designing incredible solutions quickly and effectively.

Do you need support developing an edTech persona for your next product? Backpack Interactive can help! Check out our UXR services for more information.

Collecting qualitative and quantitative research about your edTech users is the best way to design incredible learning tools.

After all, teachers, parents, and administrators are sophisticated users of edTech products. They have high expectations for what learning tools should do—and how effective these products should be. Their opinions also affect whether a school invests time, energy, and money into adopting learning tools in the classroom.

Whether you’re just getting started in edTech product design or you’re trying to convey the value of user research to your team, this guide offers an in-depth look at how to conduct user experience research in edTech.

Learn how to empower your product team with detailed information about a wide range of users and industry trends, so you can make informed decisions, limit risks, and work more efficiently.

This guide will also show you how trends in educational technology inform product design. Find examples of user research at work in real edTech products and walk away with resources you can use right away. 

Table of Contents

1. What is educational technology (edTech) research? 
2. 5 UXR terms to know
3. Why conduct edTech research?
4. Types of user experience research in edTech
5. How user research and trends inform edTech product design
6. How to follow shifts in edTech trends
7. Examples of edTech trends backed by UXR
8. Tools and resources for conducting UXR in edTech

What is educational technology (edTech) research?

In edTech, user experience research (UXR) is conducted by interviewing, surveying, or testing product users, including teachers, students, administrators, and parents. 

Data is collected in order to identify pain points, challenges, and user needs for a specific edTech product. User experience (UX) researchers also collect data to determine the efficacy of a learning tool, including whether the tool achieves learning outcomes.

At the beginning of the product development process, UX researchers conduct interviews and surveys to help stakeholders make decisions about their priorities for product features. In addition to interviewing users, researchers will analyze competitor products to determine which edTech trends are driving the market. The resulting product and design recommendations help edTech stakeholders make decisions quickly and easily.

Most edTech companies already have insights about the people who use their products. But user experience research offers more clarity by:

1. Providing qualitative and quantitative data about users.
2. Identifying relevant, valuable trends in the industry.
3. Minimizing risks and maximizing product budgets.

The edTech industry continues to grow rapidly, which means competition for investment, product development, and school adoption is fierce. Between 2021 and 2026, the edTech market is expected to grow from $183.4 billion to $410.2 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 16%. New edTech products will have to cut through the noise by being well-researched and well-designed.

5 UXR terms to know

User experience research (UXR) in edTech is a specialized field. We use terms common in market and commercial user research, but we apply those terms to describe teaching, learning, and classroom environments. 

Whether you’re conducting your own UXR or working with an external team, these are the 5 terms you need to know.

1. User experience research (UXR)

User experience research is the process of interviewing, testing, and observing users in their environment. In edTech, this means interviewing teachers, students, and administrators to better understand their needs, challenges, and pain points in the classroom. The phrase is often shortened to “UXR.”

2. Discovery

Discovery is the initial phase of edTech product development. This is typically when a researcher interviews users, researches competitors, and conducts an audit. 

Discovery work lays the foundation for product design. The final recommendations from a user experience researcher will provide stakeholders with a strategic path for prioritizing features, making design decisions, and spending the product budget.

3. Persona

A persona is a researched tool that reflects the needs, motivations, challenges, and pain points of a specific type of edTech user or buyer. Typical edTech user personas include teachers, students, specialists, and coaches. 

If it makes sense for your edTech product, you might even create multiple teacher personas. Using multiple teacher personas will help you capture differences in teaching experience, expertise, or comfort with technology. That way, you can design a stronger product for all teachers who use your learning tool.

Buyers are also included in edTech personas. A typical edTech buyer is a district administrator or head teacher. Unlike other industries, edTech buyers are also product users. Administrators will typically only monitor product engagement from a very high level, rather than use the edTech product every day.

4. User journey

A user journey is a narrative tool that describes each phase of a user’s engagement with your product. Most user journeys describe what a user is doing before, during, and after they use your edTech product, as well as how they feel during each of these phases. User journeys help product teams develop empathy for their users and keep their challenges top-of-mind during the design process.

5. User testing

User testing occurs once your product team has developed a prototype, or a lightweight version of your edTech tool that users can click. Researchers observe how users interact with specific screens in the prototype, ask questions, and even record the interactions for further study. 

