The importance of user experience in elearning

Hi. Today I want to talk about why it’s important to care about the user experience when designing your online course, and I will also use the acronym UX just to get in the rhythm of that because that’s what all the lingo is. 

So the UX is super important when designing an online course because as consumers of a lot of technology over the last 20 years, all of us are really, really used to being able to get onto our devices and find what we need. And we have been very spoiled with user experience because of some of the big companies that we are accustomed to. So, I think Airbnb is one of the top-rated user experiences of an app. User experience means how easy and how intuitive is it for me to access what I need inside of a platform? 

So this is even more important when it comes to education, which is why it’s always shocked me that it has been not talked about too much, because if you have got a learner coming into your system for the first time, and they are, probably got some of their own emotions going on about the learning experience. They may have some anxiety around learning. They may be a bit apprehensive and they’re definitely kind of keen to get in there and understand what it is that’s required so that they can pass. 

And if they come in with that kind of mindset and they, they land on your online course or in your platform and they can’t find anything they need, they’re not greeted with a welcome, they’ve got problems navigating, they, and they basically get frustrated, that adds to their cognitive overload. So that can very easily deter a student from engaging again and it could take them days or weeks to come back into the system if they do not feel that they can find what they need and they feel overwhelmed. And not everybody is brave enough to reach out and get help and especially, I’ve found in my in my experience that, mature age students are often also very nervous to ask for help because they don’t really want to look silly and so that will cause a lot of problems and a lot of barriers for your learners. 

So there are some simple things that you can do when you’re building your online course to really pay attention to what it is those learners are going to need. And so the first things that we do at Oppida, is we make sure we have a very intuitive home page. We make sure that we decide upfront what is the key information that this learner is going to need for this course, and for many more if they are enrolled in multiple courses in your institution, and we put those things front and centre in buttons and so we say: ‘Here is where you can find information about how to get help. Here’s where you can find this policy etc etc’ and then we create a very sequential home page where we highlight again any of the key information they need about their lecturer and direct them straight to the modules and to create the con- to complete the content. The same goes for assessment. So all of those are designed in the home page and then once we get into the content, we really care about how each page is laid out so it is clear and concise and consistent. Consistency, consistency, consistency! 

So they’re just some of the things to think about when you are designing your online course is to actually pay a bit of attention up-front to that user experience and even test it with some of your users. That’s also a really good way to see whether what you think is intuitive is actually intuitive to your learners.