As EdTech companies mature, they inevitably look to grow their user bases. When you find yourself at such an inflection point, it’s more critical than ever to refine your research, design, and development processes to ensure you don’t create or compound your UX problems. In this first article in our series on optimizing your UX program to enable smooth growth, we’ll examine what this means for your research process.
This article is the first in a three-part series examining how EdTech product leaders can optimize their UX program for growth. Part one focuses on user research and testing strategies, while subsequent articles will explore ideation and planning processes, followed by design and prototyping best practices. Together, these pieces provide a comprehensive framework for scaling your EdTech product thoughtfully and successfully.
If you are on the brink of increasing your product complexity, user base, or services, it is imperative to approach research strategically to avoid consequences. Possible risks include:
- Not learning enough about the current landscape of competitors
- Not doing enough research about your prospective new users
- Failing to align prospective user groups to strategic business development goals
- Misunderstanding your product and your users as they are now
You will need UX research practices that center your current users, reveal potential users, and accurately contextualize your product in the competitive landscape. By relying on the right blend of strategic research methods aligned with your business goals, you can develop a holistic and successful growth strategy that will delight current and prospective users and avoid inefficiently spent time and effort.
Understanding the Risks and Consequences of Inadequate UX Research
Product design always carries inherent risks, but these intensify when exploring new markets or making significant changes to existing products. Each growth phase brings unique challenges that demand careful preparation and research.
Failing to understand your place in the competitive landscape
At a growth inflection point, understanding your competitive landscape becomes crucial. You must consider:
- Not every feature needs to be part of your product
- Some functions can integrate with users’ existing tools
- Your product should excel in specific areas while partnering with complementary solutions
Key questions to answer about the landscape include:
- Do customers use your product alone or alongside other tools?
- What unique advantages do competitors hold in certain areas?
- How can you carve out a differentiated position?
Misunderstanding prospective users
Beyond mapping the competitive landscape, you need a clear picture of your potential users. Make sure to:
- Identify where new users will come from
- Understand institutional constraints (especially in EdTech)
- Research decision-making authority and adoption barriers
User research can reveal important insights like, for example, whether instructors and students face limitations due to institution-level contracts. Effective user research reveals not just who might use your product, but how and why they can choose it.
Disregarding business goals
While UX research and business strategy may seem separate, they must align closely. Your organization must:
- Let user research inform your growth roadmap
- Identify market requirements and opportunities
- Prioritize features based on user needs and business objectives
Your strategy should balance industry standards with unique opportunities for differentiation.
Leaving behind your current users
Balancing growth with existing user needs requires careful consideration. Consider the following principles and supporting action steps:
- Respect Established Usage Patterns
- Understand how loyal customers currently use your product
- Research and communicate changes effectively
- Avoid alienating longtime users
- Look Beyond Analytics
- Don’t rely solely on usage data, especially if users lack alternatives
- Engage in direct conversations with users
- Create a complete picture of product resonance
- Focus on improvements that drive both adoption and retention
Remember: Even when users have limited choices, prioritizing user experience through thorough research leads to better outcomes for everyone. Through UX research, you can create a clearer picture of how your product resonates and prioritize improvements that drive adoption and retention.
Establish Your Place in the Market and User Ecosystem
When your organization is looking to grow, it is essential to fully understand your product area’s market, the competitive landscape, and the larger ecosystem of products and services in which your users live. This outward-facing research will ensure that your business strategy is well-informed and that any new features or tools solve unique and documented user problems.
Researching table stakes, parity, and stand-out opportunities
A well-run research operation will contextualize your current product within the current market and provide future projections based on different strategies. Market research can help answer questions such as:
- What are the table stakes for a product in your market space?
- Is there parity in all or specific areas across the board between competitors?
- Does your product really have to achieve parity in all ways, or can it focus on specific areas?
- If most competitors do the same things well and the same things badly, where are the opportunities to stand out?
Understanding your users’ ecosystem
Sometimes a product does not have to interact with anything else for users to be successful. Usually, however, users are switching between tools and products all the time. In EdTech, specifically, instructors and students often have to juggle many different tools and jump between many different environments to accomplish all of their tasks. Before launching a growth initiative, it is crucial to understand how your users are likely to fit your product into their larger journeys.
Defining Growth Objectives and Target Users
Effective growth requires working in the intersection of user research and business strategy. This often means collaborating with sales, marketing, or customer experience teams.
Aligning research with business goals
Researching your current cohort of users and defining sources of new user cohorts can help you define metrics for growth. These can then be tied to objectives over the short- and long-term. In EdTech, this might look like expanding to a different academic discipline, age group, or educational service. Whatever your potential growth area is, user research can inform your business strategy. Usually this will require partnering with sales or customer experience teams.
Understanding future users
Landscape research, competitive analyses, and benchmarking studies can help identify unmet user needs, the current solutions on the market, and where your product has opportunities to stand out. These findings can inform your business goals and growth objectives, and will lay the foundation for upcoming user experience design work.
Balancing current and prospective user needs
Organizations often have metrics and analytics on their current users’ behavior, along with customer experience data about serious pain points and points of user friction. User researchers can analyze and synthesize that data to determine what current users need in the next iteration of your product.
Sometimes, however, making decisions from analytics alone can create an inaccurate picture. Maybe your users do not have a choice over what features they use, and it is likely that your CX data only reflects a particular kind and severity of complaint. By prioritizing interviews and conversations with your users through UX research, you can create a clearer picture on how your product resonates and prioritize improvements that drive adoption and retention.
Best Practices for UX Research During Periods of Growth
Here are five guiding research principles you can follow to help ensure your UX program supports your EdTech company’s growth goals:
- Establish a clear research strategy that aligns research objectives with business goals and balances current and prospective user needs
- Foster cross-functional collaboration and share research insights between sales, customers support, and product teams
- Implement continuous research cycles with regular user check-ins and iterative testing of new features and changes
- Make sure you understand what’s at the heart of user needs — both what users articulate and what they do not—so that you are solving the right problems
- Balance innovation with familiarity, introducing new features thoughtfully and with adequate onboarding and support
Research is Just a Piece of the Puzzle
The strategies, best practices, and associated risks of UX research during a period of growth will remain important during the entire research and design cycle. These things should become foundational in your product and design organization’s practices moving forward. When you find yourself at an inflection point fueled by a growth initiative, an experienced EdTech UX research partner can be a powerful ally. At Openfield, our research expertise has been forged by over 40,000 hours of user interviews, observational studies, surveys, prototype testing, and co-creation workshops that have allowed product leaders like yourself to meet the moment of growth with great confidence and success.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you through this exciting phase, let’s set up a time to talk.