In order to build a clickable prototype for user testing, your product and engineering teams work together in a process called rapid prototyping. This is when you quickly iterate and develop screens to test out a feature idea.

Why conduct edTech research?

User experience research allows you to understand user problems within your existing products, identify gaps in the marketplace, and minimize the risks you take to address these needs through product design. 

Conducting UXR also produces qualitative and quantitative data. By the end of the UXR process, you’ll have user interview transcripts and hard data to back up your decision making.

edTech research typically costs 10% or less of your total design and engineering budget. However, it provides a strong return on investment (ROI) by saving you time and work along the way. 

You’ll also receive a wide range of insights from user experience research findings that can be applied to products for years to come. These insights include:

• A more nuanced understanding of your product users
• Data about why users experience challenges in your products
• Which competitor products your users turn to for specific features, value-add, or integration capabilities
• Trends in edTech that end users, or your competitors, have identified as new needs
• Opportunities in the market for addressing a specific challenge faced by teachers, students, or administrators
• Areas of focus for product design, so you don’t waste your time and engineering budget
• Data about whether your product will perform well in a school setting
• Anecdotal data about how your products are currently being used

Ultimately, great UXR gathers up-to-date information about your users and industry trends. This data will help your team eliminate confirmation bias, so you can find creative solutions to real challenges and pain points. With more clarity, you can minimize business risks and accelerate your product timeline.

Types of user experience research in edTech

edTech users are incredible sources of insights and data. User experience researchers use both qualitative and quantitative methods to learn what teachers and students need from edTech products.

Qualitative user research

Qualitative user research findings provide important details about your edTech personas, including their needs, motivations, challenges, and pain points. These methods include:

• Conducting user interviews
• Observing users in real classrooms
• Analyzing field responses to surveys
• Interviewing Customer Success teams

In addition to helping you develop an edTech persona, qualitative findings are used as quotes, insights, or observations in order to support product design recommendations. 

It’s also helpful to hear the tone of users as you conduct interviews. This one-on-one interaction builds empathy with your user’s pain points and results in stronger product design.

Ultimately, conducting rigorous qualitative research helps you understand the “why” behind your quantitative data.

Quantitative user research and user testing

Quantitative user research, on the other hand, results in measurable data. For example, you may want to know the percentage of users who already have a specific edTech product. Or, you might wish to calculate a task completion rate within your learning tool. 

Quantitative research methods include:

• Conducting user surveys
• Reviewing Google analytics or product analytics
• Conducting user flow testing to measure specific user interactions

Together, both quantitative and qualitative research will paint a clear picture of your users’ classroom environment, the challenges they face, and how you can improve edTech product design.

Competitor research

Competitor research, in the form of a competitive audit, is the fastest way to identify innovative trends in educational technology. New edTech trends might represent a business opportunity, reveal a gap in the market, or identify an emerging user need.

During a competitive audit, you’ll evaluate top competitors in the field, identify user pain points, and zero in on user needs from a design or UX perspective. Once you’ve audited the products of your competitors, you’ll be well-positioned to identify your business opportunities and prioritize features for your learning tool.

Auditing

In addition to researching your users and competitors, it’s important to investigate how well your own edTech products work. Conducting an audit is the best way to evaluate the functionality of learning tools. Three common types of audits include:

• A technology audit. During a technology audit, you’ll analyze your current technology stack and architecture in order to improve the platform and workflow.
• An accessibility audit. Accessibility audits evaluate how well your website or learning tool complies with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and with the ADA. You will assess color contrast, font sizing, navigation, use of images and icons, screen reader optimization, and more.
• A usability audit. In a usability audit, you will review your existing product and identify areas in the user experience or user interface (UI) to improve. You may also recommend new features based on your findings.

After you’ve conducted research on both your users and competitors, you’ll have collected plenty of insights, data, and analysis on the needs and trends that will help you design more effective learning tools.

How user research and trends inform edTech product design

Whether you’re working with an internal or an external UX team, the final recommendations from a UXR engagement allow you to build smarter learning tools. Specifically, user experience research findings help you perform the following product design tasks:

Develop edTech user personas

Research-backed personas are the foundation of good edTech product design. By clearly outlining your user’s needs, motivations, challenges, and pain points, an edTech persona keeps your entire product team aligned on what teachers and students really need in your product.

