10 things you can do today to improve user experience

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Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

Having a positive user experience is at the heart of successful and memorable learning. Many of the customers with whom I have personally worked with are using a myriad of engagement techniques to make this happen.

In my eyes, here are the 10 ways to improve user experience:

1. Change your alert message or ticker tape

This is a quick and simple option to start with. Change your message and add a hyperlink to get people clicking through to a new course or to a mandatory course that you want to get more learners to enrol on.

2. Add a HTML block promoting a course

This takes the above idea and makes it more visible. A block on the side of your screen with an image linking people to your latest course is a good way to drive traffic.

3. Add a “What’s Next” option to a course

When users have reached the bottom of a course and picked up a certificate don’t let them walk away. Add a section promoting other courses that the user may find useful. Once you have people using courses on your site take every opportunity to promote your other courses.

4. Bulk enroll people on mandatory courses

If you have a number of mandatory courses that you need people to do then don’t wait for them to get around to enrolling simply enrol everyone. This makes it easier to report on the stragglers that still haven’t got around to completing the course.

5. Update THAT course

We all have at least one course that we want to go back to and give it a makeover. Now is the ideal time to take another look at it. You could rethink it and rebuild it in Adapt to give it an engaging brand new feel. Remember that if you don’t have the resources but want to update courses you can always talk to our Content Team about a small project.

6. Add a badge to a course

The buzz around badges is growing. Studies are showing that they incentivize users to complete courses. They are simple to add to activities or to courses. Not only can they look great on a user’s profile but they can be exported to external sites so that users can build an online profile (External sites like LinkedIn and Mozilla Backpack can be used to store and display open badges.)

7. Set a recurrence option so people are re-enrolled to a new version of an existing course (If you are a Learning Pool user you can set this up as a certification).

Where you have courses that users need to retake every year or 2 years you can set up “Certification” on the LMS to take away the headache of having to remind people that they need to retake a course.

8. Add an Encore element to a course

Encore is a wonderful way of defeating the forgetting curve. It’s really easy to add timed events after course completion to remind users of what they learned. These can be simply text or you can be more sophisticated with quiz questions, audio or even video memory cues.

9. Check your evaluations

We all evaluate but do we always take the time to analyse what users are saying? Set aside some time and see what people think of your courses. You may find that it’s time to give a course a much needed update which brings us back to point 5.

10. Check how your quiz performs

We use quizzes to assess that our learners are actually acquiring the knowledge that we have given them but have you ever checked to see if your quiz is performing well. You can see detailed info on your quiz and it may be that you find that one question constantly trips up your users. This could be a badly written question or it could be that you haven’t clearly addressed that subject in your module (which bring us back to point 5)