Growing your EdTech company requires more than adding features — it demands strategic UX research that protects current users while attracting new ones. Without the right research foundation, companies risk building products that miss the mark, waste resources, and alienate loyal customers. This guide shows EdTech product leaders how to structure UX research programs that support sustainable growth while avoiding common pitfalls that can derail expansion efforts.
In This Article:
- Why Strategic UX Research Becomes Critical at Growth Inflection Points
- Key Takeaways: Critical Research Risks and Focus Areas
- Why Strategic UX Research Matters for Growth
- What Happens When EdTech Companies Skip UX Research During Growth?
- How Do You Research Your EdTech Market Position?
- How Should EdTech Companies Align Research with Growth Goals?
- Research-Driven Growth vs. Growth Without Research
- What Are the Best Practices for EdTech UX Research?
- Frequently Asked Questions About EdTech UX Research for Growth
- What Should EdTech Leaders Do First?
- How Research, Planning, and Design Work Together for EdTech Growth
Why Strategic UX Research Becomes Critical at Growth Inflection Points
As EdTech companies mature, they inevitably look to grow their user bases. Drawing from 40,000+ hours of EdTech user research across K-12, higher education, and corporate learning environments, we’ve seen how critical it becomes at growth inflection points to refine your research, design, and development processes to ensure you don’t create or compound your UX problems. In this first article in our series on optimizing your UX program to enable smooth growth, we’ll examine what this means for your research process.
This article is the first in a three-part series examining how EdTech product leaders can optimize their UX program for growth. Part Two explores ideation and planning processes, including how to translate research insights into prioritized product roadmaps, followed by Part Three, which examines how design and engineering teams can collaborate better to accelerate development without sacrificing quality. Together, these pieces provide a comprehensive framework for scaling your EdTech product thoughtfully and successfully.
Key Takeaways: Critical Research Risks and Focus Areas
- 4 Critical Risks: Missing competitive insights, misunderstanding new users, ignoring business goals, abandoning current customers
- 3 Research Focus Areas: Competitive landscape analysis, user ecosystem mapping, growth objective alignment
- 5 Guiding Principles: Strategic alignment, cross-functional collaboration, continuous research cycles, deep user understanding, balanced innovation
- Openfield’s Expertise: 40,000+ hours of EdTech-specific user research, observational studies, and prototype testing
Why Strategic UX Research Matters for Growth
If you are on the brink of increasing your product complexity, user base, or services, it is imperative to approach research strategically to avoid costly consequences. Without proper research foundations, EdTech companies face four critical risks:
- Not learning enough about the current landscape of competitors
- Not doing enough research about your prospective new users
- Failing to align prospective user groups to strategic business goals
- Misunderstanding your product and your users as they are now
You will need UX research practices that center your current users, reveal potential users, and accurately contextualize your product in the competitive landscape. By relying on the right blend of strategic research methods aligned with your business goals, you can develop a holistic and successful growth strategy that will delight current and prospective users and avoid inefficiently spent time and effort.
What Happens When EdTech Companies Skip UX Research During Growth?
Product design always carries inherent risks, but these intensify when exploring new markets or making significant changes to existing products. Each growth phase brings unique challenges that demand careful preparation and research. Without strategic UX research, you risk making costly mistakes that undermine your growth investment.
Failing to Understand Your Place in the Competitive Landscape
Before pursuing any growth initiative, you must understand not just who your competitors are, but how your product fits within the broader ecosystem of tools your users rely on. At a growth inflection point, understanding your competitive landscape becomes crucial. You must consider:
- Not every feature needs to be part of your product
- Some functions can integrate with users’ existing tools
- Your product should excel in specific areas while partnering with complementary solutions
Key questions to answer about the landscape include:
- Do customers use your product alone or alongside other tools?
- What unique advantages do competitors hold in certain areas?
- How can you carve out a differentiated position?
The consequence: You’ll invest in features users can get elsewhere while missing opportunities to differentiate. Resources get wasted building table-stakes functionality instead of creating genuine competitive advantages.
