The time learners spend interacting with the course is time they will never get back. As satiating as it is for an L&D professional to think that time is inherently well-spent, this is only true if those minutes were a good use of learners’ lives.
Are these courses well-thought-out, engaging, and informative, and do they put learners at the center of their design? Do they represent the optimal use of learners’ time?
L&D professionals should create experiences and materials that add value to their users. Learners’ perspectives should be the guiding force that shapes these courses.
Instead of prioritizing individual events and courses over the comprehensive learning experience, L&D professionals should grasp the magnitude of the effort necessary to achieve behavior change.
To accomplish this, they should create solutions that address specific problems and have measurable criteria to assess their effectiveness. This approach includes applying design thinking principles in courses and ensuring learner-centric design.
Breaking Down the User Experience in Learning
User experience (UX) in learning focuses on how learners interact with educational content and environments. Here are the most important dimensions of a good UX:
- Usability – This aspect ensures that course materials are easy to navigate and understand, which typically depends on simple interfaces, clear instructions, and intuitive design.
- Accessibility – This part of the UX requires that all learners, including those with disabilities, can access, use, and benefit from the content. For instance, L&D professionals should provide alternative text for images, use accessible fonts and colors, and ensure compatibility with screen readers.
- Learner engagement – Thanks to this element, learners stay motivated and interested in engaging with the material. Quizzes, discussions, and multimedia are all part of a dynamic and interactive learning experience.
- Personalization – L&D professionals should customize content to match individual learners’ needs, affinities, and progress, as this helps maintain interest and relevance. They can achieve it through adaptive learning technologies that adjust the difficulty and type of content based on the learner’s performance and feedback.
- Feedback – Immediate, constructive feedback is vital for learners to understand whether they’re doing well and how far they are from reaching their goals. For example, L&D professionals can provide automated feedback in online quizzes, personalized comments from instructors, and peer reviews.
- Social Interaction – There should be plenty of opportunities for collaboration and communication with peers and instructors that all contribute to a richer learning experience. Discussion forums, group projects, and social media integration can facilitate this interaction and make learning a more communal and supportive process.
- Emotional Design – This element considers learners’ emotions and motivations by creating a supportive, stress-free environment, and a positive attitude toward learning and persistence. The aesthetics of the learning environment, including visual and auditory elements, also affect the overall user experience, as a visually appealing, well-organized interface makes learning more enjoyable and less intimidating.
What are Design Thinking Principles
Design thinking principles embody a human-centered approach to innovation due to focusing on understanding users’ needs, redefining problems, and creating cutting-edge solutions. These principles are rooted in empathy, creativity, and rationality, guiding designers and innovators through a structured process that encourages user-centric problem-solving.
The roots of design thinking go all the way back to the mid-20th century when industrial designers began to formalize their methods for product creation. Herbert A. Simon, an American psychologist and computer scientist, established its foundations through his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, which discussed the processes of design and decision-making.
In the 1980s, Rolf Faste expanded on Simon’s ideas while teaching at Stanford University. Faste developed the concept of design thinking and emphasized empathy in design.
Meanwhile, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, popularized design thinking in the early 2000s. His revered 2008 Harvard Business Review article and subsequent book, Change by Design, explained design thinking as a framework for innovation that designers can apply beyond traditional design fields. Moreover, Brown spoke about integrating empathy, ideation, and experimentation in a single mindset.
For instance, Stanford’s d.school used design thinking to redesign the freshman experience with their Stanford 2025 project. They identified students’ challenges through extensive research, redefined the problem of rigid academic structures, and developed innovative solutions like the open-loop university and purpose learning.
What are the Benefits of Applying Design Thinking to Problem-Solving
L&D professionals can expect many advantages of applying design thinking to problem-solving yields, starting with:
Human-Centric Solutions
Design thinking principles put each unique need and experience of learners into consideration, allowing them to create solutions that genuinely address their pain points. Moreover, focuses on real-world problems from the user’s perspective, which is essential for an effective course.
Collaborative Atmosphere
Many L&D professionals use design thinking to cultivate a culture of collective ideation and bring together diverse teams from different disciplines. Thanks to this diversity of thought, they can spark creativity and encourage the exploration of all kinds of ideas and approaches. Moreover, collaboration led by design thinking breaks down silos and facilitates better communication and shared understanding.
Proactive Problem-Solving
L&D professionals can define clear, actionable problems early in the process, meaning they can stay focused and direct their efforts toward their objectives. As a result, they prevent scope creep and ensure all their work goes toward solving the core issues.
The iterative nature of design thinking also allows teams to prototype and test solutions much faster, which enables quick feedback and reduces the risk of failure.
Shifting from Linear to Iterative Processes
Traditional problem-solving tends to follow a linear path, which can slow down flexibility and responsiveness. On the flip side, design thinking embraces iteration and prioritizes constant feedback-led refinement. Solutions then naturally evolve with changing circumstances and new information, which makes them more resilient and future-proof.
