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Righting the UX/LX Ship

Changing How We Think About Design

Becca Wilson

TO ANSWER THE QUESTION, “Why is user experience (UX) design emerging as a trend in learning?” it’s probably easiest to begin with some other questions:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the visual design and functionality of your existing digital platforms and courses?

• When was the last time that you easily navigated a wiki, portal, or LMS to find training or educational resources?

• Have you ever completed a mandatory online course and exclaimed, “That was delightful”?

• Do the processes and software inside your company support the kinds of interactions that actually make it easier to do your work?

If you’re like most learning professionals, the answers to these questions don’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy. They might even cause you some anxiety or bring on a wave of panic. They also shine a glaring spotlight on what I’d argue is the worst kept secret in the learning profession: We aren’t meeting user needs.

The baseline expectations are only getting higher. Our users don’t just compare the things we create against other training; they compare it against the entire spectrum of digital experiences—mobile apps, social media, streaming services, videogames—all of which are constantly evolving to be better, faster, smarter, and easier to use.

As L&D professionals, we have more technology at our disposal now than we’ve ever had: learning management systems, learning experience platforms, content authoring tools, xAPI, gamification, AR and VR, and now even AI. What’s ironic is that we have all this technology, but we’re not actually continuously working to best use it. Instead of using the new tools to build something better, we are using them to publish the same things we already have, just in new packages.

What good is the best learning resource out there if no one can find it? Or if the experience of using it is compared with having a root canal? Or if it’s so far outside the workflow of the day-to-day that it becomes irrelevant? As French cultural theorist Paul Virilio put it, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” So it is with UX.

How Did the Ship Sink?

We rushed to rapidly digitize our traditional training programs to enable scale and reduce delivery costs, but created a host of new problems. Producing digital training experiences gave our learners the opportunity to compare them by the standards they came to expect of other digital experiences. The stark contrast in ease of use, visual design, and functionality resulted in user frustration. Once we acknowledged that poorly designed digital experiences result in subpar adoption, we were forced to accept the responsibility to fix them. Now, we must explore the gap in skills that’s required to do so.

If we’re going to keep up with what our users expect, we as learning professionals need new skills, competences, and approaches to learning design and technology implementation. Fortunately for us, there’s already a field out there that’s doing just that—user experience (UX) design is a broad, multidisciplinary field that brings together strategy, research, cognitive science, and design to solve complex problems. Summarized by Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and user experience architect, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

UX design invites us to take a holistic view of the problem, the user, and the context, proposing a solution that gives equal attention to what happens before, during, after, and around a touchpoint or interaction. When applied to learning, UX design cares not only about the visual and functional design of the actual course, but also the architecture of the LMS catalog and the experience of navigating it, the platform that manages enrollment and completion, and the overarching system that measures the impact that completion of this course has on the individual and the business in which they work.

If this all sounds familiar; well, good. It probably should! The priority of every learning team should be to create something that a user will want to engage with and adopt, whether it’s a piece of software or a new way of thinking or behaving. UX reinforces what the best learning designers already know, that design is not just about courseware.

How UX Cures the “Shiny Object Syndrome”

As JD Dillon points out with his now infamous L&D Hype Cycle, we have a problem with shiny object syndrome in our industry. At a recent learning technologies conference, I lost count of conversations that sounded something like this:

• “Senior leaders at my company want us to use [insert new tech]. Where should I start?”

• “I want to build [insert AI application] to drive more engagement with our content library; what service or vendor should I choose?”

• “Should we use microlearning, self-directed learning, or adaptive learning?”

You know that famous quote about how if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? Well, it feels like we’ve become an army of people with AR/VR, microlearning, and chat bot hammers ready to beat the heck out of any problem that comes our way. L&D professionals are so keen to apply new tech to solve learning problems, it doesn’t matter what the problem is or if we even fully understand that problem.

Blindly applying new tech does very little to address the problems already created by our subpar learning experiences; it does even less to build credibility and trust with our users. With more hammers being invented and brought to market every day, the potential to misapply technology is a very real recipe for disaster resulting in frustrated users, wasted investment, and annoyed executives.

