The Customer Education Playbook

10Step 8: Design Learning Experiences That Lead to Behavioral Change

If you've ever taken an online course but felt frustrated by the clunky design of the learning platform, or attended a virtual training session but been distracted by the technology rather than the content, you'll know a few things about what stands in the way of optimal user experience. User experience (UX) in the context of learning is everything that occurs during learning, including the learner's subjective reaction to the experience as they interact with your learning materials and products. While good UX delights learners and generates a positive psychological state, bad UX will cause frustration and bring up negative emotions for the learner. These types of negative emotions have been shown to have a detrimental impact on motivation and learning.¹

As a result, it's important to be mindful about the experience that you're crafting. If you create great content with a bad UX, the fact that the catalog is disorganized, that learners are distracted by extraneous content, or that they don't know where to click will be enough to negate the quality of the content and inhibit a customer's ability to learn.

UX also plays an important role when it comes to stickiness. Research from web design shows that you have 50 milliseconds to make an impression on your users.² That's no time at all. Your design needs to be clear and simple and engage learners extremely fast, or your learners will bounce.

To optimize for learning, ...