Every education product has two users who never meet in the interface. The learner, who has to finish something. The buyer — a parent, a school, an L&D manager — who has to justify paying for it. Build for one and the other churns.
Two paths, one codebase
The learner path is about momentum: get in, know what to do next, see progress that feels earned. The buyer path is about evidence: enrolment, completion, attainment, cost per seat. They share a data model and share almost nothing else, including the tone of the copy.
We map both journeys before the first screen, then design them in parallel. It is the same discipline the UI and UX track applies to any product with a split audience — see the professional-and-consumer version of it in real estate and proptech.
Content is the product
Courseware is an asset with a lifecycle: authored, reviewed, versioned, retired. Teams that treat lessons as static pages end up editing production content by hand at midnight before term starts. Authoring tools, draft states and a publishing workflow are core scope, not a nice-to-have for version two.
Where a standard applies — SCORM, xAPI, a national curriculum tagging scheme — it is confirmed in week one, because retro-fitting an interoperability format is a rebuild.
The calendar owns the plan
Demand arrives in a few short windows. Enrolment season, term start, the annual training budget. That has two consequences and we plan for both:
- The release calendar works backwards from the busiest week, not forwards from today. Load testing happens before that week, not during it.
- The media plan spends against those windows and goes quiet between them. A flat monthly budget in a seasonal market buys attention when nobody is deciding. The paid track is built around the peaks.
Accessibility, because the audience is everyone
School and public-sector procurement asks for it in writing, and the underlying requirement is real: captions, keyboard paths, readable contrast, content that works on a five-year-old device on a school network. We build to that from the start; it is cheaper than the audit that follows a failed tender.
Trust before conversion
Parents and institutions check who made the material before they check the price. Author credentials, sample lessons and plain pricing do more here than any campaign — the content marketing track owns that surface.
The full sector list is on the industries page.