Create a user journey

User journeys are narrative tools that reflect the insights of UX research. They illustrate what a teacher or student is doing before, during, and after using your edTech product, as well as how they feel throughout each of those stages. 

They also identify easily overlooked barriers, like slow school internet connections. By collecting these details in one place and telling a story about product usage, user journeys help product teams design tools that meet the needs of users’ everyday environments.

Apply user data to product features

If you’re trying to solve a specific UX challenge in your edTech product, ask your UX researchers to review product trends, audit data visualization screens, and test user interactions. Whether your goal is to better support existing users or to increase product engagement, applying user data in edTech products results in smarter product design.

Identify gaps in the edTech market

By researching your competitors, you’ll be able to identify which gaps in the edTech marketplace represent opportunities for your learning tools. Marketplace gaps are a great way to direct your product team’s focus, from investing in exciting edTech innovations to alleviating common pain points.

Make strategic decisions with stakeholders

Research findings, analysis, and recommendations also help stakeholders make more confident decisions about product design. After all, if your user research, product data, and competitive analysis all point toward a single solution, you’ll eliminate the risk of designing a product or feature that won’t serve your users’ needs.

Ultimately, edTech user research findings and observations about trends are meant to be actionable. Incorporate them into your UX deliverables and product design strategy for the best outcomes.

How to follow shifts in edTech trends

UX researchers use many strategies to stay on top of emerging trends, tools, and needs in edTech. Here are five ways you can follow shifts in edTech trends:

1. Keep your user research up-to-date

Designing edTech for the long term requires following the trends in your own user base. Don’t wait too long to interview, survey, and test your current customers between projects. The more frequently you update user research findings, the easier it will be to spot the trends that define usage in your edTech products. It’s also important to connect with teachers who use competitor products, or who are not familiar with your offerings, so you can get additional user perspectives on tech-based solutions.

2. Widen the net for your user surveys

edTech users who regularly participate in surveys might not be the most representative users of your customer base. Expanding your research will help you identify user trends with more accuracy, solve for outlier cases, and create a stronger overall user experience. Be sure to give yourself enough time to meet your goals.

3. Research your competitors

Competitive research reveals industry-wide trends in edTech, including how other edTech companies solve problems, add value, and address their users’ needs. Conduct a full-scale competitive audit of a specific tool or feature to track how your competitors are handling hot-button topics, including social emotional learning and adaptive content.

4. Read widely in the field

From trade publications to LinkedIn, industry professionals discuss edTech trends in every corner of the internet. Read widely in the field to follow the topics, challenges, and questions that define edTech in real time. We recommend publications like:

• edSurge. A comprehensive source for edTech topics that affect product design across all learner age groups.
• edTech Magazine. A publication geared toward IT professionals and educators who evaluate and purchase edTech products.
• Education Week. A reported magazine that dives deep into education trends and conversations.
• UX of edTech. A new publication offering thought leadership about edTech product design, UX research, and more.

5. Follow investment data

edTech startups regularly receive infusions of cash from venture capital firms. Tracking these investments on TechCrunch, Crunchbase, and McKinsey can provide insights into the latest trends. Always cross-reference observations about funding trends with your own user research findings before making decisions about your learning tools.

By regularly following conversations about edTech trends, you’ll enrich your approach to edTech product design and conduct more informed user interviews, surveys, and tests.

3 examples of edTech trends backed by UXR

When edTech trends emerge, it’s good practice to validate their significance through user experience research. Here are three examples of edTech trends supported by our own user research findings for a variety of edTech companies:

1. Designing adaptive edTech Tools

Adaptive edTech tools are learning tools that:

• Anticipate a wide range of student needs in terms of content and concepts
• Offer teachers customized ways to organize, sequence, and scaffold learning content together
• Provide enough context for student answers, so student data is more helpful for educators

These tools aren’t just popular for supporting students with special needs or different learning abilities. Backpack Interactive’s user research findings also identified the challenges teachers face due to a widening learning gap in many U.S. classrooms—that is, a gap between where students typically perform and where they’re currently performing. 

