This article is very insightful for #EdTech companies as education products are fundamentally different from traditional software development. Design thinking-type activities are important to help guide the software development, but an ongoing relationship with teachers and students is critical to iterating the product to “fit” within a class environment. Like general software development, current teacher “wants” and “needs” have to be balanced with innovative capabilities.

An interesting question is how is #EdTEch software development different than developing software for other industries.
(1) The product should flexible and able to change over time.
(2) The product should have analytics that proactively highlights the value it is providing to teachers and students.
(3) The product should support major single sign-on authentication methods
(4) Teachers have limited time to learn complicated products. As a result, the product should have a scalable user experience. The product should not need instructions to get started and it should only require training for using advanced capabilities.
(4a) This approach will ensure that all faulty can use the product (at some level) and the product will not just be used by only pockets of teachers.
(4b) In order for an EdTech product to be transformational, it is likely that the advanced features will need to be used.
(5)The UI/UX will have to be flexible enough to adapt to a broad range of usage by teachers — from novice to advanced. Advanced features need to be hidden from novice teachers and easily surfaced to more advanced teachers.
(5a) The product should have a dashboard for the IT department, teachers and students to monitor UI/UX usage patterns. The usage data can lead to streamlining the UI/UX experience through A/B testing of potential changes.
(5b) The product should have the ability to view a screen as if seen by another class of user. A popular example is IT “impersonating” a teacher os student to help diagnose a problem.