Blog – Ahmet Uzun

User Experience Design for eLearning
Applying UX Design Concepts to
Create Digital Learning Experiences

AHMET UZUN

INTRODUCTION

User experience design (UX) is a discipline that focuses on the human-computer interaction. It is a critical part of the design process, which involves the evaluation of the end-users’ experience with a product, service or system, from the moment of decision to the moment of adoption. The main goal of UX design is to understand the needs and behaviours of the users to design products, services and systems that meet their needs. In recent years, the field of User Experience has expanded to include design thinking and user research in addition to traditional visual and interaction design.

User experience design is increasingly being applied to learning, with the goal of creating engaging learning experiences. User experience design can be used to improve the overall learning experience, from the design of the course content to the format of the course material. Having in mind UX design principles and concepts, the experts indicate that when a “user” becomes a “learner” with an educational purpose, Learning Experience design comes to life.

User experience design has revolutionized the way we interact with technology and has now begun to impact the way we learn. Thanks to Learning Experience design features and tools, engaging yet appealing learning products are easily accessible nowadays.

In this article, the methods and concepts of User Experience design will be examined firstly. Then, in the second part, digital Learning Experience Design will be introduced alongside immersive learning experiences. Finally, in the third part, the intersection UX and LX designs will be presented.

SECTION I

METHODS AND CONCEPTS OF UX DESIGN

User Experience Design (UXD) is a process of designing physical and/or digital products that are evidence-based, delightful, easy to use, and useful to interact with. UX design is about supporting the user’s needs while ensuring that it doesn’t distract them from the overall experience.

User experience design decisions are driven by market research, data analysis, and product development as well as trending aesthetic preferences. User experience design is an ever-changing field, but the fundamental principles of UX design remain the same. The UX designers also need to determine what they need to include for the visual balance of a product or a service.

The design should be intuitive and should be able to meet the needs of the user. While the user experience largely depends on the latest technology and trends, the core UX design concepts guide designers to create user friendly products or services. These concepts help UX designers look at the problems through a consistent methodology. The ideal characteristics of user experience design according to the Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb are:

Usable: The designed product should be simple and easy to use.
Useful: It must be designed to fulfill a need. If the product cannot fill a gap in the users’ lives, there is no reason they will use it.
Desirable: The product should be aesthetically attractive and induce positive emotions in users.
Findable: The user should be able to find the solution easily and quickly when they have a problem with the product.
Accessible: The product/service should be easily accessible for everyone, including the users with disabilities.
Credible: The brand and the product it develops should be trustworthy.

UX Design in Education

As online learning experience is becoming common in higher education, corporate learning, and professional development contexts, it is importan tto understand the role of UX design in education. However, designing a learning product requires a completely different UX design approach as a generalist user experience design approach wouldn’t exactly correspond in learning experience development.

The learning experience products have entirely different requirements than consumer technology products. Hence, it is crucial to understand the user experience design in education-related tools based on researches reflecting on how students can learn effectively.

User Experience design features are commonly used in education to improve the quality of the training and the engagement. The purpose of user experience design for learning is to make an easy-to-navigate learning process, allowing the users to concentrate entirely on the content and the flow of learning. The key features of UX design to create engaging online learnings are following:

Clean user experience
Engaging interactivity
Attractive main page
Simple navigation to content
User-friendly interface

UX design for eLearning includes creating an encouraging and engaging online learning environments. The fundamental idea behind the user experience design for eLearning is to create an interface and an interactivity that stimulate and improve the overall education process, aiming to increase learning retention rate by learners.

SECTION II

Digital Learning Experience Design (LXD)

Learning Experience Design (LXD) and Immersive Learning Experiences

Learning experience design or LXD is the process of creating an efficient learning experience that allows learners to achieve the learning outcome in a goal-oriented approach. LXD is designed in an amalgamation of various design disciplines with learning. The fundamental principles of designs used in learning experience design include UX design, graphic design, experience design, and interaction design. These design principles are combined with different elements of education, instructional design, experiential learning, training, gamification and cognitive psychology.