This is why the intersection of UX and learning is something to really pay attention to—something with a ton of potential to change our industry, the workplace, and even the world. Instructional design methods are really great at solving learning problems. Where they first assume, however, that there is a learning problem to be solved, UX design makes no such assumption. The UX design process is an iterative, structured approach to framing and solving all kinds of problems, not just those in a particular domain. It gives us as designers the opportunity to step back, understand the problem, and design the best solution. This means we can select technology because it enhances the learning process and experience, not just to use technology for the sake of using technology.

Additionally, the UX design process is collaborative, with designers embedded in cross-functional teams of individuals who are all trying to address the problem statement. When these diverse groups of stakeholders come together, discuss and share perspectives, and contribute to ideation, it decreases risk and increases the likelihood that the end result meets or exceeds expectations.

Adopting UX design within L&D practices also drives the intentional and consistent use of feedback loops, which is a missing component that experts like Julie Dirksen argue is the biggest reason our solutions don’t currently meet the mark. Because UX is so broad and designers are charged with the giant task of building a pleasing overall experience, flaws are a natural and often unavoidable part of the design process. We need to be concerned about the solution being good not just looking good. Instead of focusing on the bells and whistles, we need to focus on the outcome we’re trying to achieve. Incorporating feedback loops reduces the risk of technical errors, user frustration, and learner drop-off rates.

In a standard UX design process, UX designers use generative tools like interviews, surveys, research guides, ethnography, task analysis, personas, and journey maps to zero in on the problem to be solved. What results is an articulation of who we’re solving the problem for and their context. Who are they? What do they care about? What are their pain points, motivations, and goals? What possible solutions can we provide that would support them? What would the user’s journey feel like? What should we prioritize? Where are we likely to encounter issues?

Once there is a specific problem to be solved for a specific user, we move into defining a solution to that problem. The potential solution is sketched and prototyped, then tested with evaluative methods like heuristics, eye tracking, and usability testing. What emerges is a product that solves a real user problem, has an increased likelihood of being adopted, and therefore has a higher chance of actually creating the change that we expect to see.

UX in Action

Imagine a world where your employees clamor to take compliance training. It might sound like a far-away dream, but all you have to do is look at Microsoft to see that it can be a reality.

Microsoft launched a series of highly anticipated compliance training courses for its employees. Some even scheduled watch parties and binged episodes beyond what was required:

Microsoft took a page from the standard UX playbook: Bridge the gap between what the user wants to accomplish and the needs of the business. Look at the problem and understand what we hope to achieve by solving it to find the best way to solve it. Study the humans who need it and will use it. Incorporate the needs and goals of the user into the product. Let that knowledge inform the process, system, design, and interaction model for driving the behavior change you seek.

They cracked the code on creating something that learners wanted by understanding what they liked and what they needed: values-based, bingeable content that put training in the context of their day to day. The behavior of consuming media in episodes and connecting to characters that resonate with our personal values is the perfect example of UX design in learning. Microsoft took something we do in our nonwork lives and translated it to the work world, moving the completion of training from something employees have to do to something they don’t just have to do, but want to do as well.

Jump on this bandwagon and it’s not hard to be convinced that user-centric approaches can lead to bigger, better results for L&D: increased adoption for social learning platforms, higher rates of compliance for business ethics and harassment prevention training, and even measurable impact on the business in the form of habits that support a culture of innovation, reduced safety incidents, and revenue generation.

Users or Learners: Does It Matter?

Think back to Paul Virilio for a moment. Daunting though it may be to think of change in this way, it appears the ship has already wrecked: learning experience (LX) design roles are popping up everywhere. Companies like Amazon, Uber, and Nordstrom, which have long been recognized for being user-centric, are embracing this job role and hunting for experts to fill open positions. In the last month alone, I can count the number of posts on my LinkedIn feed about LX design in the double digits, and that’s only the ones I’ve seen.

If we are going to try and predict what the impact of embracing UX within learning means, we have to participate in conversations about these questions:

• Are the goals of instructional design different from the goals of UX design?

• If we’ve accepted that improving the UX of learning is critical, do the goals of instructional design also need to change?

• How do the skills required of instructional designers and curriculum developers need to change to align with those new goals?

• Does what we call the role (UX versus LX) matter? Why?

Those who have embraced the learning experience designer title and branding assert that LX design is a distinct and unique role from UX. They justify differentiation because, while they’re open about borrowing UX practices, they insist LX design requires specialized skills and abilities to create experiences for an educational context. Some of these LX evangelists also suggest that differentiation between user and learner is critical, and that the two separate designations communicate that designers are qualified to create experiences for only one of the two types of audiences.

