Published on Medium on November 1, 2019
The birth of Learning Experience Design
It was a post-taco, pre-meeting afternoon lull at work when I saw a “Learning Experience Design” community post flash up on my LinkedIn feed for the first time. Seeing the words “Learning Experience Design” I felt the hairs go up on my arms.
Niels Floor was socializing the Learning Experience Canvas amongst Instructional Designers (ID). The Canvas was a new tool to frame the why behind learning design projects and guide decisions. There was also a new conference to share expertise in the growing Learning Experience Design (LXD) community.
At the time, I was a User Experience Design (UXD) researcher at IBM. Since graduate school, the fields of Instructional* and User Experience Design had been different, charged poles I wanted to connect. Niels Floor’s well-targeted LinkedIn post seemed to articulate a missing link between UX and LX.
The separation of UX and LX
Think of a digital product you like using. Likely behind that product are User Experience (UX) designers put who put you, the end-user, front and center of their design process. The success of any product today is tied to its relevance to and adoption by its user base.
I remember the first UX director I met from the digital agency Huge Inc. who spoke to a room of grad students about mapping user journeys to create digital experiences. UX, and the human-centered design process, have yielded monumental products such as Google Maps, but also local restaurant websites and digital storefronts that are easier, more memorable, and most importantly, extremely relevant to everyday life. Product design teams made user delight a critical piece of business success.
Now think of the last training or digital learning module you completed for work. Was it because it felt relevant to you and your work goals? Or was it a mandate from upper management or HR?
In industry — where instructional design meets the majority of the working adults — there is a gap in how relevant learning experiences feel.
Related, but estranged
User experience begins with understanding users’ journey, deeper motivations, and needs. UXers prioritize the crucial problems to solve before diving into a design solution. Teams follow a design thinking methodology, collaborate with counterparts, and rapidly iterate with users even after the product hits the market.
Similar principles apply in Instructional Design. Designers understand learners by outlining the organization, performance and performer needs. Instructional designers understand the end-user needs in the way of learner goals and knowledge gaps. They write targeted outcomes, create learning materials, and nudge learners with moments for practice and edification. This basic framework — reflected in ADDIE, SAM, and other methodologies — has been used for decades by learning professionals.
Both UX and ID are measured by organizational results. Did engagement in the product yield conversions? Did participation in learning lead to more safety compliance and less error? Both disciplines seek to affect the bottom line of the business.
But Instructional Designers are often bound to existing platforms, can emphasize pedagogy or assessments at the expense of “end learner” experience, and have stakeholders who may see learning and development as reactions to performance problems. All of this hampers how relevant the experience ultimately feels to the learner.
In my graduate school days, the divide between learning and user experience design felt like that of estranged siblings. However, now that I have spent some time on both a user experience team creating tools for work and on instructional design teams, I see how the disciplines could truly strengthen one another. Moreover, the two need to operate from the same home base, with the same vocabulary, while recognizing each other’s unique strengths, to create remarkable experiences.
Acknowledging the differences
Recognizing key differences between instructional and user experience design could help both disciplines speak more fluidly to one another.
User experience often address internal or direct motivations and goals. A user has a direct goal when using a product that helps her “get to work on time” or “find a doctor that can see me.”
But learning experiences in workplace settings (and outside of school settings) often address externally decreed or indirect goals. Workplace learners may not wake up with the direct goal of “adopt new attitudes toward my work to better align with org strategy.” But it is indirectly tied to their success in that organization or role.
And while user experience trends evolve to better address users’ complex day-to-day lives, such as:
- Incorporating service design to bring together scattered digital experiences or siloed departments over user goals (think Public transportation administrations like Metro, Financial institutions like Capital One)
- Thoughtfully structured content and UX writing that never leaves a moment of ambiguity in a task flow (think Dropbox, Gov.uk)
- Microinteractions in the UI for continued engagement and moments of delight (think Calm or DuoLingo)
I have not seen Learning & Development organizations able to tap into the overall service design or minute, experiential details quite as well. Again, this ties back to limits on existing platforms teams or the scope L&D departments are given to work with.
However, as learning design is one step removed from the users’ explicit goal, learning experiences have to be even that much more seamlessly scaffolded into existing goals. To me, that means learning needs to be designed into the products and tools adult learners use every day. If I am a call center worker, I cannot always pop out of my Customer Relationship Manager to recall something I learned in module. If I am in sales, I cannot always leave a client call to sift through my recent downloads on challenger selling. If I am a busy consultant, I probably wont log back into a separate platform to confirm I used the latest feedback skills in practice that I learned a week ago. This learning would be ideally embedded into the product design.
Learning while working and scaffolding with real world examples are not new concepts for most learning designers. But all learning designers are not aware of the pathways into the product creation process. Workplace learning continues to happen on platforms that feel separate from “real work.” Could reuniting these disciplines change that? Could learning and user experience jointly allow learning to be deeply embedded into the flow of work?
Reuniting LX and UX
Here is where Learning Experience Design has great potential in uniting the two sides of the experience field. I have not gotten the opportunity to work across user experience and learning experience teams before. But what if we all did have that opportunity?
What if a learning experience department had a direct feedback loop into the IT and design departments that ran company tooling and enterprise content management?
What if user experience designers could more quickly leverage a team of learning experience designers when creating micro-assessments and repeated practice for user base.
What if learning in the flow of work could look like better callouts, better UX writing, more systematic documentation, and embedded moments for practice and assessment?
These fusions may already be happening in organizations. However, given the historical divide between instructional and user experience design departments, I venture to say collaboration is not widespread.
But that is why seeing a LinkedIn post and growing communities of “Learning Experience Designers” gave me chills.
I’m curious if your team works on a Learning Experience Design team that has connections to product design? Has your team arrived at a shared vocabulary — even an evolving one — on how to understand and socialize user/learner needs? Have you embedded learning into a product and how did that go?
(*Note: I use Instructional Designer in reference to industry and not university settings. Learning Experience Designer is the exciting, possible future for Instructional Designers, wherein Learning & Development departments realize the need to speak a common language with other experience designers.)