7 Best Practices for Testing Digital Products in Schools

Conducting user experience testing for your digital product in a classroom setting is exciting.

You finally get to see your edTech product at work in a real environment. Meanwhile, 25 little people start pushing all the buttons on your learning tool at once.

It takes a lot of product planning to get to this moment, so it’s important to make the time count.

Have you left enough time in your product development schedule—or enough wiggle room in your budget—to make substantive changes?

Are the questions developed by your UX team open-ended enough to provide you with useful data?

Set your team up for success by thinking through user testing in schools from the very beginning of the process.

Here’s how we design user testing to get to the heart of your users in their every-day environment.

1. Stay open to changing your product

By the time you’re ready to test in schools, you might think there are no surprises left.

You’ve tested your prototypes and iterated your product along the way. You’ve even road-tested your learning platform with users.

But the point of user testing is to discover the many unexpected ways users will interact with your product.

Remain open-minded to the possibility of change, even late in the game. After all, small changes in your UX can create a much better experience for your users overall.

2. Build design changes into your schedule and budget

To get the most value out of testing, incorporate design changes into your schedule and budget.

Be clear with your team about the differences between cosmetic changes that won’t impact a product’s success, and changes that will make a lasting, positive impact on your user’s experience.

Use all the feedback you receive from testing to improve your product’s UX in substantive ways.

3. Choose a true sample of users

Testing reveals how the average teacher or student learns to engage with your product in real time.

For the data to be most effective, strike a balance between testing internal and external users.

Internal users will give you important insights into how the product should work in an ideal world.

External users, especially those who aren’t tech savvy, reveal what might be confusing or unexpected about your product.

4. Identify specific micro user flows essential to the product

At this point, it’s probably been awhile since you thought about how students and teachers log in to your product.

Or how teachers create a new class or other entry type.

Think through the micro user flows that are most meaningful in each user journey, and focus your attention there during testing.

What did students have difficulty doing? What features confused or excited them?

These are great parts of the UX where you can prioritize budget for making improvements.

5. Concentrate on functionality

Help your users focus on functionality by incorporating clickable wireframes and other prototyping into your testing process.

Wireframes eliminate any potential distractions created by visual design and allow users to really think about how a product works.

Screensharing and heatmapping tools also help you see where users are directing their mouse.

Are they wandering around on screen? Skipping over the login button because they expect it to be located in a different corner of their monitor?

Be open to changing visual designs based on what you see after testing functionality first.

6. Design open-ended questions

If you “lead the witness” in user testing, you’re not going to get a real answer about your product.

Open-ended questions allow you to dig into responses and discover whether users are getting what they should out of your product.

7. Understand—and prepare for—the school environment

It’s good practice for both product owners and the UX team to be in the room when users test products.

This is especially true in school environments, which might have outdated hardware or bad internet connections. These hurdles are easy to forget in the comforts of your own office.

The technology available in schools will also affect your testing outcomes.

Make your product as lightweight as possible and scale it for the ChromeBook, which is commonly used in schools.

Observe how the school environment impacts the ways your users interact with the product.

Were there any unexpected stumbling blocks that might impact your UX or UI?

Conclusion

Done right, user experience testing reveals how well your product helps students learn, or guides teachers to create detailed reports about their classrooms.

This crucial process also reveals where you can still improve the UX and UI in meaningful ways for your users.

Time and again, we’ve seen how a thoughtful, data-driven user testing process affects final product design in surprising ways.

With these best practices in place, you’ll be ready to tackle user testing for any edTech product and give your users exactly what they need.