Arguing about semantics doesn’t matter. Yes, a “learner” is a specific type of user with a particular set of needs and goals. Yes, designing for how people learn is a special use case, but all design requires domain-specific knowledge. For example, designing an entertainment experience for children that provides for parental oversight, creating a retail checkout experience that is accessible, or making the strategy to broadcast a live event around the world also require specific expertise. The way that a UX designer employs their unique knowledge of human behavior and cognitive science to encourage a user to complete a series of steps on a mobile app is the same way that they should leverage their unique knowledge of educational pedagogy to ensure that the outcome of the interaction produces the intended behavior change. Looking at the UX versus LX question from that perspective, perhaps UX is the umbrella underneath which learning experience design sits.

By firmly linking the relationship between UX and LX, we can prevent the inevitable rift that is created between the adaptation of a tool or method and the body of knowledge from which it is taken. Appropriation of tools and methods is not a bad thing. It’s what we should do—take approaches that already solve similar problems and try to figure out how they can help us solve new problems. When we change their names, however, and pretend that they are separate or new or invented in our space and unique to our problems, we slow the pace of innovation. As the tools and methods evolve and adapt to new use cases, and as experts contribute back to make them better, we no longer benefit. And then eventually, when we realize how far behind we’ve fallen with updating a tool, method, or approach, we have to start over again. A great example of this is the parallel between waterfall software development methodology and ADDIE. It took years for Agile development methods to start showing up in L&D. LLAMA, anyone?

Regardless of what you call it, UX or LX, it’s clear that L&D would benefit from embracing UX design’s more iterative, structured approach to framing and solving problems. The priority is that we shift how we think about designing experiences. We must move forward in alignment around the idea that users and their previous experiences and preconceived notions about what media-based interaction should be like is a mandatory element of any solution’s design. Not to be provocative, but moving away from “learning” labeled roles might be just what our field needs. An influx of talent could infuse innovation into our ways of working and help drive the improved outcomes that we seek.

So what does a designer need to know and be able to do to create relevant, high impact learning solutions?

The UX/LX Unicorn

A quick Google search will surface a dizzying array of opinions and models intended to illustrate the disciplines, competencies, or skills of a designer. Look at Dan Willis’s UX umbrella, Tim Brown’s T-shaped designer, Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb, Nick Finck’s Six Core Disciplines of UX, and J.J. Garrett’s Elements of User Experience and Fields of UX Study. You’ll see that while they don’t all agree on the same naming conventions, the ideas are very much the same.

My personal favorite is Rachel Daniel’s UX Unicorn. She crafted a magical multi-disciplinary beast that can master content, strategy, structure, visuals, interaction, prototyping, and usability. The best part is that visual design is the unicorn’s horn: capable of magically transforming even the most terrible and painful experience into delight and joy (Daniel 2015).

Figure 3-1. The UX Unicorn

This metaphor is also true in the L&D space. Given all the overlap and intersection points already discussed, it’s definitely no coincidence that learning teams are also on the hunt for talent that can do it all: conduct in-depth needs analysis, design comprehensive blended programs, build accessible and beautiful e-learning modules, facilitate face-to-face and virtual training sessions, and execute ROI analysis with aplomb. Talk about a fairy tale!

It’s clear that our skills need to evolve at a pace more closely aligned to user expectations. While it’s true that it takes years of experience to acquire a broad, adaptive skill range as an individual, it’s not a mythical feat, especially if we embrace the collaborative working style inherent in the UX design process. Either we individually become generalists and learn tons of stuff or we work in teams that bring all the pieces together.

Think of UX design and learning across various organizations and institutions as parallel lines moving at the same time. Each moves forward, evolving independently, spurred on by its own unique concerns. The exciting part of what’s happening around us, and this question about UX and learning, is that our lines are beginning to intersect. Your expertise can inform mine. Your understanding of a problem shapes mine. Your specialized skills become part of the model I use to staff my own team.

As our learning teams work to incorporate these skills into our definition of what instructional designers, curriculum developers, and LMS administrators do, we’ll hopefully see the impact of their efforts manifested in the delight of our users, much like the results of Microsoft and comparable to the digital experiences against which we’re benchmarked. There’s no doubt in my mind that adopting UX tools, methods, approaches, and ways of looking at problems that start with the user will elevate what we as learning professionals put out into the world.