Phil Holcombe is Form & Faculty's founder and Chief Design Officer, bringing decades of experience designing educational products and curricula, alongside 10+ years of teaching in K–12 and higher education.
In education, a beautifully built feature doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work for the people who actually use it. Teachers juggle 100 micro-decisions a day, counselors are constantly triaging student needs, and principals are stretched thin managing systems, people, and pressure. When we release new features without real-world usability testing, we risk adding friction to workflows that already feel overloaded.
That’s why usability studies with real customers — before launch — are one of the highest-leverage steps in the product development process. Watching actual educators move through a prototype quickly reveals what surveys or internal dog-fooding never will: where people hesitate, what they don’t understand, and what they try to do that your team never anticipated. These insights protect you from costly rework, ensure your feature aligns to teacher and administrator mental models, and build trust with your customers by showing that you design with them, not for them.
One of the biggest misconceptions in product development — especially in EdTech — is that you need a nearly finished feature before testing it with real users. In reality, the opposite is often true. Early, low-fidelity prototypes frequently generate better insights because they signal to educators that the design is still flexible. Teachers, counselors, and administrators are far more willing to critique a sketch or clickable mockup than a polished interface that looks “done.”
Lightweight prototypes help you:
Whether it’s a rough Figma prototype, a whiteboard sketch, or even a physical walkthrough with printed screens, the goal is the same: learn what educators need before investing in full development. Early prototyping turns usability testing into a strategic amplifier — one that saves engineering time, aligns cross-functional teams, and dramatically improves the final experience.
1. Test workflows, not just screens.
Educators rarely engage with features in isolation — they’re moving between teaching, grading, rostering, and responding to student needs. Structure your study around real tasks (e.g., “Identify which students need Tier 2 support” or “Build a lesson modification with your school’s Portrait of a Graduate”), not just UI elements. This exposes hidden friction points and helps you design for how people actually work.
2. Prioritize representative users, not power users.
Many teams unintentionally test with their most engaged champions. While their feedback is valuable, it’s not representative. Include new teachers, time-pressed counselors, assistant principals, and even educators who are skeptical of technology. Their mental models reveal different breakdowns, and those are the ones that will sink adoption if you don’t catch them early.
3. Watch for confusion, not complaints.
Educators won’t always articulate what’s wrong; they’ll show you. Notice when someone hesitates, scrolls back and forth, re-reads text, or asks “Wait, what does this do?” These micro-moments are the gold. They signal where the UI, language, or AI logic needs simplification or where the feature diverges from their expectations. This level of observational insight is the real power of a usability study.
Usability testing before release isn’t a box to check. It’s a commitment to building tools that honor educators’ time, reduce cognitive load, and make schools run more smoothly.