Challenge & Research Goals
eduki’s UX Team had a routine way of conducting research: moderated, in-depth interviews with their own pool of teachers. While thorough, this approach came with a significant structural problem. Teachers are a niche, chronically time-pressured audience, and getting them to respond to research invitations was a constant challenge.
Teachers are chronically under time pressure and are very hard to reach. We experienced low response rates, and together with our reliance on moderated interviews, this significantly slowed down our research process.
Eileen P., who focuses on the Author Enablement product area, faced an additional challenge: language barriers. Much of eduki’s research starts with the German market — their largest — and Eileen doesn’t speak German.
It started revealing weak spots in our workflow. How reliant we are on our own users — recruiting participants takes significant effort, and response rates aren't always guaranteed.
The team needed a way to move faster, reach a broader audience, and reduce reliance on a small, hard-to-engage user base.
Solution
The team already had deep moderated research. What they were missing was speed and scale — and that’s where UXtweak’s unmoderated testing and User Panel came in.
We realized the real value wasn’t in copying our workflow, but in expanding it—using UXtweak’s user panel to run unmoderated studies alongside our existing methods.
Unmoderated Testing: Author Material Upload Flow
One of eduki’s most revealing studies involved the author material upload process — a sequential modal flow that the team hypothesized was confusing and time-consuming.
While usage signals indicated friction and feedback pointed to classification confusion, users still described the process as “super easy”.
The team decided to test two alternative designs in an unmoderated study:
- Version A: A single-page layout with all fields visible at once
- Version B: A simplified, sequential modal — similar to the existing experience.
We were trying to find the most intuitive version for our material upload process. Our hypothesis was that it was problematic, time-consuming, confusing — and then overwhelmingly the responses came back and everyone described it as super easy.
The study recruited 20 participants through UXtweak’s User Panel — screened for teachers or education-adjacent roles — compared to the significantly lower response rate from their own author pool.
The panel recruitment was fast, required no language facilitation, and delivered a sample size the team had not reached before in a discovery study.
You handled everything in German and still got us a strong turnout. That made my life so much easier.
Outcome
Validated a design — and avoided a costly rebuild
The study results showed no clear winner between the two designs. Users appreciated the guided, step-by-step quality of the modals and the overview clarity of the single-page layout — but neither caused real usability issues.
The real insight was that the problem wasn’t the user experience at all: it was an internal system constraint around data analysis capabilities.
Without the study, we likely would have invested heavily in rebuilding the flow. Instead, we identified key issues early and adjusted direction before development.
The team adopted a hybrid solution — a guided, full-page step-by-step flow instead of modal-based interactions — balancing user feedback with technical constraints. Rather than validating a direction, the research reshaped the problem itself.
A cumulative shift in research confidence
Beyond any single study, the team describes the value of UXtweak as accumulative.
The value is accumulative over time. It gives us earlier confidence about what we should probably pursue and what we shouldn’t — or what we should not overinvest in. We can go very broad very quickly, which we cannot do with our own niche audience.
Why UXtweak?
When asked what stood out beyond the tools themselves, both Kristin and Eileen pointed immediately to the support from UXtweak Customer Success team.
I feel so supported. Even for that alone, I would recommend UXtweak.
Every time we had any form of issue or question, Marek was super responsive and helped us find a solution right away.
Kristin also reflected on the broader impact UXtweak has had on how the team thinks about research itself — not just what tools they use, but how they approach problems.
It really helped us shift our mindset on how we do research and how we evolve. I think it’s helping us grow our research practice.
