Learning Experience Design: The Process with Greg Arthur

Learning interventions can range from something written on a piece of paper to immersive workshops, but how do you know when to design one over the other?

Learning experience design can help you and your team identify which format works best in your organization’s context or find the middle ground by answering the following essential question: Do we know if this learning solution will work, and is it right for our audience?

With guidance from Greg Arthur, author of ‘The Learning Experience Design Log Book,’ we answer these questions by exploring what makes outstanding learning experience design, the process of developing a learning intervention, and how data is critical to making an impact.

Listen to our L&D Podcast episode: Learning Experience Design With Greg Arthur

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Outstanding learning experience design

Impactful learning design is context-specific for each topic, industry, or time of year and ultimately starts with the leaders in those areas and focuses on user experience.

Looking back at the outstanding L&D teams I’ve personally worked with, I see that they stood for impact. They strived to move beyond just providing learning and ticking the boxes of what is expected of traditional learning and development.

Outstanding learning design also revolves around the user experience and developing learning interventions for a target audience. You need to understand how your solution will benefit the individuals it is designed to help and how it impacts your organization’s business needs.

“Outstanding learning design is not just about keeping the lights on. It has to work for and genuinely benefit everyone,” says Greg Arthur, author of the Learning Experience Design Log Book.

Learning design as Lego instructions

When devising the Learning Experience Design Log Book, Greg aimed to outline his process so anyone can follow it and be creative as they develop learning interventions.

The process begins by defining the problem, engaging and collaborating with your audience and stakeholders, and breaking down the main problem into all the smaller problems that, as a whole, keep your stakeholders up at night.

“It’s basically Lego for learning design. You start with all the bits, follow all the instructions, and the problem that you’re solving is what is pictured on the box,” says Greg.

“It’s basically Lego for learning design. You start with all the bits, follow all the instructions, and the problem that you’re solving is what is pictured on the box."

Leveraging the Log Book and a digital whiteboard like Miro provides a guide to what has happened throughout the design process. A designer or developer can then come in at the end to build the solution and clearly see the problem definition, why certain decisions were made, and why they are building what they are building.

The result is that everything about the learning solution is clear and open to everybody, which can reduce the time spent on development from twelve months to about eight weeks.

Develop and test your prototype

The design workshop is the key to designing an intervention. In this workshop, your team makes a prototype of your learning intervention to pilot, test, and iterate.

“We want people to ideate and think about some wild ideas. If your idea is to send somebody to the moon, write it down. Then you take the wild idea and consider how to make it a realistic solution.”

Part of the workshop is the defend or destroy phase, where everyone brings their ideas to the discussion and takes turns presenting to the team. The person presenting has to defend their ideas while those listening look for areas of improvement. These can be small things like including company-specific language or changing a background color.

The discussion will generate a mixture of great elements from various products that can be combined into one solution or a single product that needs some tweaking. From here, your prototype is ready to be piloted.

Be sure that you get the right data from your test, including asking your audience the following questions:

Did you find the solution helpful?
Would you recommend the solution to someone else?
What would you change?
How did you know this learning intervention helped you?

By answering these questions, you can ensure that when the designer or developer comes in to help you make the best version of your solution, you can give them a super-tight brief, and they can get started immediately.

Data is key throughout the learning design process

You want to measure what happens immediately after you deploy your learning intervention and track its impact months and years afterward.

During the learning experience design process, you need to consider two types of data: the data you have access to now and the data you don’t currently have. The data you can access now includes people’s stories and opinions and hard data, such as key business metrics.

For the data you don't have access to, start by listing the data you need and identifying how you will get it. A big question to ask is how realistic it is for you to get the data in time. If it will take six months to access that data, see what else you can get, and use it in six months when you’re refreshing your solution.

Explore further insights on learning experience design in the episode on The L&D Podcast: Learning Experience Design With Greg Arthur.

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