Misunderstanding Prospective Users
Beyond mapping the competitive landscape, you need a clear picture of your potential users — not just who they are, but the institutional and practical constraints they operate within. Make sure to:
- Identify where new users will come from
- Understand institutional constraints (especially in EdTech)
- Research decision-making authority and adoption barriers
User research can reveal important insights like, for example, whether instructors and students face limitations due to institution-level contracts. Effective user research reveals not just who might use your product, but how and why they can choose it.
According to EdWeek Market Brief, product usage actually rose over the last year despite predictions it would tighten due to tougher standards. Melissa Loble, chief academic officer for Instructure had this advice to EdTech product leaders – “If I were a vendor, I would really need to distinguish myself.” She explained that EdTech products that “can meet standards for interoperability, [and] evidence, and how you’re using AI ethically and responsibly will help create distinction.”
The consequence: Your product may be technically excellent but institutionally incompatible with how decisions are actually made. You’ll invest in building and marketing to individuals who lack the authority or ability to adopt your solution.
Disregarding Business Goals
While UX research and business strategy may seem separate, they must align closely for growth initiatives to succeed. Your organization must:
- Let user research inform your growth roadmap, not just validate predetermined plans
- Identify market requirements and opportunities based on real user needs
- Prioritize features based on the intersection of user needs and business objectives
Your strategy should balance industry standards with unique opportunities for differentiation.
The consequence: Research becomes an academic exercise disconnected from revenue growth. Teams gather insights that never influence product decisions, wasting time and creating cynicism about research’s value.
Leaving Behind Your Current Users
Growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum — you’re building from an existing user base that generates your current revenue and provides your market credibility. Balancing growth with existing user needs requires careful consideration. Consider the following principles and supporting action steps:
- Respect Established Usage Patterns
- Understand how loyal customers currently use your product
- Research and communicate changes effectively before implementing them
- Avoid alienating longtime users with abrupt workflow changes
Our research for Wolters Kluwer’s CoursePoint+ product revealed that instructors were frustrated because the entire product navigation was organized around the publications they use and not the classes they teach. We helped their team recognize that a shift to course-centric navigation would simplify workflows for their users. Our research findings helped shape a gradual rollout strategy that introduced the new course-centric mental model through scaffolded transitions, allowing instructors to adapt without abandoning the curricula and processes they’d already built.
To uncover the issues and address them, we followed an evidence-based approach that included:
- UX audits and benchmarking
- Design sprint session aligned and explored solutions
- A prioritization matrix informed a refined working roadmap
- User testing uncovered significant pain points
View the full CoursePoint+ Case Study
- Look Beyond Analytics
- Don’t rely solely on usage data, especially if users lack alternatives
- Engage in direct conversations with users to understand satisfaction vs. necessity
- Create a complete picture of product resonance, not just product usage
- Focus on improvements that drive both adoption and retention
Remember: Even when users have limited choices, prioritizing user experience through thorough research leads to better outcomes for everyone. Through UX research, you can create a clearer picture of how your product resonates and prioritize improvements that drive adoption and retention.
The consequence: Churn increases as you chase new markets, undermining the foundation that supports growth investment. Loyal customers who championed your product become detractors, damaging your reputation in the very communities you’re trying to expand into.
How Do You Research Your EdTech Market Position?
When your organization is looking to grow, it is essential to fully understand your product area’s market, the competitive landscape, and the larger ecosystem of products and services in which your users live. This outward-facing research will ensure that your business strategy is well-informed and that any new features or tools solve unique and documented user problems.
Researching Table Stakes, Parity, and Stand-Out Opportunities
A well-run research operation will contextualize your current product within the current market and provide future projections based on different strategies. Market research can help answer questions such as:
- What are the table stakes for a product in your market space?
- Is there parity in all or specific areas across the board between competitors?
- Does your product really have to achieve parity in all ways, or can it focus on specific areas?
- If most competitors do the same things well and the same things badly, where are the opportunities to stand out?
These questions help you identify where to invest your development resources strategically — achieving parity only where it matters while differentiating in areas that create real value for users.
Understanding Your Users’ Ecosystem
Sometimes a product does not have to interact with anything else for users to be successful. Usually, however, users are switching between tools and products all the time. In EdTech, specifically, instructors and students often have to juggle many different tools and jump between many different environments to accomplish all of their tasks. Before launching a growth initiative, it is crucial to understand how your users are likely to fit your product into their larger journeys.
