How User Experience Designers and Instructional Designers Should Work Together

This blog post was originally published on extensionengine.com on June 13, 2019.

If you have content you want others to learn, an online experience is a powerful, efficient way to reach a wide audience – provided you make that experience engaging. You need to create an experience that will not only satisfy your intended learning objectives, but also deliver that learning in a way that will result in actual impact by holding learners’ attention and demonstrating their progress. This is done through a combination of learning experience (LX) design and user experience (UX) design.

Learning experience design is a large and complex field, encompassing the ways that educational content is organized for learners, presented to them, and ultimately experienced by them.To be successful, an LX designer has to know what the educator’s and learners; goals are and then design with those goals in mind. User experience design concerns the overall process, functionality, and appearance of a user’s journey through a product or service. When the UX design of an experience is effective, the user journey flows so seamlessly that the user barely notices the designer’s hand in crafting the experience.

The old way of designing learning programs

When it comes to designing an online learning experience, the traditional approach and industry standard has kept these two design processes separate.

Over in one department, the UX design team is busy integrating branding, audience information, usability, and function to come up with a learning program. In a completely separate department, the LX design team is focusing on how to improve the learning experience to cultivate better learning outcomes.

In this standard scenario, you’ve determined your objectives, but the components designed to meet them are constructed in distinct silos. The teams involved may be internal, external, or both, but they never interact. The learning experience components become mini-projects all strung together, and the end result is a clunky collection of related segments rather than a fluid learning experience.

A better design approach

This isn’t how we approach LX and UX design at Studion. Instead, we incorporate both types of design throughout the entire design process. It is a design fusion. We’ve found that this approach delivers much more intuitive online programs—ones that learners actually embrace.

Our design process is balanced and collaborative. The LX and UX design processes both begin by getting to know our clients, surveying the competitive landscape of similar projects, and identifying the needs of the educators and the learners. Each design vertical then begins brainstorming, designing, and iterating in their areas of expertise. At regular intervals, they deliberately intersect, with LX informing UX and vice versa. Imagine a helix of intertwined LX and UX, constituting the DNA of Studion and your learning experience.

Why UXD and LXD must intersect

The UX/LX helix is critical. Deliberate moments of connection provide opportunities for each team to learn the current state of the project as well as gather valuable feedback. In short, these intervals provide a chance to:

• verify that the project is on track with the intended learning objectives

• discuss new findings or experiences

• plan tasks for the next intersection.

By coalescing and sharing information, both teams are better able to align on goals, develop and validate learning modalities, and tweak features and functionality. This results in an earlier and more agile opportunity to address any issues that might cause friction in the learning experience. The result of a new approach

Studion’s process of collaboration and interaction is the “special sauce” that makes the end learning experience remarkable. By regularly checking learning design against user experience design, we get that synergy that is so vital to the creation of a straightforward, intuitive, and successful learning experience. The same kind of learning experience isn’t possible with an assembly line approach.

Creating digital learning experiences is a team sport. There’s a sort of design zeitgeist that occurs when you work together from beginning to end—a culture and mode of thinking. At Studion, our professional culture is entirely focused on the learner and their experience. As a result, our entire design process takes learning design to a higher, more tightly woven level.

Creating an online learning experience program that succeeds involves a series of operations that must work in unison. It demands agility, focus, and shared goals. When teams are fragmented, what you set out to make isn’t always what you end up getting because no one connects along the way to ensure that the process is on track and working.

By integrating user experience with learning experience design, you fundamentally change the direction of the design approach. An optimal learner experience doesn’t just happen. If your aim is to successfully put your learner in the driver’s seat, you must invoke a new way of looking at how design functions.