We Forget About The Learner

I love travelling, the adventure, the unknown, the people you meet, the cultures you are immersed into; my ideal trip is one where you book your flight and the rest will just fall into place. I do however also enjoy the occasional all inclusive trip to simply not think about anything, read my books and just relax. A couple of weeks ago I spent some time in Mexico doing exactly that.

While I was sitting at dinner, I watched a man in a wheelchair going up the ramp to the restaurant. He tried and failed at first so he had to back up and try again. He was laughing but I could tell it was really difficult for him and his wife had to give him a final push so he could make it up the ramp.

The hotel was actually very accessible; at least that’s what I thought until I saw this man. After dinner I went outside and took a look at the ramp again that I had walked up so many times before and all of a sudden I realized how steep it actually was. This got me thinking of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design.The hotel had the right intentions of building a user “interface” and design that is accessible to everyone. However, the reality looked very different. Just like in L&D, we have the right intentions, but often, we let our users hanging.

UI and UX design are finding their way more and more into digital learning, for good reasons. UI design anticipates what a user might need to do and ensures that the interface has elements that are easy to access, understand and use to facilitate those actions.This includes input controls such as buttons and drop-down fields, navigational components, informational components, such as tooltips or progress bars, and containers, UX is going above UI and provides meaningful and personally relevant experiences. It is a process that doesn’t just include the design, but the entire experience you have with a product from purchasing it to troubleshooting it. Without wanting to go into UI/UX design in more detail (that’s a separate post for another time), one element that is crucial to this process is user testing.

Going back to the man in the wheelchair trying to go up the ramp, had the construction company actually involved a user when building the ramp, it would probably have been less steep, longer, wider, etc. The same holds true for learning. We cannot sit in our offices, shut out from the world, and build learning experiences without including our learners. What works for a designer, might not work for a user/learner. When creating your digital solutions, plan some time for prototyping and user testing. And I am not talking about an alpha and beta test that is done by the stakeholders. No, I am talking about an actual learner.

Organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build learning, are worried about budgets and timelines, but seem less worried about the really important aspect: the learner experience. If you create an outstanding learner experience, chances are higher that the learning will stick. So why not build in some extra time into your project and get your learners’ feedback before rolling out your ineffective solution?

Do you include user testing when building learning solutions? Let me know in the comments below.

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