Imagine spending thousands of dollars on an edtech product for your school or district that promises to transform student learning, only to watch students struggle to engage with it. It’s a scenario we’ve heard about repeatedly from educators. While teachers and education leaders are the ones making the procurement decisions, the end users — students themselves — are often left out of the conversation.
With funding from the Gates Foundation, our research and development team at ISTE+ASCD set out to change that by conducting a study that centered the student experience in edtech product design. What we learned can help both product design teams and edtech buyers better understand what student usability actually means — and why it matters.
What Is Student Usability?
Student usability considers both the pedagogical and technical aspects of a product from the student perspective. In other words, it asks how “easy to use” an edtech product really is for students. While we’ve conducted extensive research on teacher usability, students are an important but often overlooked user group.
We first explored what existing research suggests about designing edtech with students in mind. Products should include active, engaged, meaningful and socially interactive experiences. Additional features that support student learning outcomes include accessibility tools, opportunities for autonomous learning, connecting content to learning outcomes, engaging learning experiences, opportunities for productive struggle, motivational feedback and personalized learning experiences.
Co-design with students can help product developers come to better design decisions. We’ve been exploring this approach with partners like InTandem and Sesame Workshop, but we started by asking students directly about their experiences with the tools they use every day.
What We Heard From Students
By working in partnership with InTandem, we recruited high school students from across the United States to participate in virtual focus groups and complete an online questionnaire about their experiences with edtech products for learning. Here’s what students prioritized when it comes to their usability preferences and needs:
Clear, intuitive design
Above all else, students wanted products that are easy to use, with a clean design and smooth functionality. An especially important consideration for students? Easily finding information about assignments and due dates. This “ease of use” concept seems basic, but our research confirmed it isn’t always executed well. For product providers, this means emphasizing a clear, intuitive user interface that facilitates easy access to what’s most important to students — especially assignments and due dates.
Meaningful interaction and representation
Students generally liked avatars and gamified elements when appropriate and when they were meaningfully connected to the learning experience. As one student shared, when done well, gamification is “an interactive way of learning that fosters healthy competition and enthusiasm in the process of learning.”
The key here is meaningful connection. Product providers should evaluate when and where avatars and gamified elements might enhance the learning experience within their product — and conversely, where they might become a distraction. Both competitive and cooperative elements of game-based learning can work, as can opportunities for productive struggle, but the connection to learning needs to be clear.
Mobile compatibility for specific purposes
While students reported a strong preference for completing schoolwork on laptop devices, they also acknowledged the need for mobile compatibility for specific tasks. Primarily, students reported using mobile devices to check assignments and review calendar due dates. This doesn’t mean every edtech product needs a sophisticated mobile app, but it does suggest that designing products as primarily web-based — so they can be accessible on any type of device, whether laptop or mobile — is the way to go.
Flexibility with accessibility tools
Students acknowledged the value of accessibility tools within an edtech product. Most students liked speech-to-text as a feature, but wanted narration off by default. The message here for product providers is clear: Accessibility tools should be available but not imposed, allowing students to customize their experience based on their individual needs.
Customization where it counts
Here’s where student preferences revealed an interesting tension. Students wanted control over user interface elements, including how they view and receive calendars, notifications and reminders. However, they typically didn’t want a customized learning path; rather, they preferred a sequential one that provides guidance for navigating the learning experience. For product providers, this suggests emphasizing customization of the user interface while being more cautious about over-personalizing the learning pathway itself.
What This Means for Edtech
The findings from our research point to a gap between what students need and what many products deliver. Students aren’t asking for flashy features or complex personalization algorithms. They want clarity, meaningful engagement and control over their own experience.
For school and district leaders evaluating edtech products, this research suggests that student usability should be given equal weight with teacher usability. Edtech buyers might consider asking questions such as: Can students actually navigate this tool independently? Does it respect their time and learning preferences? Are accessibility features available without being intrusive?
For product developers, the takeaway is simple: Students are your end users, not an afterthought. The edtech market may be oversaturated, but there’s room for products that genuinely prioritize student experience. By centering student voices in design decisions, we can move closer to edtech that delivers on its promise to support learning.
Our team will release a formal student usability framework in 2026, in time for the ISTE+ASCD conference. In addition to the framework, we’ll publish field-tested guidance for product developers who want to build for best-in-class student usability, as well as for edtech buyers who want to know what to look for in products.
