Ed tech is effective when tools are designed for real learners, centering usability and accessibility rather than relying on one-size-fits-all assumptions. When products reflect the diverse ways their users access and engage with content, learning becomes more meaningful and personal.
This post focuses on practical user-centered design practices—methods teams can use to understand learners’ real contexts and build products that work for them. For more on standards and tools to support implementation and readiness, see our User-Centered Design & Discovery Toolkit.
You can also catch up on the recording of our recent webinar, where Anna Aldric, Director of Technical Innovation at Axim Collaborative, and Sam Johnston, Chief Postsecondary and Workforce Development Officer at CAST, shared practical frameworks and strategies that teams can use to build products that support meaningful participation for every learner.
Strategy: User Personas & Journeys: Designing for the Learners You Serve
What is it? User personas are evidence-based profiles that represent the core groups of users your product is designed to support. Instead of designing for a hypothetical “typical user,” product teams can define concrete user personas to establish a shared understanding of their users—and what success looks like for them. These personas bring real learner needs, motivations, environments, and constraints into every decision a product team makes.
Why does it matter? Strong personas reduce guesswork and align teams around what users actually experience. Mapping how users move across the product—from first discovery to fidelity usage—reveals where confusion or friction may appear. When product decisions reflect the realities of users’ unique contexts, such as access to devices, bandwidth, assistive technologies, or limited time, teams can focus their energy on the product improvements that create greater usability and more equitable outcomes.
Examples of user personas. Meaningful personas are grounded in real context, not assumptions. They will be unique to each product, and may represent both broad and niche cases. For example:
- A learner who is employed full-time and is using a mobile hotspot during breaks to access the tool.
- An instructor who has limited time to set up the tool.
- A student who relies on a screen reader for all interactions with the tool.
Defining user personas helps uncover the unique needs of learners and ensures the tool is designed in ways that work for their specific contexts. For example, if user journey mapping shows that many learners rely on downloading videos due to unreliable Wi-Fi, the product team would prioritize offline access as an essential feature rather than a future enhancement—ensuring the product actually serves user needs.
Apply. Define 3-5 user personas for your tool overall or a new feature in development using the user personas and user journeys worksheets in our User-Centered Design & Discovery Toolkit. These worksheets will walk you through the process of identifying key user groups, capturing their goals and constraints, and aligning your product roadmap to important needs.
Once user personas clarify who your learners are and what they need, usability testing, outlined below, reveals how well your product supports them in practice.
Strategy: Usability Testing: Learning From Real Experience
What is it? Usability testing validates whether a product actually works the way it’s intended. Instead of relying on internal assumptions, teams observe real users interacting with the product to understand how they navigate it and where the design supports—or hinders—their success. Usability testing shows whether the product experience is intuitive and whether learners can find what they need. More important than a large sample is a diverse one. Testing with diverse users varying in backgrounds, abilities, and learning needs can quickly reveal points of friction that make a tool confusing or difficult to use.
Why it matters & examples. Usability testing shifts the focus from asking “Does the feature exist?” to asking “Can users actually use it as intended?” Testing early—when designs are still flexible—helps teams resolve issues before they become costly or compound into bigger problems for users. For example:
- A student cannot locate the “Submit” button because it drops below the fold on mobile.
- A teacher misses a rubric hidden inside a small dropdown menu.
- Buttons appear too low-contrast under classroom lighting.
- Missing alt text blocks learners who rely on screen readers.
Small barriers like these add up—slowing learners down, creating frustration, and causing them to disengage or abandon a tool altogether. Addressing issues during prototyping or early iterations prevents entire groups of users from being excluded later on and allows teams to resolve problems far more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Apply. Launch a usability study to understand where learners struggle and where your design supports them. Our User-Centered Design & Discovery Toolkit offers two tools to get you started:
- System Usability Scale (SUS): this worksheet will help you measure and interpret the usability of your products using the SUS—a standardized 10-item survey. You’ll be able to calculate your SUS score and identify usability strengths and weaknesses to inform product decisions.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): this worksheet will help you plan, run, and evaluate a UAT cycle, ensuring the product meets user needs, functional requirements, accessibility expectations, and real-world constraints.
While usability testing is an important place to start for inclusive design, it isn’t enough on its own. The next section explores the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which examines whether learners can meaningfully engage with, understand, and act on what the product offers.
Guidelines: Universal Design for Learning: Structuring for Variability
What is it? Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework, developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), for creating educational experiences that work for the widest range of learners from the start. Instead of treating accessibility as a retrofit, UDL assumes variability as the norm and designs for it proactively. Rooted in decades of learning and cognitive science, UDL helps product teams design environments where more learners can succeed without needing separate accommodations.
Core Principles. The UDL framework is grounded in the idea that learning tools should offer multiple pathways for access and participation so all learners can succeed. These include:
- Multiple Means of Engagement—tools should provide different ways for learners to stay motivated, connect with the content, and persist through challenges.
- Multiple Means of Representation—tools should present information in various formats so learners can perceive, understand, and make meaning from content regardless of differences in language, perception, or background knowledge.
- Multiple Means of Action & Expression—tools should allow learners multiple ways to navigate materials, interact with content, and demonstrate what they know.
Why it matters & examples. UDL reframes learning barriers as design challenges rather than learner shortcomings. By assuming variation from the outset, teams can build features that support learners with disabilities while simultaneously improving usability for everyone. For example:
- Captions are essential for deaf and hard-of-hearing learners, and also valuable for students in noisy environments or multilingual learners.
- Glossaries, definitions, and adjustable reading levels help students with dyslexia or lower reading fluency access content, and they also support advanced learners who are encountering unfamiliar technical vocabulary for the first time.
- Multiple ways to submit work—such as audio, text, or video—support learners with motor or language-based disabilities, and also benefit students who think more clearly aloud, or who are developing writing skills.
Apply. Follow the UDL guidelines in order to operationalize the framework during your design process. These will help identify opportunities to offer multiple ways for learners to engage, represent information, and express understanding.
Want to dig deeper? Designing accessible, user-centered products is an ongoing commitment. As you continue to refine personas, test with real users, and embed UDL into your design decisions, your products will become more intuitive, equitable, and effective for the learners you serve.
For teams looking for accessibility standards, compliance tools, and institutional readiness resources, we’ve curated a collection of resources here.
