Building Amazing Learner Experiences

In this blog post, we’ll discuss why creating fantastic learner experiences is crucial for learning and development success at work. We’ll also discuss what could go wrong if it is overlooked and offer some tips on how L&D professionals can develop effective strategies to ensure every student has a positive journey through education. Let’s explore ways we can give our employees top-notch educational experiences at work

What is Learner Experience?

Learner experience refers to the holistic journey that your team undergoes throughout an educational course or training. It includes all the touch points and moments of interaction, from the small ones, like the look-and-feel of an online quiz, to the bigger, more visible factors, like a classroom lecture’s atmosphere. These learner experiences are critical in ensuring the transfer and application of knowledge. Learner experience (LX) design is all about making learning experiences that really change how learners see things. It’s when you plan and make learning activities with a clear goal in mind, focusing on the learner to keep them interested and help them learn better. LX design takes bits from instructional design, user experience (UX) design, and cognitive psychology to ensure these learning experiences are not only effective but also meaningful.

Why do Your Learner’s Experiences Matter?

Does your organization invest in creating a meaningful learner experience? If not, you are missing out. The learning experience is not just a vanity metric; it carries a valuable impact that can often be hard to notice. First up, learner experience is vital to the success of learning and development efforts. Picture it yourself: where would you enjoy learning more, in a boring recorded video lecture or with a subject matter expert seeking your questions? A well-designed learner experience enhances knowledge retention and skill acquisition. Learners who are engaged and find the learning process intuitive and enjoyable are more likely to absorb and apply new information effectively. This undoubtedly means that your ROI for training is better when the LX is solid. Plus, there are secondary benefits to investing in training experiences at work. With a good learner experience, your teams are happier, and you can curb turnover because your employees see your company’s investment in their long-term growth. Over time, this adds up to a competitive advantage.

To sum up, good learner experiences will:

• Impact the success of your L&D strategy
• Reduce turnover on your team
• Raise the loyalty of your people
• Show you positive impact on employee satisfaction and engagement
• Make internal mobility and career progressions easier

The role of engagement in the success of learning cannot be underestimated. Research shows that up to 75% of learning is lost within the next six days, as Janis Cooper highlighted in our conversation. This phenomenon, tracked well by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, leads us to the core question—what’s a good learner experience, and how can we build one? Experiential learning engages the learner directly in an incident that focuses on a particular area, such as leadership skills. The experience is profound and memorable for the employees. For the team, it offers a quick ROI because learners need to collaborate with the horses to accomplish specific activities designed for them, as Janis explains. What else adds up to good learner experience? Let’s narrow down on the essentials –

6 Factors of Good Learner Experiences

Multiple ingredients shape a solid learner experience:

Addressing existing pain points

Do you want to create a good learning experience? Why don’t you start by understanding what is making it bad? Addressing the existing pain points in a learning journey is key to creating an experience that the team loves. For example, simplifying complex navigation in e-learning platforms or providing clearer instructions for assignments. Addressing pain points shows learners that their needs are understood and valued. This feeling of being heard already adds to positive workplace experiences.

Building relevance

If you have ever been part of bad training, you know this question eventually pops up: Why am I here? A good learner experience answers it effectively. Within the learning path, build relevance for the user. Using real-world, relatable examples helps learners connect new information to their existing knowledge and work context. It could involve industry-specific case studies or scenarios that mirror common workplace situations, making the learning more applicable and memorable for your employees. Explore custom learning journeys on Risely.

Don’t jam as much content as possible

Unsurprisingly, no one likes being bombarded with content. That’s plain old cognitive overload. A good learner experience considers this and creates balance. It focuses on high quality and the right quantity of inputs so that the learners can retain and apply ideas effectively.

Adapts to user needs

It’s a no-brainer that learning styles, needs, and moods differ. What suits you may not suit another. However, being stuck in rigid learning experiences designed without considering unique needs is frustrating. Adaptability saves from this by tailoring content, pace, and difficulty to individual learners. It could involve allowing learners to choose their learning path or using AI to adjust content based on performance. Adaptivity ensures that learning is neither too easy nor too challenging.