Research should reveal:
- What other tools do your target users rely on daily?
- Where do pain points occur when switching between tools?
- Which integrations would create the most value vs. which are “nice to have”?
- How does your product fit into existing institutional technology stacks?
How Should EdTech Companies Align Research with Growth Goals?
Effective growth requires working in the intersection of user research and business strategy. This often means collaborating with sales, marketing, or customer experience teams to ensure research insights directly inform strategic decisions.
Aligning Research with Business Goals
Researching your current cohort of users and defining sources of new user cohorts can help you define metrics for growth. These can then be tied to objectives over the short- and long-term. In EdTech, this might look like expanding to a different academic discipline, age group, or educational service. Whatever your potential growth area is, user research can inform your business strategy. Usually this will require partnering with sales or customer experience teams to ensure research questions address real business needs.
Understanding Future Users
Landscape research, competitive analyses, and benchmarking studies can help identify unmet user needs, the current solutions on the market, and where your product has opportunities to stand out. These findings can inform your business goals and growth objectives, and will lay the foundation for upcoming user experience design work.
The goal isn’t just to understand what features future users want, but to understand the problems they’re trying to solve, the constraints they operate within, and how they currently work around gaps in existing solutions.
Balancing Current and Prospective User Needs
Organizations often have metrics and analytics on your current users’ behavior, along with customer experience data about serious pain points and points of user friction. User researchers can analyze and synthesize that data to determine what current users need in the next iteration of your product.
Sometimes, however, making decisions from analytics alone can create an inaccurate picture. Maybe your users do not have a choice over what features they use, and it is likely that your CX data only reflects a particular kind and severity of complaint. By prioritizing interviews and conversations with your users through UX research, you can create a clearer picture of how your product resonates and prioritize improvements that drive adoption and retention.
Research-Driven Growth vs. Growth Without Research
Strategic research fundamentally changes how growth initiatives unfold across six critical dimensions:
Feature Prioritization: With strategic research, features are based on validated user needs and competitive gaps. Without research, prioritization relies on assumptions or the loudest stakeholder voices.
Market Position: Research enables differentiation based on real opportunities identified through competitive analysis. Without it, companies remain reactive to competitor moves rather than carving unique positions.
User Retention: Strategic research ensures current users are supported through changes, maintaining the foundation that enables growth. Without research, companies risk alienating their loyal base while chasing new markets.
Resource Efficiency: Research focuses investment on high-impact areas where user needs and competitive opportunities intersect. Without it, teams waste effort building features that go unused or fail to differentiate.
Growth Confidence: Data-backed decisions reduce risk and build stakeholder confidence in growth investments. Without research, guesswork and hope increase uncertainty about whether initiatives will succeed.
Time to Market: While research requires upfront time investment, it enables faster execution by reducing costly pivots and false starts. Without research, quick starts often lead to expensive course corrections later when fundamental assumptions prove wrong.
What Are the Best Practices for EdTech UX Research?
Here are five guiding research principles you can follow to help ensure your UX program supports your EdTech company’s growth goals:
1. Establish a Clear Research Strategy
Establish a clear research strategy that aligns research objectives with business goals and balances current and prospective user needs. Your strategy should explicitly define what success looks like for both your existing user base and target growth segments. Document how research insights will inform product decisions at each stage of growth, ensuring research becomes a valued input to strategy rather than an afterthought.
2. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration
Foster cross-functional collaboration and share research insights between sales, customer support, and product teams. Create regular forums where research findings are presented and discussed across departments. Sales teams bring market intelligence, support teams understand pain points, and product teams translate insights into features — together they create a complete picture that no single department can achieve alone.
3. Implement Continuous Research Cycles
Implement continuous research cycles with regular user check-ins and iterative testing of new features and changes. Don’t treat research as a one-time gate before a major release. Instead, build ongoing feedback loops that catch issues early when they’re less costly to address. Regular touchpoints with users help you spot trends, validate assumptions, and maintain connection to real user needs throughout development cycles.
