unbarrier.voice — partnership invitation
Students are the why.
I help you build products people actually use, understand, trust, and benefit from.
Apple Professional Learning Specialist. 26 years in classrooms. GoodNotes partner. Dyslexic and ADHD educator.
What I see, again and again
The bit between a product launch
and a child who's actually using it.
Five things I notice every time I'm in a classroom watching what children do with EdTech, or in a product room watching what adults assume children do.
observation 01
Teachers want to be 99.8% confident in a tool before they use it. Most products are designed for the 5% who'll fiddle until it works. The other 95% open it, get stuck, and go back to whatever they were doing before.
observation 02
The current generation arriving into reception are less ready for school than any I've taught. Less language, less regulation, less stamina. Products designed for the child you imagined three years ago aren't the children turning up next September.
observation 03
In early years, there is almost no accessible data for the students themselves. We collect data about them, in clipboards and tally charts. We rarely give them data they can see, hold, and use to talk about their own day.
observation 04
By the time we notice a child has crashed out, it's too late. Most products tell you what happened after it happened. The useful data is the friction in the moment — the cognitive load, the dignity moment, the small disengagement no analytics dashboard captures.
observation 05
Children need the pattern before they need the variation. Most tools default to choice and randomisation because it looks engaging on a demo. In a real classroom, choice without pattern is overwhelm. The pattern is the bit that helps them learn.
Where I'm at
I'm shaping this slowly, on purpose.
unbarrier.voice is the work I'm building next, drawing on what I've learned across years of classroom practice and inside EdTech product rooms. I'm not ready to put the full offer in front of the world yet — the people I've worked with deserve to hear about it from me first.
What I can say: it sits between learners and product teams, on purpose. It's structured pupil intelligence — not feedback, not focus groups, not workshops, not audits. Closer to the kind of user research a serious product team would commission, designed for the audience that actually uses your product.
If any of that is what your team has been quietly missing — email me. Early conversations shape this work, and I'd rather build it with the people who need it than guess at what they need.
If any of this lands
Tell me what you're building.
A short email is plenty. The product, where you're up to, what's on your mind. I'll listen properly before I say anything useful.
nici@unbarrier.me →