Every STEM educator who adopts Labster comes to us with a different story. Some are trying to serve students in fully online programs who never set foot in a physical lab. Others are managing 300-student lecture sections where one-on-one support is nearly impossible. Some are facing budget cuts that have reduced lab hours, while others are battling a retention crisis they can't quite explain.

Each of these instructors has ideas about what would make Labster work better for them.

The question is: whose feedback should actually shape what we build next?

The Loudest Voice Problem

Here's something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly easy to get wrong: the loudest voices are not always the most representative ones.

As Labster's Design Lead, it's my job to make sure the product team is solving the right problems, not just the most visible ones. And for a platform serving millions of students across 3,000+ institutions, "visible" feedback can be heavily skewed. A vocal administrator at a large institution can generate more feedback volume than hundreds of instructors who are quietly satisfied, or quietly struggling, in different ways.

When our product team needed to decide which customization features to prioritize, we had a long list of pain points gathered from Account Managers and Sales conversations. We knew what problems existed. What we didn't know was which problems mattered most, and to whom.

That distinction turned out to be the game-changer.

Listening at Scale: What Our Research Revealed

We surveyed over 1,000 Labster users, asking them to compare and rank their pain points against one another. We didn't just ask "is this a problem for you?" We asked them to tell us, comparatively, what they most wanted solved.

The results were humbling — and clarifying.

The problem we internally expected to rank highest (customized quizzes) finished 12th. An opportunity we hadn't even placed in our top tier emerged as a clear priority. And critically, the highest-ranked problems varied significantly depending on how an instructor was actually using Labster, whether as a pre-lab, a standalone assessment tool, a replacement for unavailable equipment, or a supplement for online students.

"We already knew what our customers' common problems were, but we didn't know which ones were most important to them. We had never asked them to compare the importance of these problems before. Having a set of problems prioritized by our users was the game changer."

That last insight — the way a use case shapes priority — is especially important for a platform like Labster, where the same simulation can serve a community college biology course, a nursing prerequisite program, and a four-year research university differently. Generic feedback doesn't capture those distinctions. Structured, comparative research does.

Why This Matters for Your Institution

If you're a faculty member or an academic leader evaluating or already using Labster, this isn't just an inside look at our product process. It has a direct implication for you.

When you participate in Labster's research, you shape the roadmap.

That means the features being prioritized aren't built to satisfy the squeakiest wheel; they're built to address what the broadest range of educators in similar contexts actually needs most. And because we segment that feedback by use case, instructors at institutions like yours are influencing decisions relevant to your specific context.

It's also worth naming who benefits when we get this right. Better platform decisions don't just make our product team's lives easier. They translate directly into:

• More instructional time saved when the features that reduce friction for faculty are the ones we actually ship.
• Better learning outcomes when simulations are customizable in the ways that matter most for how your students are encountering them.
• Smoother institutional adoption when the platform works intuitively across the range of roles involved in a STEM program, from administrators to coordinators to the faculty on the ground.

Building for the Whole Institution

One thing our research reinforced is that Labster's impact isn't felt by just one type of user. A department chair cares about program-level completion data. A course coordinator cares about how labs map to learning objectives. A professor cares about whether students arrive to class prepared. A student cares whether the simulation makes sense and keeps them engaged.

These aren't competing priorities, but they do require us to think carefully about which problems, when solved, create value across all of these roles simultaneously.

That's the filter we now bring to prioritization: not just "which problem affects the most users," but "which problem, when solved, unlocks value for faculty and students and the institution's broader goals?"

"As a rapidly scaling company, almost anything you do will move the needle. But this research made me realize that solving certain problems moves the needle a lot more than others."

An Ongoing Conversation

This research wasn't a one-time event. It changed how we approach feedback as an ongoing practice. We continue to run structured research with educators at institutions of all types, from small community colleges to large R1 universities, precisely because context matters and priorities shift as programs evolve.

If you're a Labster customer and haven't been involved in a feedback session or survey, we want to hear from you. The constraints you're working within, the student population you serve, and the goals your program is working toward are exactly the kind of signals that help us build something genuinely useful.

Email Tudor at tbogdan@ubisimvr.com to get started.

Want to see how Labster works for programs like yours? Book a demo.