What makes a great learning experience

Digital learning has always gotten a bit of a bad rap. Because who hasn’t had to sit through a boring training module with awful clip art graphics and cheesy videos? 

But what if learning experiences didn’t have to be so bad? What if they could be digital-first—and so much more than poorly-designed slides and a voice over? What if digital learning could truly be modular, interactive, well-designed and engaging? 

What if it made you actually want to learn? 

What did old school, “mom jeans” learning experiences look like?

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the rapid growth of tech in our society brought with it a wave of digital-first learning programs, but many of these learning or training modules were just not engaging. 

If you remember, old school learning experiences were typically based on a Powerpoint slideshow approach, very linear in nature, and sometimes with a voice over thrown in to check off a media component for increased engagement. Users would look at one slide and click through to the next, normally with a lot of text on-screen, until reaching the end and answering some test questions. The use of micro content, such as short videos, text pop-ups, or collaborative and discussion based tools like social media integrations, was non-existent.

These days, the way that people consume digital experiences is totally changing. 

Not only has the technology completely evolved, but the way we consume content has too. This has digital learning designers exploring how we can make learning content smarter and more consumable — and in a way that really connects the content to the experience for the end user. 

So what does a modern digital learning experience look like? 

When it comes to digital content, everything is a learning experience. And really well-done digital content means that it doesn’t feel like a learning experience at all. 

For starters, a learning experience should be modular (meaning the content is broken down into a number of smaller parts) and designed with digital in mind, including what best makes up a digital experience for the end user. Getting granular about human-centred design is another aspect that connects modular approaches with learning styles and content objectives.

The modern learning experience requires a blended approach, meaning learning should occur in a variety of deployments such as websites, interactive features, games, apps, etc. Learning experiences should be clean and modern in design. The journey should be easy and intuitive for the user to understand, the content should be clear and well-organized, and the experience should be as personal as possible.

A strong, modern learning experience requires thoughtful content design. 

Content design is an emerging field in the world of user experience—and especially in learning experience design—where content specialists are designing the learning materials in collaboration with designers and developers. Content designers focus on keeping content clear and digestible, relevant to the context of the learners, and accessible to all users. Content design requires the designer to take the source content and dig into it further, rethinking how it can be shared, rather than laying it out at face value.

The experience should also be customized to include curated media integrations such as audio, video, images (static or interactive), motion graphics: even integrating a podcast could be a unique touch that takes the learning from great to next-level. 

In today’s digital world, top-of-the-line user experience and digital design is essential. This means learning experience designers should be thinking about UX and visual and interactive design for digital learning in the same way a company like Spotify does. 

So what does the future look like?

The digital learning experience has already come so far from the mom jeans era of the 90s. But we still have a long way to go. Here is what we expect to see in the future for digital learning:

• More collaboration
• Businesses are catching on that the freshest and most innovative learning experiences come out of a collaborative model. In the future, we expect to see more subject matter experts (SMEs) and client collaborators sitting in the room with content designers, digital designers, and developers (or, if we’re going fully remote here, sharing a Slack channel). 
• More deployment pathways
• Traditionally, final products are deployed through an LMS, but now we can think about deploying learning content in different ways, like any other content and media creator would. We can also expect to see other areas such as marketing, used to deploy experiences for the purpose of learning, like on social media, podcasts, email campaigns, and an organization’s site.
• Redefined Learning and Development teams
• Traditionally, L&D teams wouldn’t have worked too closely with designers, or may have brought them in towards the end to put a final touch on the design or “make things look good”. Going forward, we can expect to see more cross-functional designers brought in at every stage of a project lifecycle, from kickoff to deployment. A whole spectrum of designers and design thinkers are now critical to a successful business and digital learning product design.

What did we miss? What do you predict we’ll see in the future? Tell us.

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