For example, a fourth grade teacher may now need to re-visit concepts from 2nd or 3rd grade to get their students up to speed. edTech companies can better support teachers by building more adaptive learning tools.

Want to learn more about how to build adaptive learning tools? We have user research, including personas, qualitative interview findings, and product recommendations you can apply to your tools right now!

2. Using SEL features across the curriculum

Students who learned at home during the pandemic also experienced a drop in their social-emotional learning, or SEL, skills. While SEL-specific edTech products can help, our user research findings indicate that almost every learning tool can benefit from an SEL component. 

 

edTech products that offer users chances to collaborate, build community, and apply their creative problem-solving skills are more engaging and more robust. Learning tools that leverage these engagement tactics address the CASEL framework for promoting social-emotional learning. They also work whether you’re designing a reading, math, or science edTech product.

3. AI in teacher-facing products

Artificial intelligence (AI) in edTech products should make teachers’ jobs easier, speeding up tasks that take a long time and extending their reach to more students. When interviewing teachers, we often hear requests for:

• Products that adjust learning content to a student’s level of understanding
• Products that provide feedback to students so they know whether they’re on the right track
• Products that help them quickly group students by level or need
• Products that prevent cheating

Smart applications of AI can address these needs in teacher-facing products by:

• Designing adaptive learning content and content sequences that respond to student input
• Identifying specific moments in the experience where just-in-time feedback is most helpful for learners
• Creating meaningful relationships between product analytics and grouping features
• Using ChatGPT tools to identify student-submitted content written by AI

By conducting user experience research, you can validate how trends like adaptive edTech products or learning tools powered by AI will work best for your users. The end result? A smarter edTech product that addresses your user’s long-term needs—not just what the market says is trendy right now.

Tools and resources for conducting UXR in edTech

Ready to learn more? We collected the best tools for conducting edTech research below, so you can improve your UXR methods and track your competitors.

1. UserTesting.com

On UserTesting.com, it’s easy to create a profile of your ideal demographic. Then, the service recruits edTech users that match your needs. edTech is a specialized field, so finding a high volume of users through this recruitment method can be challenging. But it’s worth using if you have specific research objectives in mind and need additional support with user recruitment.

2. SurveyMonkey

Send edTech users survey questions and collect responses with SurveyMonkey. The free tool is great for research teams working on a budget.

3. Google Analytics

Researching user behavior on your own site offers a multitude of insights. Let Google Analytics point the way toward a more specialized need, like examining completion rates on a specific set of screens in your learning tool.

4. Hotjar

Hotjar is a heat mapping tool for live products or websites that allows you to track user behavior. You’ll get detailed visualizations of user interactions, and you can also record user tests to review later.

5. Maze 

Conduct user testing with a clickable prototype using Maze. Break up a screen into individual tasks, provide moderation and support, and record your user tests for review.

6. Condens

A streamlined tool for collecting, analyzing, and sharing all your research findings with other stakeholders. Condens also provides transcription services within the app, so you don’t have to work with an additional tool to transcribe user interviews.

7. Coda

Coda is a documentation and planning tool for teams. Keep your research questions, recruitment data, timelines, and results all in one easy-to-access document.

The Value of edTech Research

Conducting and applying user experience research to your learning tools is the best way to design smarter products. With detailed research on your users and competitors, you can validate new edTech trends, minimize risks, and accelerate your product timeline.

As the edTech market expands, competition will only become more fierce. Software companies and educational publishers must be ready to invest in understanding their users to differentiate in a crowded market. 

After all, when you design an edTech product that solves real user needs, teachers, students, and administrators take note. And your tool is one step closer to adoption!

Looking for more examples of edTech trends supported by user research? Download our FREE report on designing adaptive tools and receive validated teacher personas, qualitative insights from our Teacher Council, a competitive audit, and design recommendations you can use ASAP.

Inclusive design draws on the experiences of people from many different backgrounds to make products stronger for every teacher or learner.

On the surface, this may look like choosing more inclusive animations and illustrations in your user interface.

In reality, accessibility and inclusion in UX design extends to every part of the product design process in edTech. When we design with this intention in mind, we make edTech products more accessible.

From product planning to user recruitment, here’s how to ensure your learning tools are built using accessible and inclusive UX design standards.

