Category: UX Research

How Human-Centered Design Creates Better edTech Products

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
December 7, 2022

In industrial design, considering how the human body interacts with objects has led to incredible, intuitive products. In fact, you can see human-centered design in many everyday objects.

Think of the standard light switch. Or a bicycle.

These objects don’t come with instructions, but their designers acknowledged the “human factors” that make it easy for us to switch them on or peddle away. 

Similarly, in digital design for edTech products, we consider both how people learn and how they will physically interact with your tool.

After all, there are commonalities in how people learn, backed by science. If edTech product design doesn’t leverage these elements, it’s a missed opportunity for your users—and for you.

User-centered design in edTech isn’t just something you can check off your requirements list — it’s an overall approach to design that impacts your work, every step of the way.

From conducting user experience research to designing for specific technology needs, user-centered design will shape how you create learning tools—and make stronger products for your users.

Conducting User Experience Research (UXR) and Testing

When you build a new edTech tool, you begin by trying to solve a specific user problem. Before you start designing, though, it’s important to validate user challenges and pain points through qualitative interviews and testing.

No matter how talented your team is, you won’t know if you have created a user-centered learning tool without researching and testing it first.

When you interview and observe your users closely, you also determine the many human factors that drive how a product is used. In edTech, these physical factors include:

  • How much time a teacher or student has to use the tool
  • The classroom environment
  • Whether your product can work with slow or crummy internet connections
  • How users physically interact with the tool, including:
    • Audio components—Do users need headphones?
    • Printed components—Do teachers need printers or scanners?
    • Inputs—Do users swipe with their thumb or  index finger? Do they need a stylus, keyboard, or mouse? Can they use voice commands? 

By designing within the physical limitations of the classroom, you’ll solve the challenges faced by teachers and students in a way that engages their interest and piques their delight.

Designing through the Lens of Teacher Personas

Human-centered design also means understanding the limitations of those who are teaching with your edTech product.

It doesn’t matter how effective your edTech product is—or how much students love it. If it’s too complicated for teachers or learners to use in the classroom, educators might not think your product is worth the trouble. 

When you design through the lens of your teacher persona, you ensure that learning tools integrate into a teacher’s classroom, their pace, and their available time.

Without validating these challenges ahead of time, you’ll run into problems with use and adoption. That’s why ease of product set-up and product management is foundational to edTech product design—and to understanding your teacher persona.

Creating Prototypes and Wireframes

The best wireframes and clickable prototypes reflect user needs, research, and requirements. In other words, they’re a great opportunity to put human-centered design to work!

Say you’re designing an edTech product with a complex reporting process. From user research, you might know that many of the teachers who use your product are intimidated by generating reports about their classroom. For your first iteration, you might design a product look-and-feel that offers teachers a friendly boost of confidence. Reflect these choices in a high-fidelity prototype and test it with your users for feedback.

Ultimately, your product team will design many prototypes to validate the user-centered approach to your design. They’re a lightweight, inexpensive way to ensure you’re making the right design decisions for your users.

Developing Learning Content

Whether it’s microcopy or a full curriculum, the content in your edTech product is inextricable from user experience.

Here are three ways you can ensure your content is centered on the needs of real people:

  • Consider sequencing. In a digital tool, you have more control over content sequencing. You can create something adaptive or non-linear to support the learners who use your product. What’s the optimal way to organize content for your specific users?
  • Allow for learner choice and agency. Print curricula doesn’t typically allow the flexibility for learners to make choices. But in digital tools, you have the opportunity to break learning content into smaller, more discrete pieces that can be recombined in many coherent ways.

    Say you have a digital reading tool. After a student reads a chapter, they might have four or five options for where they can go next. Or, they might always be able to choose where they go next in your product because you provide just-in-time support along the way.
  • Use learning science techniques. Learning science techniques are critical to developing content in a human-centered way. Whether you plan to accommodate contextualization needs or create reflection activities, work with your content team to develop additional support and scaffolding. To be most effective, your content team should be prepared to work in concert with your user experience team.

Addressing Technology Needs

edTech product teams are used to designing responsive screens for mobile devices. But there are other ways to keep users top-of-mind as you discuss technology needs for your learning tool.

Optimize Your Learning Tool

As you consider mobile vs. desktop design needs, you’ll have to think beyond optimizing by screen size. User-centered design also requires that your team understands where and how your learning tool will be used. 

