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 Two explores ideation and planning processes, followed by Part Three, which how design and engineering teams can collaborate better. 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:
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.
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.
At a growth inflection point, understanding your competitive landscape becomes crucial. You must consider:
Key questions to answer about the landscape include:
Beyond mapping the competitive landscape, you need a clear picture of your potential users. Make sure to:
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.
While UX research and business strategy may seem separate, they must align closely. Your organization must:
Your strategy should balance industry standards with unique opportunities for differentiation.
Balancing growth with existing user needs requires careful consideration. Consider the following principles and supporting action steps:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Effective growth requires working in the intersection of user research and business strategy. This often means collaborating with sales, marketing, or customer experience teams.
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.
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.
Organizations often have metrics and analytics on your 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.
Here are five guiding research principles you can follow to help ensure your UX program supports your EdTech company’s growth goals:
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 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.
This article is the first in a three-part series on optimizing your UX program for EdTech growth. For a comprehensive approach, be sure to read Part Two on effective ideation and planning processes that set the foundation for successful design implementation or continue to Part Three, where we explore design and prototyping best practices that bring your plans to life while maintaining engineering efficiency.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you through this exciting phase, let’s set up a time to talk.