Tonight, I was walking around the city, no real destination, just passing by stores and shops. What struck me was the line-up of people in various stores and shops. The exact same pattern everywhere: people in line, on their phones. Now, this is nothing new of course. We’ve seen this kind of behaviour more and more over the last couple of years. Why it struck me today was that I just had read IBM’s report on closing the skills gap. There has been some chatter around it on LinkedIn a while back as well (see thread and link to report here). There is a ton of good insight and surprising facts. Two things really jumped out at me:

First, approximately 120 million professionals need to be reskilled to deal with AI and new digital business environments. Yet the biggest gaps are not digital skills, but behavioral skills. And here I am walking around the city, seeing people, young and old, in an environment in which they could easily practice these behavioural skills. Yet, everyone chooses to hide behind their phones. Isn’t it ironic that the very technology that is disrupting not just our personal lives, but our professional careers could be the very reason that we actually have these behavioural skills gaps? 

The second fact that stood out to me has to do with the question who’s responsible for reskilling. The report states: “In addition, many executives tell us it’s not the enterprise’s responsibility to provide reskilling and retraining. According to a recent survey on AI and ethics, only 38 percent of CHROs say their organizations have an obligation to retrain or reskill workers impacted by AI technology. If nations aren’t prepared for the challenges associated with adopting intelligent automation and most CHROs don’t believe reskilling is the organization’s responsibility, what is the path forward?” Clearly, things need to change in the educational system, before workers join organizations. But at the same time, I feel very strongly about an organization’s responsibility to retrain if they want to stay competitive. We live in interesting times and learning professionals, in my humble opinion, have a responsibility to consult organizations when it comes to reskilling. We are in dire need to address these challenges head-on and offer employees the best possible options to fill the skills gap. 

Let’s take a step back, understand employees’ needs and personalize training, reskill staff as needed, cross-train them and find roles within our organizations that might be a better fit for them. It’s not rocket-science, but someone has to take responsibility! 

I recently switched to a different internet provider and was really impressed by the entire experience. Once I had decided on the plan, I received an email informing me about my purchase and my upcoming appointment for a technician to come in. The time and date wasn’t the same than originally mentioned to me on the phone, but that wasn’t a problem. A link allowed me to change the appointment to my desired time and day, which I did, and again, received an email confirmation with the updates. Then, 24 hours before the appointment, I received a text message asking me to confirm, and someone from the company called as well leaving a voicemail. That was the first time that I was a bit taken aback. I had the hardest time understanding what the person was trying to tell me. If it hadn’t been for the text message, I would have not known what the call was about. It was loud in the background, the person didn’t start talking until about 5 seconds in, and I could clearly tell he was reading a script, way too fast and in broken English (English isn’t my first language either so I can say things like that!). Anyway, the next day, the technician comes in, I get my internet, and I receive a text message and email after, informing me that the job was done and asking me for some quick feedback. Two days after that, I received another phone call from the company. I missed the call and they didn’t leave a voicemail (right away, I checked my connection to make sure it still worked….I mean, I don’t know why they called!). Two days after that, they call again, I pick up and I could swear it was the same person who called me the first time! Again, I didn’t understand a word. After some back and forth, I figured he just wanted to know if I had questions, and of course, if I was interested in buying more stuff. Fair enough.

Why am I telling you this long story? Well, the company did an excellent job mapping out the user journey, figuring out different toucpoints where they should engage with me, managing my expectations, providing the service, getting feedback, and even adding an upselling opportunity. But they dropped the ball with the phone calls. Clearly, the person calling is makes minimum wage, follows a script, works in a call centre, and he simply doesn’t like his job. I get it, but I heard it in his voice and it changed how I felt about the entire experience, and the company.

All that to say, there is lots of talk in L&D about learner journey mapping, and the learner experience (which I’m a big fan of as well), but it’s not enough to identify all the different touch points at which we interact with our learners. We also need to take a close look at what we are actually delivering at these touch points. And I feel that we aren’t doing a good job at that right now. We are so happy that we came up with a great learner journey, that the content becomes secondary. But we can’t put lipstick on a pig. If your content, and content delivery to make the connection to my internet story, isn’t up to par, our learners won’t really be engaged. Maybe we even push them to the other side and they are more turned off than ever!

So next time you plan out a learner journey, think about how learners will perceive your content, how they will interact with it, how it will make them feel, and how it impacts the overall experience. You can have the greatest learner journey, but if you break that trust at one step during the process, if you miss the mark, if you don’t deliver what they really need and expect, it can negatively impact your entire training program. Focus on the learner and remember that creating the experience isn’t enough, you have to fill in the gaps with engaging content that resonates with your learners.

“I don’t like it, but I can’t really say why.”…..“Once I see it, I will be able to tell you if it is what I had envisioned.”…..“I can tell you what I don’t like about it.”

We all heard this feedback from clients before, or even our own internal teams. Design reviews take patience and understanding, but if run well, are certainly an invaluable source of feedback. But what makes a good design review and how can you get the most out of it to elevate your digital learning experiences?