Remember: the physical use of your product determines everything from button placement to product accessibility. Very young learners, for instance, have smaller hands than adults, and they may be more tempted to use their pointer finger than their thumbs. This may change your layout more than you realize!

Optimizing your tool for the mobile version also requires you to streamline your features. For example, mobile doesn’t typically provide a great experience for data-driven features like reporting or rostering. Now’s the time to think about how you can still provide robust mobile features and a great user experience.

Engage your Engineering Team

Ask your technology team to participate in user testing. This way, they can watch teachers and learners use your product and observe these interactions for themselves. At the very least, make sure they participate in the analysis and recommendations that come out of UXR.

In order to address UX and engineering challenges, it’s crucial for technologists to see where users hit stumbling blocks. Good engineers will step up with creative solutions. They may even be able to solve a “UX problem” with a smart technology fix! But they can only provide this level of support when they’re engaged in the creative process from the very beginning.

Reconsidering Design ‘Frills’

Design teams often use techniques like micro animations or transitions to get a minimum viable product, or MVP, out the door. When it’s down to the wire, engineering teams push these ‘frills’ to the bottom of the priority list. 

These carefully designed UI elements guide users’ attention, sometimes even making users aware that they haven’t completed a form, assessment, or quiz. In edTech, the stakes for these fun extras are often quite high!

When engineers take into account that these elements add to the usability of your product, making the design even more human, they can be reprioritized in product planning (and perhaps even the budget). Very often these elements aren’t just icing on the cake—they’re essential to your product’s success.

The ROI of Human-Centered Design

If your team lays a strong foundation for user-centered design during the initial phases of UX strategy, you’ll avoid expensive changes down the line. (That expensive technology platform you’ve been eyeing…does it really align with user needs? Or support a user-centered product experience? Don’t wait to find out!)

But focusing on your users is about more than avoiding painful mistakes or wrong turns. It also opens up the possibility to create edTech products that truly engage your users. After all, once you’ve solved a challenge in the best possible way, your product team can focus on designs that deliver delight. What’s more human than that?

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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A Teacher’s Take: How edTech Can Help Us Close The Learning Gap

Jessica Lewis bio picture Jessica Lewis
October 28, 2022

It’s one thing to read about the learning gap in news and media outlets, but it’s another thing to experience it firsthand. I’ve taught middle school English Language Arts (ELA) in a New York City public school for four years now, including pre-, during, and post-pandemic. Here’s what learning loss really looks like in the classroom—and how edTech tools can help educators close the learning gap. 

What Is “The Learning Gap”?  

Learning gaps are characterized as a disparity between  where students are currently performing versus where they should be performing. Many factors contribute to the increased learning gaps we’re seeing in students across the country. The most obvious and widespread cause is, of course, the pandemic. 

According to the NWEA July 2022 Research Brief, “…student achievement at the end of the 2021-2022 school year remains lower than a typical year.” Math scores declined around 5 to 10 percentile points, and reading scores declined an average of 2 to 4 percentile points. 

Older students are more likely to face long-lasting effects from learning loss, while elementary-aged students are improving at higher and faster rates than middle school students. This makes  elementary-aged students more likely to narrow learning gaps and remain on track than any other age group. 

However, spikes in mental health problems, peer conflict, and disruptive behavior indicate that the “learning gap” goes beyond academic loss. It extends to a gap in social-emotional skills, too.

Although no student is immune to the ongoing impacts of COVID, some students are more susceptible to wider and more prolonged learning gaps than others. Preexisting learning gaps fueled by racial and socioeconomic inequity and inequality have grown even wider as a result of the pandemic and still need to be addressed. 

What Did The Learning Gap Look Like In My Classroom?

The learning gap manifested in a variety of ways in my classroom. From academic challenges to social-emotional stumbling blocks, the hurdles my students faced seemed endless. 

It was shocking to witness. Students struggled with what I (wrongly) viewed as “the basics,” like walking quietly in the hallways, sitting at a desk, or waiting for an appropriate moment to add to  a conversation. In many ways, we were back at square one.

In order for edTech product owners to design products that successfully address these learning gaps, it’s important to understand where my students were at and which academic and social-emotional impacts were of greatest concern. 

Academic Impacts

It took several weeks before I understood the full extent of the academic loss my middle schoolers faced. Some students had spent more than a year learning online. The lack of face-to-face interactions with teachers led to both confusion about, and their disengagement with, the ELA curriculum. 