What Does Accessibility and Inclusion Look Like in edTech UX Design?

Discussing accessibility and inclusion in the edTech product world can be confusing. Many of these terms are used interchangeably—and they’re also very closely related!

Here’s a quick break down of what each term means and how they apply to learning tools:

• Accessible design. With an accessible design mindset, you specifically consider the needs of edTech users with disabilities. This could range from providing assistive technologies, like closed captioning or screen reading capabilities, to meeting baseline accessibility benchmarks.
  

• Universal design (UDL). One way to ensure that you’re always designing accessible learning tools is to adopt a framework like universal design, or UDL.
  
  UDL principles will help you design edTech products for users with all needs—including teachers or learners who might require specific accommodations. By designing with a wide range of user needs in mind, you’ll improve the user experience for everyone who encounters your learning tool.
  
  
• Inclusive design. By adopting an inclusive design mindset, designers consider the impact their product will have on a diverse group of people. This affects everything from representations of people and environments within your product to considering how users will interact physically with your tool.

In order for edTech products to be successful, they have to work for as many different people as possible. This means addressing both accessibility and representation effectively in our learning tools.

In the U.S. alone, there are many different regional understandings of educational concepts or UX patterns, and this becomes more complex as you design tools for English Language Learners or across state standards.

After years of adopting accessible edTech design frameworks, I’ve come to believe that prioritizing accessibility is a way to be more inclusive—and vice versa.

When designers engage with a wider set of people through user testing, they will naturally come into contact with users who have vastly different needs. This process opens up more opportunities for solving problems creatively—and for making our products accessible and inclusive for as many users as possible.

 

After years of adopting accessible edTech design frameworks, I’ve come to believe that prioritizing accessibility is a way to be more inclusive—and vice versa. 

 

How to Make Your edTech UX Research Process More Accessible and Inclusive 

Once you know how accessibility and inclusion affects user experience, it’s easy to find ways to incorporate this mindset into every aspect of product planning.

Here’s how to make each step of your UX research process more inclusive, from recruitment to competitive analysis:

User recruitment

When it’s time to test your learning tool, the way you approach, interview, and observe your users is fundamental to designing an accessible and inclusive product. Here are a few recruitment tips to keep in mind:

• Extend your timeline. Recruiting for accessibility testing can take more time. Make sure you’re seeking out users who can truly understand and speak to an issue in the product impacted by accessibility needs. This is especially true if you’re working on a product that supports specific learning needs or abilities, like a reading tool for dyslexic learners. 
• Interact thoughtfully and intentionally. Some users may prefer text-to-type options or email instead of a live call. Be ready, willing, and able to accommodate user preferences to ensure their perspectives are included.
• Make it easy to participate. Whether you test outside of normal business hours or offer asynchronous options, eliminate as many barriers as possible to user testing

Interview & survey methodology

User experience researchers and product teams should also anticipate shifting their interview or survey methodologies to accommodate different types of users. This will ensure that your user research findings apply to edTech users with a wide range of needs.

Here are a few ideas we use in our own UX research:

• Sending simple surveys. If someone isn’t comfortable speaking in English, for example, you might send a simplified survey or work in translation.
• Offering multiple forms of response. Phone or video interviews don’t work for everyone. Give users options for how they respond, including written responses.
• Providing asynchronous prototype or concept testing. Asynchronous testing allows users to take their time and perform tests comfortably in their own environments.
• Fairly compensating participants for their time. Be mindful of the time commitment you’re asking users to undertake. Recognize that a user test or interview may require one user more time than another.

Ultimately, offering users a variety of options will help you interview or test a wide array of users. This way, you’ll get the fullest possible picture of how your learning tool addresses their needs.

Competitive analysis

Competitive research is a great place to expand your product team’s ideas about what accessibility and inclusion look like in UX design. Here are a few places to start during your next competitive audit:

• Examine edTech competitors through the lens of accessibility and inclusion. Are the illustrations in these tools representative of many different kinds of people? Are their language choices inclusive? Identify accessibility and inclusion benchmarks for edTech and analyze competitors accordingly.
• Include competitors from different industries. This is a great way to expose your entire product team to innovative best practices and the newest ways to incorporate accessible technology into digital products. Rather than simply being in compliance with a specific standard, you can shift your team’s thinking about accessible design.
• Conduct an accessibility audit. In addition to conducting a competitive audit through the lens of accessibility, work with your engineering team to conduct a technical accessibility audit. Taken together, the findings from both of these audits offer powerful recommendations for improving your learning tool’s experience.