Checking for understanding

Pushing content constantly without seeing if it is getting understood or useful for the end-user is unhelpful. After all, how do you measure impact here? Effective learner experiences have elements that reinforce whether the user has understood or not. Regular knowledge checks, quizzes, or interactive elements help here. Based on this, you can ensure that learning gaps get detected and filled rather than overlooked.

Your organization’s culture

Learning does not happen in isolation. Even the best programs could be a waste of time if senior leadership declares them so. This has been felt in the failure of leadership development programs over the years. Your team’s culture is critical in motivating people, shaping their attitude toward learning, making opportunities accessible, and even providing the support a learner receives in addition to the content they consume. Now that we know what shapes a good learner experience, let’s dive a bit better into the making of learning experiences.

How to create solid corporate learner experience?

To make learning really work, it’s all about planning carefully and designing with thought. Here are a few key steps that you should take to ensure it all goes well. First, let’s design the experience for our learners. For simplicity, we have broken it down into four steps.

Analysis

Everything starts by understanding where you are and where you are headed. So, think of the current learner experience. What does it look like? Try to evaluate against the factors we saw listed above. Further, take a look at your learning and development objectives. Learner experiences differ based on what goals you are moving toward. You will also need to understand your target audience. For example, what’s the best way of teaching a new skill to ten teams of developers? Create a uniform and structured course with standardized assessments. But what about the team leads who need to work with a new tech? Help them build a growth mindset that opens them up to continuous learning with the help of one-on-one leadership coaching.

Design

In step two, identify the building blocks of a solid learning experience. Start with a broad outline (read more about learning and development strategies). Next, finalize the components. What are those? Think of training methods, training delivery modes, subject-specific modules, and so on. Remember that we spoke of checking to understand to ensure LX’s success? We will need assessments, too! At the end of this step, you have all these placed along a clear roadmap.

Development

In the third step of building learning experiences comes developing the training materials and methods we spoke of earlier. This is where you can create the most impact by focusing on the small details like:

• Use good UI practices to create helpful learning pathways.
• Mix in media and interactive elements to cut down monotony in learning material.
• Use an understanding of psychology to plan lessons better. You might need to equip the trainers with resources and training, too.
• Keep the schedules and priorities of learners in mind to ensure that you are not overburdening them.
• Build a digital and physical learning environment, including setting up the LMS and the culture that supports growth
• Update training materials and assessments to reflect the latest know-how and boost your team’s expertise.

Implementation and evaluation

Now comes the real deal. Put your plans into action and observe the rollout. It is the right time to ask yourself how much you score on the factors of a good LX we saw earlier. Grab the template here and conduct a before-and-after evaluation of your organization’s learning experience with your employees. But this is just one side of the equation! Learner experience has a broader impact that must be evaluated. Where can you find that?

• Look for performance changes. Improvements in regular reviews with direct managers are a good way to track the impact. A few one-on-one discussions can further help you gain clarity on the early patterns you might notice.
• Search for behavioral changes, too, such as meeting more deadlines or handling conflicts better.
• Assess against the learning objectives. You can do this using in-house assessments or external resources like Risely’s leadership skill assessments.

Based on these inputs, you can identify areas of improvement to feed back into the broader L&D strategy. With all this done, think ROI because that’s ultimately where L&D teams have a battle to fight. A healthier learning experience enhances learners’ interest in participating in training (you might observe these in higher completion and participation rates, more detailed answers during focus interviews, interest toward more learning opportunities, not needing to send multiple reminders, etc.), which show a more significant positive business impact.

3 Pitfalls to avoid while designing a learner experience at work

We all make mistakes. So let’s prevent some before they happen.

#1 You threw strategy and objectives out the window

Not really, but figuratively, it happens plenty while learning programs are being designed. An essential feature of good learning experiences is that they tie the company together into one. How does that happen? Ensure that learning objectives are derived from strategic ones and that learners’ needs are assessed before they are handed a plan. Not meeting learners where they are is setting your L&D strategy up for failure, as you will not be able to conceive the ideal learning experience.