Upon returning to in-person school, I noticed that countless students in my classes were grades behind in their reading levels. They also lacked age-appropriate writing skills. Most students could not name the last book or short story they read, and many had no interest in picking one up. The idea of “working” for new information, rather than passively consuming it through a screen, seemed outrageous and far too strenuous. 

This is because the way students absorbed information shifted over the course of the pandemic. Apps like TikTok, where entertainment unfolds over 30-second videos, made asking students to sit for traditional lessons an unrealistic expectation. My 15-20 minute lessons were too simply long for their shortened attention spans. 

Ultimately, students didn’t have the foundational skills my 8th-grade curriculum required for them to make progress with new concepts.I quickly recognized that I not only needed to revise my curriculum, but also adapt my approach. 

Social-Emotional Impacts

Perhaps one of the most evident forms of learning loss was students’ lack of social emotional skills. Their  self-awareness, self management, relationship, and decision-making skills had all regressed. Although I had 8th graders sitting in front of me, it felt like I was working with 6th graders, the grade my students were in when the pandemic started. 

Without these basic skills, academic learning is very difficult. In my classroom, this is where my “closing the gap” work started. My co-teacher and I began implementing concrete, and sometimes painfully explicit, strategies to support the growth of these foundational SEL skills.

When teachable moments popped up, we’d pause our ELA work and jump on the opportunity. We explained why now was not the best time to ask to use the restroom and highlighted where the date should be written in a notebook. We modeled the most efficient way to walk to your desk to avoid disrupting others and unpacked why whistling during  a lesson is inappropriate. These important teachable moments supported the growth of SEL skills, but they also took away from instructional time. Time quickly became one of our largest obstacles. 

Social-emotional deficits also created more  interpersonal issues between peers and between students and teachers. Students struggled to make sense of normal interactions. They mistook healthy disagreements as antagonistic, which led to both verbal and physical fights. Accidentally bumping into someone else in the hallway became “picking a fight.” 

Concrete rules and expectations in the classroom were also perceived as punitive and “unfair,” and were often met with pushback, unkind words, and even outright refusal to stay in the classroom. Students’ threshold for difficult, uncomfortable, but normal interactions had decreased. The default reaction I saw time and time again was disproportionate anger, frustration, and aggression. 

What’s Being Done to Address the Learning Gap? 

In July, the White House acknowledged the seriousness of learning loss through a “series of actions,” including, “…the creation of the National Partnership for Student Success, a coalition of leading national education and youth development organizations that will work to expand tutoring and mentoring programs across the country.” 

The Hill reported that the National Partnership for Student Success aims to provide American students with “an additional 250,000 tutors and mentors over the next three years.” This roll out aligns with the concept of high-dosage tutoring, one of the “few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close [to producing] an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction.” High-dosage tutoring is “…defined by educators as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year.” 

Both Biden’s efforts and the current research on learning loss remedies reinforces the fact that school alone cannot bridge the gap created by the pandemic. In fact, extra instructional time outside of the classroom is a necessary component for narrowing the learning gap. This will make strategies like high-dosage tutoring, voluntary summer school, and integrating edTech products into the curriculum even more important.

How Can EdTech Narrow the Learning Gap?

The time needed to close learning gaps from the pandemic far exceeds the time students have in the classroom. According to the NWEA’s July 2022 Research Brief, if the rate of change continues as is, it will take the average elementary student at least three years to fully recover—and even longer for older students to catch up. 

Unfortunately, in many cases, recovery timelines extend past federal recovery fund spending deadlines, “…and for some students, full recovery will not be attainable before the end of high school.” Additionally, many teachers are struggling to carve out time for social-emotional instruction in their jam-packed school day.

In order to close the learning gap, teachers and students both need solutions that extend beyond the traditional school day, scaffold and differentiate content, make small group work possible, and level a historically uneven playing field. edTech can help with each of these challenges.

  1. Offer Consistent Instructional Support Beyond the School Day

    Additional instruction time is needed to close the learning gaps created by the pandemic, but time is a major barrier. There simply aren’t enough hours in the school day to fix these gaps.

    edTech is one of the few solutions that can extend additional instructional support outside of the classroom and the school day. In addition to allowing students to “catch up” on important building blocks after school and on weekends, edTech can also help address a persistent understaffing problem. Between COVID quarantines and teachers leaving the profession at unprecedented rates, many students are experiencing interruptions in their instruction.

    edTech products that specifically target learning gaps can offer consistency to students at a time where educational inconsistencies are commonplace—and when teachers are busier than ever.