Product planning

Complex features regularly get de-scoped or de-emphasized during the product planning process. That means it’s up to designers to champion the findings from user interviews that will make their learning tools more accessible and inclusive. 

Remember: designing for accessibility and inclusion makes the user experience better for everyone. It’s worth it to prioritize the features you know will be most helpful for the teachers and learners who use your product. 

If you need to compromise, hone in on the most important feature to design. This should be verified by user research and make a specific improvement in your learning tool. Don’t be afraid to reference user research findings or audits to advocate for this priority. 

You might not be able to incorporate all of the accessible features you identified in your minimum viable product. But designing the most important feature will ensure the product’s success and speed the road to adoption!

How Accessible and Inclusive UX Research Practices Helped WNET Support Parents During Remote Learning

During COVID lock downs, public media station WNET created video content to help teachers support students with remote learning. Some videos were created specifically for English Language Learners, while others were specific to literacy topics like phonics. 

They asked Backpack Interactive to conduct user interviews and UX research to determine whether they should market this content to students or to families. Were families interested in navigating the site or supporting their students with remote learning content? Or would it be easier for students to use the site themselves?

Our approach to conducting user research ensured that we answered the question of audience in the most inclusive way possible. By adopting an inclusive mindset throughout the recruitment and user interview process, we were ultimately able to provide recommendations for user experience that supported the needs of all users.

 

Recruiting users 

In order to confirm that WNET was solving for the right user, we wanted to talk to as many parents as possible who had children in the right age group. WNET’s videos were designed for early learners, including students with specific needs, like learning delays. 

This meant we had to recruit parents:

• With children in the right age group
• With children who had specific learning needs
• With children who needed the video content, due to missing pre-K or Kindergarten instruction during the pandemic

Interviewing users in an inclusive way

During interviews, we wanted to assess how parents would find a resource on the site to use at home. We learned a lot about parents’ search habits—and how easy it was for parents to be frustrated by not finding what they wanted.

To ensure that we conducted interviews in an inclusive way, we:

• Adopted a flexible approach to call timing. Between time differences and work commitments, it wasn’t always possible for parents to answer questions during work hours. By staying flexible and scheduling calls during the evenings, we received crucial feedback.
• Made accommodations for second-language speakers. For many parents, English was a second language. We offered them multiple ways to participate in the interviews, including providing written responses and answering simple survey questions.
• Welcomed children to the interviews. Many parents brought students to the interviews, and we got lots of real-time feedback from the students themselves. They commented on everything from video length to visuals!

Prioritizing inclusion in our final recommendations

After creating personas to reflect the user needs that emerged during our interviews, we developed recommendations for WENT’s site. These recommendations prioritized accessibility and inclusive design, including:

• Designing for the parent persona. Because they’re not typically an edTech buyer, parents’ needs aren’t always considered during product design. We needed to change that for WNET.
• Adopting an accessibility end goal. Unlike teachers who use edTech day-to-day, parents have a high frustration level with educational technology. You can lose them after one failed search attempt! By prioritizing access as the end goal of the design, we could reduce the number of clicks parents made to identify learning content.
• Grouping content and site organization. Grouping content differently made it easier for parents to navigate the site and find videos for their children.
• Using plain language. Rather than use pedagogical terms to tag video content, we recommended developing a new taxonomy with simpler, more accessible language.
• Allowing for browsing and searching. Including grade levels and student skills in metadata made it easier for parents to search common terms and find the right content more quickly.

Designing accessible and inclusive user experiences in edTech isn’t just about hitting certain benchmarks. It’s a design mindset that will improve your learning tool for all the teachers and students who depend on it in the classroom. Simple changes to your UX research methods mean big wins for accessibility during UX strategy and design phases—and even bigger wins for your users.

Do your edTech products support everyone’s needs? Contact us below to find out how better UX research can lead to more inclusive learning tools.