When product leaders begin a partnership with an outside UX team, the discovery process presents a unique challenge. All stakeholders must gain alignment about the product problem to solve and come to a shared understanding about your users. And in order to understand your users, you need to consider their flows. Task flows, user flows, and user journey maps can all be useful in the UX discovery phase. All of these tools share a sense of establishing and tracking user movement. But they are discrete tools that have specific purposes and appropriate uses. You should know what outcomes each of these three tools provide, how they overlap, and how they support each other. That way, you’ll know where your efforts will be best applied in our discovery work together.
UX teams often view design systems as luxuries they can’t afford. But an effective design system is much more than a “nice-to-have.” It can increase efficiency, save money, and shift your team’s focus to creating delightful new features rather than untangling design knots. While the idea of building a design system may seem daunting, our guide will help steer you whether you’re starting small or jumping in feet-first.
The better the roadmap, the better the journey to your destination. It’s true on a vacation, and it’s true for your EdTech product development. Similar factors have to be weighed out when you plan: timelines, experiences, costs, and goals. Unfortunately, many product roadmaps that intend to reflect long-term plans are actually short-sighted. They may not align properly with your strategic direction, or they might be too rigid to handle the reality of what the future holds. And most problematically, roadmaps can be void of real user experience insights. Unless it aligns to what is beneficial to the end user at every step, your roadmap could be at risk of these kinds of vulnerabilities. You’ll need to strengthen it and ensure it’s much more than an informational document.
In EdTech, your product and UX teams share a purpose: meeting the evolving needs of your users. You may be more likely to invest in improving the UX of the visible, user-facing parts of your product. That makes sense — it affects the bottom line. There’s no denying what students and instructors immediately see (like attendance, grades, and assignments) influences what EdTech product is purchased by or for them. These user-facing elements are made with internal course building tools, yet you probably make far fewer investments in them. From a UX perspective, this is a mistake. Internal tools — like the ones that build course templates — powerfully shape users’ overall experience with your product.
Are your EdTech product’s data visualizations telling stories that are useful to users? If they don’t meet the thoughtful and consistent standards in your own style guide, they probably aren’t. When you access our Quick Action Guide, you’ll have all you need to empower your data visualizations with: uniform look and feel, quicker design process, overarching strategy for data reporting, first-rate user experience, adherence to accessibility requirements, data and product credibility.