  2. Scaffold and Differentiate Student Learning Content

    High teacher-to-student ratios makes narrowing these new learning gaps difficult, especially when many students have individualized education plans, or IEPs. In my integrated co-teaching classes, for example, one third of each class had an IEP. 

    Even under normal circumstances, creating daily lessons that meet the needs of all students at once is challenging. Now, faced with large learning gaps, differentiating and scaffolding content is a major challenge. For example, some students may need conceptual support from lessons that occurred one to two grade levels ago—not just a few units ago. 

    Adaptive edTech products can provide targeted support for students, as well as professional support for teachers. By offering teachers adaptive content that reaches across grade levels, edTech product owners can support and streamline the work that is already going on in our classrooms.

  3. Increase Small Group Work Time

    Understaffing, underfunding, and antiquated school models also result in many classes, like my own, being filled to max capacity. Throughout my four years of teaching, most of my classes were capped at 33 students. This makes working in small groups or supporting students with 1:1 instruction especially challenging—even though students need small group instruction at higher rates right now.

    The pandemic has also exacerbated students’ ability to work independently. In some classes, the majority of my students found it difficult to work independently without prompting and redirection. This made conducting small groups and 1:1 conferencing difficult at a time when more students needed individualized support.

    While small group work still happens in most classrooms, edTech products can increase the value of that time by supporting students until teachers have a chance to work with them directly.

    Adaptive edTech products that meet students where they are can also make independent work more meaningful to students who are not receiving 1:1 or small group instruction. Even as students struggle to work independently, edTech products will allow teachers to lead more frequent, targeted small groups and address the learning gap.

  4. Level an Already-Uneven Playing Field

    The use of edTech products for bridging learning gaps also has the potential to level a historically uneven playing field. edTech can provide supplementary instruction to students who do not have access to tutors or adult support outside of the classroom.

    Digital products can also help narrow gaps for students in low-income districts who otherwise might not have access to robust educational resources in school. If used thoughtfully, and with an awareness of digital inequity, systemic inequality, and implicit biases, edTech can help to bridge gaps that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Final Thoughts 

Unfortunately, the time and individualized attention students need to close learning gaps exceeds what the traditional school day and school staff are physically able to offer. 

Given the magnitude of loss students are facing, educators and students need to utilize other avenues of supplemental support. Because of their ability to scale personalized support on demand, edTech products are a great solution to this problem. 

Educators and students both need differentiated and adaptive learning tools. They need products that focus explicitly on SEL and products that seamlessly integrate SEL into content area curriculum. 

They need products that can be used independently by students both in and out of the classroom. They need products that support the growth of attention span and academic stamina. 

Ultimately, they need products that consider the unique hurdles created by the pandemic. 

Although education is in a fragile state, it is also in a moment of great opportunity. The pandemic forced the world to reevaluate old models of working, learning, and interacting. 

It is imperative that the education field swiftly reacts not only to the adverse impacts of the pandemic, but also to the opportunity to reevaluate and reinvent antiquated systems that no longer work, and for many, never worked at all. 

EdTech can—and should—have a special role in this process.

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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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Why User Flow Testing Matters—and When to Use It

Sean Oakes bio picture Sean Oakes
May 5, 2022

We always want to know if the learning tools we design for teachers and students will work for them. Do they like it? Will it be useful? How would they integrate the tool into their learning experience or into their teaching? 

These questions are central to qualitative user testing. But testing user flows is a little different. By conducting data-focused research on a prototype, you can determine whether users can complete tasks or how they get off track. 

Data-driven user testing is also the perfect opportunity to test the assumptions behind your design decisions or your overall UX strategy. After all, edTech products aren’t meant for designers or product owners. They’re designed for your users: real educators and students who depend on your tool to make an impact on their classroom experience. 

In addition to its benefits for your users, conducting user flow testing minimizes financial risk and helps you roll out a stronger learning tool. By collecting data and feedback ahead of your launch, you’re far less likely to design an edTech product that underperforms or garners negative reviews. 

Instead, your design team can iterate based on user data and qualitative feedback. Integrate user flow testing into your design process, and you’ll never have to go back to square one again. We’ll even show you how to do it.

Let’s dive in!

What is User Flow Testing?

You’ve already dug deep into user research findings in discovery, created personas, and developed a solution. You’ve likely even interviewed teachers or students, describing product features and using their feedback to refine your ideas. 

Once your qualitative interviews and rapid prototype tests are in the rearview mirror, it’s time to administer user flow testing to find data-driven answers about user interactions. This type of user testing is especially useful when your product has a highly transactional user flow with lots of interaction. For example, this might mean teachers are using your tool to organize a content sequence for learning or to build a new report. 