In other words, LX design is a combination of user experience design and instructional design. LXD is a learner-centric design approach involving designing an effective learning experience that helps learners increase their retention rate and improve overall learning experience.

Both user experience and learning experience designs emphasize increasing user engagement and enjoyment while reducing friction. In learning experience design, the experience is how the user interacts and engages with the learning materials such as online courses, playlists, quizzes, and games.

LX designer aims to promote a practical experience along with delivering customized content depending on the background and needs of the learner. Technologies like digital authoring tools, virtual/augmented reality and immersive learnings are revolutionizing the creation and the delivery of online learnings.

Among above mentioned technologies, Immersive Learning is an experiential learning methodology that allows users to participate in simulations and situations to learn in an engaging yet safe environment. The technology promotes immersive learning by 3D interactivity and simulations to provide an immersive experience to learners. An immersive learning environment is designed using artificial stimuli like images, videos, 3D elements and sounds to make learners feel a real-world-like experience. Some common types of technologies that are widely used in immersive learning techniques are:

Virtual Reality (VR) uses digital simulations to create real-world scenarios. Users get immersed in the virtual world through a headset and can experience complex real-life situations virtually.
Augmented Reality (AR) is another immersive technology that creates simulations in AR glasses, offering learners a fully immersed experience. The technology augments the real environment into a virtual interface.
Mixed Reality (XR) is a combination of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. This technology makes virtual interactions look realistic, and it allows physical and digital objects interact in real-time.

Authoring Tools and Learning Management Systems

Learning management systems are applications or online platforms that store and organize e-learning content in one place for easy access to the users. LMS also allows administrators to create certificates and track the users’ learning activities and levels.

Depending on the platform, the learning management systems incorporate several features, including:

Tracking learning throughout the course.
Subscription to playlists, allowing users to stay updated with
new developments.
Social learning through forums and chat rooms.
Gamification of learning.
Recommend learning based on the user’s profile and interests.

Learning management systems provide instructors and administrators a way to create content, deliver it to learners, monitor their participation, and access their performance. LMS also provides users with the ability to use interactive and engaging features like video conferencing, real-time challenges etc. As a crucial element of content creation for LMS platforms, authoring tools play important role in constructing and offering adapted online training content to learners.

In the e-learning world, authoring tools are used for creating digital content for learners. LX designers and instructional designers commonly use e-learning authoring tools to create digital learning material. Authoring tools are usually pre-programmed and offer a ready-to-use interface that includes interactions, tests, games, images, and videos that learners can manipulate with ease. Here are the key features of authoring tools:

Content Authoring
The key feature of an authoring tool is the ability to create content. This includes adding or editing images, texts, slides, media, and other elements. These features allow LX designers to bring their storyboard and the content to life and improve what the learners will see, hear, or do throughout the course.
Interactivity
Interactivity LX designers aim to encourage learners to engage with the course by allowing them to participate actively through interactive features. The interactivity of authoring tools increases engagement and retention by allowing learners to acquire information more efficiently. This can be through solving problems, discovering information, playing mini games, and working through real-life-like scenarios. Some key features that improve the interactivity of authoring tools include creating custom activities, matching, drag-and-drop, and hotspot reveals.
Content management
Organizing the media, text, and other digital content assets is crucially important. LX designers may require these assets later to update the course or create a new one. The content management feature of authoring tools can save time for development and help keep the content organized. It also enables creators to stay in control of the tools and resources they may require for developing the course. The core features of content management include question banks, course libraries, and media libraries.
Accessibility
LX designer develops an e-learning course to make it accessible to all within the scope. The accessibility feature of authoring tools allows instructors to add or change on-screen elements, formatting, and interactions to suit the user’s needs. The features that can make the e-learning more accessible are closed captions, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 support, navigation accessible through a keyboard, customizable tab, accessible font size, and exporting translation files.
Collaboration
The development of e-learning courses may require the involvement of various creators. With the option to collaborate, all stakeholders can be involved in the course design. The feature enables learning designers and course developers to share the e-learning content with anyone who needs to see it. Collaboration in e-learning will provide features like shared resources, co-authoring, user roles, share options, and author control. In short, online learning authoring tools are the applications that are designed to create engaging learning content and courses, using text, media, and interactions while allowing other stakeholders to participate in learning design and development in a collaborative and accessible way. Having the fact that every different group of learner has different needs, goals, and expectations, authoring tools should be developed in an adapted way where the contribution of UX design methods and concepts become indispensable. A good example here can be the authoring tools specialized in mobile-only learnings and construct their product respecting mobile-first UX principles.

