2020 was most clearly defined by one thing: COVID-19. That was true for the world at large, and it was also decidedly true for the smaller world of EdTech. The pandemic forced a handful of industries into the spotlight. Chief among them? Health, finance — and education. As schools everywhere rushed to assemble remote learning protocols, EdTech products and other tech companies (hello Zoom!) stepped up in a major way to fill the gaps. But that doesn’t mean it was seamless. Far from it.
If you’re like many EdTech companies, you probably don’t have concrete data on how your competitors’ products perform at the task level. But your ability to set the proper usability targets for key tasks within your own product depends on your ability to do so. Establishing task-level baseline metrics is the only way to properly prioritize your UX team’s efforts moving forward. Here’s what you need to know to ensure that you use these metrics to maximize the ROI of your efforts.
Accessibility is a fast-growing concern for all EdTech companies. If your EdTech product doesn’t effectively serve all of its users (including those with disabilities) then you have a problem. You aren’t just excluding whole categories of users. You’re shortchanging your overall user experience — and setting yourself up for possible lawsuits to boot. Don’t put your product’s accessibility on the back burner. Start planning your accessibility audit and remediation plan today. Your users (and your legal team) will thank you.
Are you adapting to meet your users’ changing needs in the pandemic as quickly as your competitors? As an established EdTech company, you’ve already carved out a unique spot for your product (or suite of products) in the market. Now that you’ve solidified your place within the EdTech space, your focus has shifted from staking a claim to defending and growing your marketshare. But if you’re not listening carefully to them and adapting your product quickly enough, someone else may beat you to it.
As EdTech products like yours mature, they grow. That is, they amass an increasing number of features, functionalities, and users. And as they do that, they create and collect more and more of something else: User data. This ever-expanding river of data represents a major opportunity to add value for your users by uncovering meaningful and actionable insights. But how you go about presenting that data can spell the difference between success and failure.
