As part of the Modern Learning Leader Programme, Barbara Thompson delivered a webinar on UX.

UX is “User Design” and encompases so many things, partly the visual elements, but in this case more about how things work, or can work better!

History of UX from Wikipedia:

The field of user experience design is a conceptual design discipline and has its roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that, since the late 1940s, has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user’s experience.With the proliferation of workplace computers in the early 1990s, user experience started to become a concern for designers. It was Donald Norman, a user experience architect, who coined the term “user experience”, and brought it to a wider audience.

You can listen to a podcast from Good Practice about user design and how it can be applied to L&D.

Barbara shared that UX contains elements as follows:

The following image was shared with Barbara to highlight what UX actually covers:

I wasn’t 100% sure about what “heuristic” meant, which Barbara explained really well. The dictionary tells me: “enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves.”

I love the image that Barbara shared, below, to highlight how our stakeholders can get in the way of what the user really needs out of a product of any kind, be that a physical product, software, app, system or process.

Below is a methodology that Barbara uses in her work. She highlighted that it was a modified from ADDIE. I like steps one and two, which are taken from UX, as they focus specifically on performance objectives.

Logicearth have a blog post about UX tips. It’s more specifically for e-learning, but a useful review for all.

Saffron Interactive also have a great blog post about improving UX (and UI – user interaction).

This topic has some links to Design Thinking:

“Design thinking is also an approach that can be used to consider issues, with a means to help resolve these issues, more broadly than within professional design practice and has been applied in business as well as social issues.”

For the Modern Learning Leader programme I’m reading Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation by Idris Mootee. I’ll do some writing on that separately.

Josh Bersin’s article highlighted: “Research on global human capital trends shows that 84% of business leaders cite the ‘need for improved organisational learning’ as a top priority, and 44% say it’s urgent”.

The article goes on to say “Unfortunately, the problem is not one of designing better programs or simply replacing or upgrading learning platforms. Rather, there is something more fundamental going on — a need to totally rethink corporate L&D, to shift the focus to design thinking and the employee experience.”

This is a great point about how UX (and Design Thinking) are important for organisations now. Barbara shared this:

And Barbara shared this as a summary:

You can read my other Modern Learning Leader blog posts

  1. What is a Modern Learning Leader?
  2. The human condition
  3. The human condition – faces and social learning
  4. Instructional design – reminder notes
  5. What sUX about L&D design?