What Is a Design Review

Just to be clear, I’m not referring to instructional design here, but the design of the digital learning experience overall (something overlooked too often): the graphic user interface (GUI), images and photographs, buttons and icons, the user flow and the user experience all of these elements create. First and foremost, the design of any digital learning experience needs to be evaluated against project requirements and outcomes. Yes, it’s not just the content and the instructional design, but the design overall!

Usually, design reviews can be found in product development, but with learning experience design on the rise, L&D professionals should take a good look at this practice. It is a step in which design and development work together and talk about sketches for page layouts, mock-ups of icons and imagery to get feedback on all of these design decisions. It’s not a pitch, but a process to evaluate and critique current design work.

How Do I Conduct a Design Review?

Design reviews are best conducted in a face-to-face or virtual meeting. It’s imperative for the teams to be together, discuss and evaluate work to date and agree on next steps. A design review cannot be conducted through email or instant message. You might be able to share some additional thoughts after a design review meeting, but ensure you make the time to meet in person first. It’s worth it.

It can be helpful to decide on a formal process that supports collaboration, creates a productive environment, is repeatable and most important of all, leads to an improved design. Some rules you could incorporate include:

• Have at least one design review session per project
• Have no more than 6 people in one session
• Bring in different people all the time to broaden point of views
• Bring in people that aren’t familiar with the project to get a fresh perspective
• The primary designer should lead the session

Steps to Take Before a Design Review

Most important of all, the lead designer needs to keep the session moving and under one hour. That means, organization and preparation are key. Once the people that need to attend have been chosen, send a meeting invite and state the overall project overview, the goals and outcomes, as well as timelines, deliverables and constraints. This way, everyone can come prepared to the session. It might be helpful to create a checklist or template to ensure all points are hit. Before the session starts, ensure you have everything ready that you want to show, including mock-ups, prototypes and examples from other projects that could help inspire the team.

Steps to Take During a Design Review

To start the session, the lead designer should state the goals of the design review and what she hopes to achieve at the end of it. Ideally, limit the number of outcomes per session to really focus on only a couple of elements instead of trying to save the world all at once. It is best to write the outcomes on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Question to cover could include:

• What are the first impressions from a 1-second or 5-second test?
• What do we want the learner to do on this page?
• Is that call to action obvious?
• What happens if we remove a section?

Participants should be given ample time (15-25 mins) to explore materials, prototypes and mockups themselves without interruption before going into a productive discussion. Encourage them to take notes throughout, prioritize their feedback, and focus on the end user experience.

Then it’s time to dive into the discussion. Everyone in the room gets to share one piece of feedback at a time; the group then discusses it before moving on to the next item. Capture all feedback in digital format so it can easily be accessed later. No decisions are made during this step. Not everyone will always agree on everything so here are some tips to keep the session moving:

• Avoid feedback that’s subjective or emotional
• Don’t let discussions drag and one person dominate the room
• If people disagree on an idea, write it down for later
• Have participants vote on ideas
• Not every feedback is good so plan to disregard ideas

With ten minutes to spare, wrap up the session and let everyone know that notes will be shared. This way, participants can add more feedback if they wish.

After The Design Review

The lead designer needs time to iterate and think about each piece of feedback. The designer makes the call on what feedback to keep and what feedback to disregard. Remember though, you are not your design so check your ego at the door and really listen to the valuable feedback that was shared. Prioritize the items you wish to change and turn them into actionable items to be addressed by the appropriate people.

A well-organized design review not only supports collaboration within your team, but helps to strengthen your team overall as well as the learning experience. You might even consider adding your clients or learners to these meetings. Designers might find it challenging in the beginning to run design review sessions, but over time, they will be an invaluable tool in your toolbox to help you elevate digital learning experiences.

The concept of personas is well known to marketers. To create a persona, marketers develop multiple fictional character profiles that describe their real and potential customer base. Based on these personas, they then develop content that resonates with them. L&D professionals can also leverage this user-centered approach to create better and more engaging learning.

What Are Personas?

You can think of personas as fictional, generalized characters, each with individual goals and needs. Marketers observe behavior patterns among their real and potential customers and couple those observations with educated guesses, which help them understand their customers better. A persona can include the following information:

• Job role and responsibilities
• Biggest challenges
• Industry
• “Watering holes” (Where do these learners go to get their information, such as blogs, websites, publications, etc.?)
• Demographic
• Personal background

Marketers research personas by capturing specific information through forms on websites, interviewing current customers, looking for trends in databases and asking for feedback from the sales team. Developing three to five personas typically results in the best outcomes. Some personas are very detailed, while others are a brief sketch of each user. Either way, marketers usually include a fictional name and a picture in the persona. When reading a persona profile, the “person” comes to life, helping marketers create products and content that align with his or her needs, goals and interests.

