Say the words “exclusive design,” and the average person probably starts picturing high-end fashion brands and electronic devices. After all, in the world of marketing, “exclusive” is a good thing. But in the context of digital products, exclusive design isn’t a positive feature. It’s a preventable failure. When it comes to EdTech products, an exclusive design pattern is one that doesn’t meet the needs of all of its users. In other words, it’s a design pattern that only works well for certain groups of people, such as visual users or those with a mouse in addition to a keyboard.
At their best, data visualizations enable EdTech companies to tell interesting and meaningful stories using the data collected within individual products. Visualizations are both attractive and powerful. They have the ability to highlight trends, support decisions, and improve outcomes across the board. But not all data visualizations are created equal. If you don’t approach them with focus and care, they can actually work against you. A data visualization can be gorgeous — a piece of art worthy of hanging on the wall — without being truly useful.
As an EdTech leader, you know firsthand how challenging it can be to strike the right balance between production costs, time to market, and quality. You must ship great products that generate revenue for your bottom line, build customer confidence in your brand, and ensure that your user and business needs are adequately addressed. That’s a pretty tall order, especially considering that you’re probably also under pressure to tighten your proverbial belt, given the current economic times. As a result, you may be grappling with the inevitable need to trim production costs in the form of UX research, design, and engineering.
As a product owner, you’ve been trained to put your users’ needs first. But you also know from experience that you don’t have the luxury of developing EdTech products in a vacuum. While your users should ideally drive everything you do, you must also contend with a host of competing pressures, from budgetary constraints to compressed timelines. The truth is that your feature requests and production timelines are often driven by business needs. But your users are the reason you created your product in the first place.
EdTech companies like yours rely on UX research to make important decisions about your product. Each of your key stakeholders — including your product and executive leadership teams — must clearly understand your research findings and the recommendations that flow from them. So it’s critical that your research reports are clear and effective. Like the EdTech products you build, research reports are only effective to the extent that they serve their end users. Unfortunately, they are too frequently only formulated with a researcher’s mindset. That is, they are so focused on documenting the individual trees that they fail to also tell a compelling story about the forest.
