Recently we hosted the first edition of “Tasty Talks” at inBrain. The concept: three speakers give a 30 minute presentation on e-learning related topics while we eat tasty snacks. An evening full of Food for Thought and actual food! One of the speakers was Inge van Dam, UX Researcher at Online Department. She presented surprising figures about measuring user experience.
User/Learner Experience
The benefits of a good user experience, in our case the learner experience, has been previously discussed in this blog. But a short wrap-up doesn’t hurt anyone! Improving the learner experience is intended to smoothly and effectively guide a participant through an e-learning. This allows him or her to start learning quickly, achieve a high learning efficiency and, when they are done, close the screen with satisfaction.
As a designer, how do you accomplish a good learner experience and an optimal learning result? According to Inge of Online Department, the answer is testing.
Five Guinea pigs
That’s easier than you think! You don’t need dozens of test subjects and heaps of money to present significant figures. Research shows that, surprisingly, you only need five test subjects. About 80% of the user problems are found within such a small group. These five heroes collect enough feedback to help improve your learner experience exponentially. Basically, this means that you need just one day for your research, assuming half a day for collecting feedback and half a day for analysis.
More ways of measuring and knowing
Next to actually letting participants go through the learning journey, there are plenty of other ways to achieve the best learner experience. For example: a 5 second test. In this test we show a screen of the design and ask a participant what he thinks this e-learning is intended for. The participant then writes this down in one sentence. That way, you’ll quickly find out if the look-and-feel matches your intention. Another form, card-sorting, lets participants place specific topics in rows under different categories. You test whether you are on the right track for the structure and layout of your e-learning concept. In short, we have many opportunities to get the best learning efficiency from a learning experience. Is this something you care about as much as we do? Swing by for a cup of coffee to discuss the possibilities!