A user flow test begins by putting a working prototype in front of your user. Based on their behaviors, you can determine where they get off track or where their decisions diverge from what you expected. With tools like heat mapping, you’ll also be able to discover whether users can complete tasks, and, if they can’t, which part of the user flow is causing challenges.

If your ultimate goal is to make a product’s UX so seamless that users are unaware of it, user flow testing is how you smooth out the details of an experience with finer and finer sandpaper. Plus, you’ll always get the data you need to back up your findings and fuel your next iteration!

Two Types of User Flow Testing

Moderated User Flow Tests & Heat Mapping

“Talk and click” tests, where you watch a user interact with a prototype in real time, are an optimal way to conduct user flow testing. By setting up a prototype with a heat map, you can observe where your user clicks. 

During the session, you’ll also ask your user to sound out what they’re thinking as they interact with the experience. By listening to the user’s experience as you observe their interactions, you learn valuable insights about your user flow.

While “talk and click” user flow tests are preferable to unmoderated tests, they’re not always viable. It depends on where you are in the product development process—and how many users you need to test. Remember: you’ll want to test a decent number of users to get the most valuable data set, all of which requires prep time and meetings. 

Because you want to measure how your product will work, you’ll also need to conduct the test late in the wireframe process. After all, you can’t put early work in front of 60 users without context—especially if you’re conducting virtual tests.

If you’re testing with young learners, you may still wish to have a moderator present in real time. Students don’t always interact with edTech products in a linear way, and they’ll respond to your questions more easily with additional guidance. 

Young students, in particular, are very focused on how a wireframe looks. They’ll engage deeply with visual presentation—which might not be the feedback you’re looking for. A moderator can help these users stay focused on task completion during a user flow test. This way, you can be sure to collect the data you need to iterate successfully.

Virtual Task Completion

Testing edTech products has become infinitely more challenging during the pandemic. Thankfully, virtual task completion is a great option for user flow testing, and it’s easy to coordinate. 

Services like usertesting.com help you reach potential users and build the data set you need to make improvements to your learning tool. Because virtual tests are easy to complete quickly and asynchronously, they lessen the demand on educators’ time.

They can be easier to schedule for learners, too. Remember: students often need the help of their busy parents to complete something like a user test. If you’re trying to test and validate quickly, virtual task completion is a win-win for everyone.

After sending your users a prototype, grab a screen recording as they accomplish tasks in your learning tool. In addition to creating a baseline for task completion, you’ll be able to clearly identify where and why users faltered. 

While you may have to guess about what’s not working, your new user baseline helps you to iterate different solutions. You can even test again with the same user group to see if you’ve refined your learning tool successfully.

A 5-Step Road Map for User Flow Testing

User flow testing is a specific stage of user testing, and it sometimes requires additional buy-in from your stakeholders. 

Below, we’ve mapped out a five-step road map for integrating user flow testing into your current process. In general, you’ll start with more qualitative methods, like user interviews, and progress to more data-driven tools like user flow testing.

  1. Conduct qualitative user interviews. Hold these early feedback sessions with your users by sharing UX wireframes for discussion.
  2. Build a clickable prototype and conduct user flow testing. Once you have a detailed prototype or wireframe, you’ll be able to set up a moderated or unmoderated task completion session.
  3. Address feedback that came up in earlier testing sessions. Use the qualitative and quantitative data you’ve collected to address user feedback and suggestions.
  4. Test out the look and feel of your learning tool. With more detailed, high-fidelity wireframes, you can also collect user feedback on the look and feel of your edTech product. This is often the best time to test with young learners, who respond most easily to nearly finished design work.
  5. Compare user testing data with real-world data. After you release your learning tool into the wild, you’ll be able to collect an even bigger set of data with active users. Have you accurately addressed the problem? Are your users still coming up against the same challenges? By comparing user testing data with real-world data, you’ll be able to more effectively address issues of usability.

This road map works well with shorter timelines. Large-scale projects might need as many as 3 to 4 user touchpoints to gather enough data for improvements. It’s not uncommon to repeat or refine steps along the way, either. Ultimately, the goal of testing is to refine your product—and to eliminate business risks by identifying the best solutions for your users.

3 Tools to Use for Your Next User Flow Test

New to user flow testing? We recommend the following free or low-cost tools to get started with a professional polish. 