Developing a Learner Persona

Why should L&D professionals care about personas? They can help you can create the right content, for the right audience, at the right time.
Here are some questions you can ask, or extract from learners’ personal information you have on file, when developing your learner personas:

• What is your job role?
• Are you a manager?
• How many years have you been with this organization?
• Have you changed roles within the organization?
• How would you rate your tech-savviness?
• Do you prefer learning online or through face-to-face training?
• Are you an early bird or a late riser?
• Are you involved in volunteer work organized by our company?
• What do you do in your free time?

Ask these questions, but also use data from your learning platform. Many platforms enable you to see when and how content has been accessed. If your system doesn’t capture these data, try to collect them using Google Analytics on any activities that are happening outside the LMS, and combine them with data you can gather using your LMS. The combination of questions, learning platform data and demographic data will result in a variety of profiles, and you can then categorize your learners into different groups.

Creating Engaging Content That Resonates With Your Learner Personas

Let’s look at two examples of learner personas:

• Burt, 43 years old, he has been with your company for six years. He’s a manager in the support department, overseeing five staff. He is extremely tech-savvy and loves to learn about new technologies in his free time. Burt learns best after work hours and prefers to access learning through his mobile device on his commute home. He volunteers his time twice each year to help with charity events organized by your organization.
• Apama, 23 years old, is fresh out of university. English is her second language, and she works as an administrative assistant. She enjoys getting up early and going for a run before coming to work. Apama loves her iPhone and is good at using her Mac, but she isn’t as familiar with PCs, which your company uses. She isn’t really interested in new technologies and learns best in face-to-face training where she can asks questions on the spot.

Burt and Apama are, of course, not real people, but their personas can be extended to other people in your organization who have similar interests and job roles. To create content for “Burt,” you might develop a training solution that is quickly accessed through a mobile device and shorter than eight minutes in length, delivered over a couple of days. You can push this content to those learners shortly after 5 p.m., which is when they are on their way home. “Apama,” on the other hand, would need the same content in a face-to-face training session, where she can ask questions, ideally held in the morning.

Developing multiple training solutions for the same content is more labor-intensive and might not always be possible. However, considering the positive outcomes you will be able to achieve (more engaged learners, better on the job performance, etc.), it might be worth the investment, especially for programs you run on a regular basis, such as onboarding or annual compliance training.

Design thinking is becoming more and more prevalent in training design. Consisting of five stages (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) [link to previous articles], it is a human-centered design approach that helps designers create outstanding learning experiences.

Through interviews, observations, the creation of empathy maps and learner personas, designers connect with the learner and gain valuable insights in the Empathize and Define stages. In the Ideation stage, data collected in the first two stages is interpreted and designers define a problem statement before ideating some concepts. Equipped with a variety of ideas collected through brainstorming, mind maps or analogies, designers move on to the Prototype stage, in which they produce a number of  inexpensive, scaled down versions of the solution. The prototype should be shared within the team and a wider audience to get as much feedback as possible. In this stage, designers move from an abstract idea to a more tangible product. Once a prototype is in place, the designer can move on to test the solution.

Test

It’s most important to remember that, despite the fact that testing is the last step in the design thinking process, it is certainly an iterative process. Meaning, results from the test phase are used to redefine problems, inform the understanding of users, how people think, behave and feel. Rigorous testing should be done not just by the designer, but by other evaluators to ensure the solution meets the learners’ needs. As a result, designers may have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a different solution.

User Testing

User testing can certainly happen throughout the design thinking process, but let’s take a look at some ways of conducting good usability tests. It is best to use a natural setting to test the prototype, meaning the familiar environment the learner is used to. The goal should be to have learners use the prototype like they would in real life as much as possible. Follow these guidelines for best outcomes:

• Tell the user that you are testing the prototype, not the user
• If possible, have alternatives for the prototype so you can test which version works best
• Do not over explain the prototype but watch the learner use it, and write down your observations
• Ask users to talk through their experience when using the prototype
• If you only want to test certain portions of the prototype, have specific  tasks ready that the learner should perform
• When you observe the learner, make sure you don’t disrupt the user’s interaction
• Ask follow-up questions to clarify what the user is describing
• Think about having an additional person to take notes and write down observations so you can focus on the learner

Negative and Positive Feedback

Don’t be discouraged by negative feedback. On the contrary, negative feedback can provide lots of insights into your solution. It can help designers find new ways to solve the same problems, or help discover previously unconsidered problems. Designers have to seek feedback wherever possible, conduct test using real end-users, analyze the results to determine what’s working and what isn’t. The end goal is a desirable, feasible and viable solution.

Desirable and Feasible Solutions

Desirability relates to the focus on people. It is at the heart of design thinking: human-centred design. A solution always needs to be appeal to the needs, emotions, and behaviours of our learners. Feasibility refers to the technology in place and answers the question if your design solution is technically possible. Technology shouldn’t hold you back, but sometimes a solution cannot be implemented without occurring huge costs.

To summarize, despite having five, as it seems liner stages, the design thinking process is fluid, iterative and flexible. Stages feed into one another and form iterative loops, they don’t follow necessarily any sequence in a project. The best gauge of success is when your training solution satisfies the desirability and feasibility tests.