When it comes to product development, user insights are invaluable. After all, it’s crucial you develop an EdTech product your users actually want and need. To glean that insight, you’ve got to understand how to effectively talk to users — without influencing their responses. Download our free guide to learn how to craft smart testing scripts that yield the most accurate, actionable user feedback.
The COVID-19 pandemic turned the traditional in-person classroom experience on its head. Students were suddenly remote, and instructors scrambled to continue teaching. While most students have returned to the classroom, the hybrid model — where some students are in person and others are remote — is likely here to stay. And that brings a series of unparalleled challenges and opportunities for EdTech products. This evolution of the traditional classroom offers great freedom and flexibility for both instructors and students. But it also presents new problems for teaching and learning. Effective UX design can help defray pain points and create products that are valuable for all users — whether they’re in-person or remote. For your EdTech product to have a lasting impact, it must accommodate the realities of the hybrid classroom.
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.