  • Hotjar (https://www.hotjar.com/). Install this heat mapping tool on live products or websites to track user behavior.
  • Maze (https://maze.co/). Use this tool to send your user groups a clickable prototype. You can break up a prototype screen into individual tasks for your users, or provide moderation and context for your user groups, which is ideal for user flow testing. Maze also allows you to record everything your user does, providing a  very scripted experience for the user. Once they complete a task, the software poses multiple choice or open-ended questions so you can receive additional qualitative feedback
  • UserTesting (usertesting.com). Create a demographic profile for your ideal users, and this service will recruit users that match your requirements. In the specialized world of edTech, you can’t always guarantee you’ll get the right users using a service like this, so it’s best to opt for volume. Ultimately, cultivating a list of your own users from your newsletter subscribers or other contacts invested in your brand will work best for user flow testing.

How to Ask Better Questions During Your User Tests

Everyone wants to verify that they’ve made the right design decisions for a complicated feature. But without strategically narrowing your testing questions, you won’t get the information from users that can most help you.

As you come up with the script for your user flow test, identify the actionable steps you’d like to prioritize. If you’re later in the design process, identify which actions are high priority. What’s fixable? What can you do now? What will you have time to do later?

Sometimes you won’t have time or budget to test frequently so you can iterate along the way. If that’s the case, you can always test users right before you hand off the product to your dev team. This way, you can identify priority fixes for a phase two roll-out. Remember: it’s always better to do some testing, rather than none at all.

How User Flow Testing Accelerated Feature Enhancements for BellXcel’s Program Planner Feature

As part of our ongoing partnership with BellXcel — a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting after school and summer programs for underserved communities — Backpack designed and built an all-in-one digital platform where users can manage their programs.

Early in the design process, we tested BellXcel’s “Program Planner” feature with educators using a high-fidelity prototype. The Program Planner was designed to help users view and organize upcoming and completed tasks and events, as well as create personal task reminders. 

In order to make task management especially easy for new users, the Program Planner came pre-filled with recommended tasks. These tasks even came with date assignments and recommendations. For example, if a user created an account today, the Program Planner would already contain a task like “review last year’s reports” with a recommended 1-week deadline.

 

BellXcel's Program Planner with a list of pre-loaded tasks in the "Active Tasks" column
Version 1 of the BellXcel’s Program Planner

 

During user flow testing, our first goal was to establish a baseline of understanding about navigation and feature interactions. We wanted to know whether program staff members easily understood what each button in the Program Planner did and how they might navigate through the feature. Because the Program Planner was designed to help staff members manage their tasks, we also tested whether they could easily add a new task on their own. 

But we were also looking for more qualitative information, so we moderated the BellXcel test. In order to develop a clearer picture of how a user might incorporate the Program Planner into their-day-to-day, we asked how useful the feature would be for both new and experienced users. 

 

Version 2 of BellXcel’s Program Planner

 

In the end, these questions were crucial. We initially assumed that even experienced users would quickly adopt the Program Planner. By asking about users’ likeliness to adopt the feature, we learned that new users would benefit most from a feature like the Program Planner and be more willing to use the product.

Users with more experience, however, would likely find more value in later iterations, which would include integrations with Google Calendar and the planning tools they had adopted before the development of the BellXcel platform.

Our user flow tests for BellXcel illuminated issues of usability and adoptability, while also helping us to establish our UI. Because the Program Planner was such a large feature, visual design decisions made for the Program Planner affected other parts of the platform. With detailed feedback from users, we were able to move forward quickly with feature enhancements and additional features in the platform, too.

Why User Flow Tests Matter for Complex edTech Features

As our results with BellXcel demonstrate, it’s especially important to test complex interactions like planning and task management features. Putting together a pipeline of tasks for classroom, program, or curricular management is often the first real interaction a user has with your product. After all, tasks and to-dos make your product usable. 

To design the first iteration of any feature, you’ll make many assumptions about what is most important for your persona—just like we did. Without testing these assumptions on real users, however, you run the risk of making a central feature less likely to be widely adopted. And if educators are unlikely to integrate a new tool into their existing tech stack, they’ll never unlock the full value of your product.

Whether you’re collecting data for a new user baseline or incorporating feedback into an iterative design process, user flow testing validates your design decisions and mitigates risk. With a clearer picture of how your features hold up against user expectations, you can make improvements on the fly, launch a stronger edTech product, and make a real impact on your users.

Are you ready to test a prototype with your users? Contact us below to find out more about our UXR services!

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