#2 You did not modernize with time

It’s 2024, and learning is no longer located in tall halls alone. It’s often happening at the moment, in small bursts, and likely through a mobile device. For instance, video is losing momentum across the US as a learning delivery mode. It’s scalable, available on demand, and saves you from arranging schedules. That sounds like a great thing, right? It’s not. Video learning is found to be the least engaging. As the content is pre-recording, there’s no stimulation to perform, and little mechanism to engage with the whole material. So the question is, what’s in? AI, hyper-personalization, microlearning, are some of the defining words of learning today. The world of L&D is more focused on the ultimate user, i.e. the employee, than ever. Similarly, there are new trends in L&D that you need to watch out for. Incorporate microlearning, hyper-personalization, user-centered planning, and the power of AI in learning experiences to make them a class apart.

#3 You ignored the context of the learner

How one perceives the same lesson depends a lot on the context. Thus, it’s a powerful consideration of how a particular experience turns out. You could have designed it with the best intentions, but it can still be a misfit. Sounds confusing? It’s not. Employees need learning that helps them in some way – either empower them, improve their performance, or add to their long-term goals. If it does neither, no fancy illustrations will lead to a great experience. So first, keep their goals in mind. You also need to consider that they often don’t have three hours to put into learning after work and don’t like working with a mentor who probably gossips about them later. Plus, does your sales manager, with a chaotic team of five, need conflict resolution training? Would delegation skills be a better area to work on? All of this needs to be thought out before being planned out. Thus, the second point is to keep their needs in mind. It creates psychological safety and support, that are needed to learn successfully. You might not get all of this right in one go. That’s why this process of developing a learning experience for your team is often iterative, with feedback loops allowing for continuous improvement. Many instructional designers use specific models like ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) or SAM (Successive Approximation Model) to guide their process.

Let’s Tie It All Up: How Does Learner Experience Align Within The Wider L&D Strategy?

Learner experience is just one part of the wider L&D strategy. There are more elements in the play. Primarily, learners’ experience is one of the two critical enablers along with the organization’s culture and learner personas developed by the L&D teams.

Learner Personas and Learner Experience

These two work together pretty directly. Learner personas are important in curating learner experiences. They help create user-centric and informed designs that are more helpful and impactful. As we see in the learner experience platforms, many of them focus on personalized learning journeys, which are designed with personas in mind. In your role, you can use learner personas to make learner experiences more tailored and interactive for particular users. There are many ways to do it:

• curating relevant content for the user
• using appropriate modes of training delivery
• designing the suitable UI and interactions throughout the journey
• addressing specific concerns using precise communication and goal alignment
• exchanging feedback in the right medium

Now, what about the learning environment?

How does that tie in with learning experiences? Let’s understand this with a simple example: Feel the difference? That’s the influence of a company’s environment on learner experiences. When a proper learning environment is facilitated with the collaboration of L&D, HR, and supervisors, the employees have an easier time handling personal learning goals. As your employees can find support at the right moments and see others going on similar learning journeys, reinforcement and motivation occur naturally. Overall, it builds psychological safety, allowing your team members to learn by doing and make mistakes when they are at it. In essence, the learning environment sets the stage for the learner experience. While a great environment doesn’t guarantee a positive experience, it provides the necessary conditions for one. Conversely, a poor learning environment can significantly hinder even the best-designed learning experiences.

To Sum Up

In wrapping things up, remember that it’s super important to put the learner’s experience first when creating workplace educational content. By ensuring learning is engaging and sticks with learners, we boost what they get out of training. If we don’t pay attention to how learners feel, they might lose interest or not want to join in as much, which hurts the efficiency and success of L&D initiatives. When we fully commit to principles focused on giving learners an awesome ride through education—thinking deeply about experience design, focusing on learner experience design, and ensuring everything works effectively—we make learning something truly special.