Every founder in the EdTech business is focused on the standard metrics that are easy to understand — the number of visitors on a website, the amount of money spent on ads, and the number of courses available. However, the most critical statistics are less obvious. They can be found in the bounce rates on the site where a registration form is placed, the time a parent spends hesitating before entering his or her credit card number, as well as the fact that a student opened your dashboard only once and did not come back. A website UX audit helps uncover these hidden patterns, revealing where users experience friction and why they leave before completing key actions.
These are UX red flags. In EdTech, the presence of these metrics is more harmful than losing a sale. Parents are in the process of deciding whether to transmit their financial and personal information. Students are faced with the decision whether your product is worth their time. If your users’ experience is poor, you will fail at your sales.
For a practical walkthrough, read our Step-by-Step Guide for Conducting a UX Review to learn how to evaluate your platform and uncover usability issues before they affect conversions and retention.
The following are the red flags that are worth paying attention to, and how UX Audit design can help to resolve the issues.
1. High Drop-Off on Your Signup or Enrollment Form
Whenever an application process is started by numerous users yet is left unfinished, this simply means that the process is too complicated, and this affects the business. Frequent reasons for abandonment are: those applications containing requests for too many pieces of information from users; unaddressed pricing up until the very last stage, and the payment step being uninviting and rushed.
For the EdTech sector, in the first place, it is of even greater importance. Parents already have lots of concerns regarding the requirement for their kids’ personal and financial details, and such hesitation in the design of the application process works against trying to reassure them.
Things needed to be analyzed include: how many fields need to be completed by the customer? Is the pricing made clear from the very first page? Does the payment stage look reliable and trustworthy?
2. Low Return Visits to the Student Dashboard
When a student accesses the platform once and never returns, it signals a UX issue, not necessarily a technical one. If the student dashboard is cluttered, does not direct the user successfully, and/or does not indicate any progress, the users will lose interest quickly. This has serious implications for subscription models or any course-based program since the revenue amount depends greatly on user retention levels.
Things to verify: Is the progress monitor functional? Is it easy for the students to understand what to do next? Do they need instructions to navigate the dashboard?
3. Mobile Experience That Feels Like an Afterthought
A major portion of traffic in EdTech services nowadays comes from mobiles, mostly in countries where students and their parents are browsing and enrolling on their phones. If your platform is primarily built for desktop usage and modified for mobile, you may have issues like buttons that cannot be clicked easily, text that needs to be zoomed in, forms that can break on smaller screens etc.
The following questions need to be answered: Is it possible to go through the whole enrollment procedure, from the beginning to the end, on your mobile device? Does content transform itself properly, or is it just shrinking down?
4. Unclear Trust Signals
Parents do not send their children to a platform that they don’t trust. The trust in educational technology (EdTech) is created by many signals, such as user testimonials, accreditations, privacy policy, refund policies, and reports from previous users. If the signals are missing, hidden, or hard to find, the users may simply leave the site, and you may never know why.
What to consider: Check if the trust signals are present at the beginning of the site or if they require scrolling through several pages. Also, check to see if the privacy policy is easy to find and understandable, and not just legally approved.
5. Confusing Course Discovery
If students or parents are unable to locate a desired program, course, or subject in a short manner, they are most likely to leave instead of searching for it, which is a common and easily fixable issue in EdTech platforms with wide catalogs of content. Overuse of filters, imprecise categorization of courses, and inappropriate naming also add to this problem.
Questions to be asked: Is a first-time visitor able to search for any course within 30 seconds? Are filters convenient to use or useless?
6. Inconsistent Design Across Devices and Pages
When your website, registration process, and student dashboard appear to represent separate product lines, it is detrimental to trust. Such a lack of consistency suggests that the company does not pay attention to details, which makes customers think that there may be other inconsistencies in work, such as the quality of courses or the security of data.
Things to consider: do your design style, typography, color, and comparison stay uniform between the homepage and checkout?
Why These Red Flags Are Easy to Miss
Most EdTech start-up founders don’t neglect UX — they are just too attached to their product to be able to see it from the user’s perspective. You understand the functionality of every button. But your users don’t. It is this disconnect between the familiarity of the start-up founder and the user experience that accounts for lost enrollments.
This is also the reason why relying on your gut feeling or feedback from your team is not effective. Your team shares the same blind spots as you do.
Turn UX Red Flags into Growth Opportunities with UX Audit Tool
Every issue in User Experience (UX) is an opportunity to enhance your learners’ experience and raise the enrollment numbers. Rather than making assumptions, it is better to employ a UX audit tool in order to identify the friction points that stop students and parents from performing key actions.
A full UX Audit design provides insights into how to rectify all stages of learners’ experiences, from difficult navigation and an inefficient enrollment process to bad usability and poor trust signals. Addressing these issues helps EdTech companies to guarantee customer satisfaction and trust, retain learners, and ensure profitable operation of the platform.