SECTION III

Integrating UX in Learning Experience Design

“User” becomes a “learner”

As mentioned earlier, UX design is about improving the experience of products and services, while LX design is about improving the learning experience and generating desired learning outcomes. An important thing to keep in mind while designing e-learning content is that the target population of LX design is not like any general product or service users. They are learners and they consume a learning content to attain a certain knowledge level. In that manner, LX Design approach aims to understand the need of the learners and respond learning objectives before designing learning content.

When a user becomes a learner, it brings significant changes in skills, knowledge, perspective, and behavior. The enhanced learning experience can benefit the learners academically, professionally, and personally. Depending on the needs and goals, the outcomes may completely vary.

Researching and analyzing these needs and goals are done in a similar way in LX Design and UX Design. The personas are created based on design research in both LXD and UXD. The learner and user personas might have a similar structure, but the content is completely different. When the user becomes a learner, the LX designer needs to consider social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development levels of the learner.

LX design approach uses cognitive psychology to understand what motivates the learners depending on their choices. Understanding what a learner will go through during e-learning and offering them an adaptive interactive learning experience that motivates and engages, are the main key factors in successful LX design.

Intersection of UX – LX Design

Learning experience design uses several user experience design principles. UX design, along with other disciplines like graphic design, interaction design, and instructional design, forms the roots of learning experience design.

The general designing process of learning experience is similar to designing a user experience as both LXD and UXD use design research, user testing, and prototyping. When the user experience design tools are integrated into the LX design process, it gives LX designers an opportunity to rethink educational design and learners’ profiles with another perspective. The common points of the intersection of user experience and learning experience design are:

Learning experience needs to articulate learning objectives and responds to the needs of learners, using EdTech (Education Technology) tools during the design process.
Both UXD and LXD should develop a fundamental understanding of user-centered and learner-centered e-learning content creation.
UX design should interconnect the advantages and goals of using UX tools and methodologies while designing learning experiences.
Instructional Design (ID) process benefits the UX Design approaches and principles while implementing LX design contents.
UX design can help LX design to determine learner personas and provide meaningful data from cross user tests.

To sum up, it is important to note that the common principles between user experience and learning experience design are the backbone while designing engaging yet learner friendly online learning courses. These common points make the intersection of UX and LX design more crucial and meaningful.

SECTION IV

Conclusion

The importance of creating well-designed, engaging and learner friendly content is drastically emerging. Designing an excellent learning experience using User Experience and User Interface design concepts is increasingly becoming the new norm in the eLearning industry. Usability, accessibility, credibility, desirable, and user comfort are the key characteristics of quality user experience design and can be entirely applicable in LX design. In the e-learning environment, a lack of engagement, interaction, and motivation can become a barrier to successful learning. User experience design for digital learning can help the LX designers or course developers overcome this barrier and create a successful learning experience for the learners.

While user experience and learning experience seem like two different disciplines, UX design can collaborate closely with the LX design and vice versa. A UX designer analyzes the target audience and ensures the best utilization and functionality of a digital product or a service for users, while a LX designer aims to provide the best learning experience to learners. On the other hand, LX designer formulates the learning process within the learner’s journey towards gaining knowledge and acquiring a new skill. UX design focuses more on user’s general journey while using a digital product or a service.

In the final analysis, UX and UI design are becoming increasingly important in the learning industry. Users are spending more time in online learning experiences, and designers need to create experiences that enable users to grasp complex ideas and learn new skills. Additionally, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality tools and technologies are also providing LX designers new ways to design learning experiences. In this manner, LX design, adapting UX and UI design principles and other technologies, has an extremely promising future for creating impactful and adaptive digital learnings.

Let’s witness the future of education together!