As the coronavirus pandemic continues to upend life as we knew it — including the usual in-person educational models — students, teachers, and administrators are more stressed than ever before. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. Your EdTech product users are struggling with unprecedented challenges. And they have the elevated anxiety to match. To design the right solutions within your product — and effectively reduce user stress — you must first look at your users’ lives outside your product.
You already know that user testing is critical to the success of your product. But for many EdTech companies, actually sourcing test users is a perennial challenge. You see, when it comes to user testing, not just any users will do. You can either build a bespoke set of actual users of your product or you can utilize a service that brings their own preselected group. In order to get meaningful insights, you need to start with the right users.
Cheating is a perennial concern in education. All educators are aware of it, and all educators know they must monitor students’ behavior for signs of troubling activity. But in an increasingly remote and digital context, sussing out cheating is harder than ever. Instructors are generally savvy to the ways students game digital systems. But that doesn’t necessarily make those deceptive activities easier to spot. More and more, instructors are looking to EdTech products to help solve the problem.
User testing is the key to creating an EdTech product your users will love. That’s the whole reason you do it in the first place: To uncover critical user insights and leverage them to make smart, user-centric design decisions. But the truth is that simply conducting the research — even well-designed research — isn’t enough. In order to get meaningful takeaways from your research findings, you must apply the right level of statistical rigor.
The EdTech market is ripe for disruption. Between pandemic-driven changes to educational models and an influx of investors, the industry is now in a state of rapid flux. Which means the pressure is on for your EdTech company to bring useful new features to market as quickly as possible. Of course, that’s easier said than done. EdTech has long marched to the beat of its own industry-specific drum, often moving at more of a leisurely canter than a breakneck gallop.