4. Understand What’s at the Heart of User Needs
Make sure you understand what’s at the heart of user needs — both what users articulate and what they do not — so that you are solving the right problems. Users often describe solutions they imagine rather than problems they experience. Skilled research uncovers the underlying needs, frustrations, and goals that drive feature requests, allowing you to solve root problems rather than implement surface-level asks.
5. Balance Innovation with Familiarity
Balance innovation with familiarity, introducing new features thoughtfully and with adequate onboarding and support. Growth often requires product changes, but changes shouldn’t sacrifice usability for existing users. Research helps you identify which innovations will excite users versus which will create friction, and how to introduce changes in ways that feel like evolution rather than disruption.
Frequently Asked Questions About EdTech UX Research for Growth
When should EdTech companies invest in UX research for growth?
Before entering new markets, significantly changing existing products, or expanding to new user segments. Research should begin 3-6 months before growth initiatives launch to ensure findings can actually influence strategy. Starting research after decisions are made reduces it to a validation exercise that rarely changes course even when findings suggest problems.
How much UX research is needed before scaling an EdTech product?
At minimum, conduct competitive analysis, user ecosystem mapping, and interviews with 15-20 representatives from each target user segment. Balance depth with speed based on your market timing — comprehensive research takes time, but launching without insights risks expensive pivots later. The right amount depends on your growth risk tolerance and the cost of being wrong.
Can small EdTech teams afford comprehensive UX research?
Yes, through strategic research planning that focuses resources on high-impact methods. Prioritize competitive benchmarking and targeted user interviews rather than attempting to research everything. Even modest research budgets can answer critical questions if you’re strategic about what you need to know versus what would be nice to know. Consider partnering with specialized EdTech UX research firms who bring efficiency through experience.
How do you balance researching new users without neglecting current ones?
Allocate research resources proportionally — typically 60% on understanding current user needs and evolution, and 40% on prospective users during growth phases. Use continuous feedback loops and analytics for existing users while investing in deeper exploratory research for new segments. The key is ensuring growth research doesn’t completely divert attention from the users who sustain your current business.
What’s the difference between EdTech UX research and general UX research?
EdTech UX research requires understanding institutional decision-making, pedagogical needs, compliance requirements, and the unique constraints of educational environments. Researchers need domain expertise in learning science, classroom dynamics, and educational administration. General UX research methods apply, but they must be adapted for the complexity of educational contexts where the buyer, decision-maker, and end user are often different people.
What Should EdTech Leaders Do First?
If you’re preparing for growth, here’s how to begin:
- Audit your current research program: Do you understand your competitive position, user ecosystem, and current user needs deeply enough to guide expansion decisions? Identify gaps between what you know and what you need to know.
- Identify research gaps: Where are you making assumptions about new users or markets? Which assumptions carry the highest risk if wrong? These become your research priorities.
- Align with stakeholders: Ensure sales, product, and research teams share growth definitions and success metrics. Misalignment here creates research that doesn’t serve business needs or business goals that ignore user reality.
- Start conversations now: Begin user interviews before you commit to product changes or market entry. The difference between successful and failed growth initiatives often comes down to research timing — starting too late means decisions are already made.
Don’t wait until you’ve invested significant resources to discover you’re building the wrong thing for the wrong users. Strategic research at the beginning prevents expensive pivots later.
How Research, Planning, and Design Work Together for EdTech Growth
The strategies, best practices, and associated risks of UX research during a period of growth will remain important during the entire research and design cycle. These things should become foundational in your product and design organization’s practices moving forward. When you find yourself at an inflection point fueled by a growth initiative, an experienced EdTech UX research partner can be a powerful ally. At Openfield, our expertise has been forged by over 40,000 hours of user interviews, observational studies, surveys, prototype testing, and co-creation workshops that have allowed product leaders like yourself to meet the moment of growth with great confidence and success.
This article is the first in a three-part series on optimizing your UX program for EdTech growth. For a comprehensive approach, be sure to read Part Two on effective ideation and planning processes that set the foundation for successful design implementation, including how to translate research insights into prioritized product roadmaps. Continue to Part Three, where we explore design and prototyping best practices that bring your plans to life while maintaining engineering efficiency and ensuring smooth collaboration between design and development teams.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you through this exciting phase, let’s set up a time to talk.