Innovation and Experimentation
L&D professionals can take calculated risks and explore unconventional ideas, allowing them to learn from failures. A culture of experimentation is often necessary to drive breakthroughs that might not emerge through traditional methods.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Create Learner-Centric Courses
Sometimes, it is a more straightforward process to identify than solve learner challenges and issues. However, design thinking principles and tools can offer a structured yet flexible approach.
After all, design thinking serves more to enable problem-solving than design. It starts with empathy, not problem definition, involving those who experience the problem to help define it and craft human-centered solutions.
The following are the five steps of applying design thinking principles:
1. Empathize
L&D professionals should put themselves in the learner’s position to understand their world, needs, obstacles, and goals. Instead of relying solely on traditional methods like surveys and interviews, consider shadowing learners in their environments, participating in their daily routines, and engaging in informal conversations to gather nuanced insights.
Develop rich, detailed learner personas that reflect not just their objectives and difficulties but also what motivates and frustrates them. Experiment with empathy and journey mapping to visualize their learning experiences and pinpoint moments of both struggle and success.
2. Define
The next step for L&D professionals is to convert these insights into clear, actionable problem statements by synthesizing the compiled data to pinpoint the most common learner challenges. They must distill complex data into specific, targeted problems that reveal the underlying obstacles.Â
A well-defined problem statement will establish a focused direction for the design process, ensuring that every solution matches learners’ needs and educational goals. Ultimately, this method turns abstract insights into practical strategies and lays the groundwork for effective, learner-centered solutions.
3. Ideate
In this phase, L&D professionals should move beyond conventional brainstorming and leverage diverse techniques like affinity diagrams and role-playing exercises to spark fresh ideas. The goal is to nurture an environment where unconventional thinking is encouraged, which they can accomplish by challenging assumptions, exploring unexpected angles, and asking for input from diverse groups.
For instance, they can engage in collaborative workshops where participants build on each other’s ideas, blending insights from different fields and experiences.
4. Prototype
L&D professionals should start creating low-fidelity prototypes to experiment with various elements of course design. These could be as simple as rough sketches on paper or as dynamic as interactive digital models that highlight key features and user interactions.
However, they should use these early, imperfect versions to evaluate and improve ideas. Engaging real users in this process will help L&D professionals gather authentic feedback and adjust the prototype before proceeding with a full-scale project.
5. Test
The testing phase requires L&D professionals to engage directly with learners as they interact with the prototype and to pay close attention to their reactions, difficulties, and feedback. This is an opportunity to observe their engagement, identify unexpected challenges, and understand how their experience is unfolding.
They should document moments of confusion or frustration but also elements that resonate well, as this information helps refine the prototype.
Key Elements for Effective Learning Experience Design
Although applying design thinking principles is the first step toward learner-centric courses, L&D professionals must follow certain overarching principles. These will improve the overall effectiveness and ensure they aren’t only identifying but also solving learner challenges.
Recognize Learning as a Journey
Learning is a continuous process, not a one-time event. Learners shouldn’t only want to take the first step but also to continue interacting with the course and adopt new skills and information.
This is why it’s not enough that learners notice they’re curious or want to learn something. Instead, the course should support them through every step of their learning journey and create striking moments that push them toward turning knowledge into actions.
Understand Learners’ Perspective
L&D professionals should collect insights from three crucial perspectives: businesses, learners, and the environment. First, they should engage with stakeholders to understand their business objectives and the underlying motivations and success metrics that drive these goals.
The next step is to explore the learners’ daily realities by spending time in their workspaces, observing their workflows, and experiencing firsthand the obstacles they often face. They should also assess the broader environment, including organizational culture, technological constraints, and physical workspaces.
Ultimately, they should combine these diverse insights to develop solutions that balance business targets, learner needs, and environmental limitations.
Find the Intersection
L&D solutions aren’t only valuable and engaging for learners but also deliver measurable results for the business and are feasible within existing constraints. Combining them requires in-depth interviews with stakeholders to understand the specific outcomes they aim to achieve.
Meanwhile, L&D professionals should use tools like feasibility matrices to evaluate potential solutions in terms of technical, financial, and operational constraints. Otherwise, they may struggle to prevent the common pitfalls of traditional instructional design, which often skews too heavily toward one aspect, neglecting others.
The First Solution Should Always Be a Prototype
The first course may not be the most effective one, which is why L&D professionals should start with a prototype. They can use solutions from other niches, such as software development and product development to create simple prototypes and test them on fractions of learners.
Once they have the starting point, L&D professionals can refine it and add additional features and materials.
Conclusion
Every part of the learning course should add value and be meaningful. The safest way to achieve that is to understand learners and outline each aspect and how it contributes to engaging and impactful outcomes. This includes considering what constitutes a positive learning experience in learning.
Moreover, L&D professionals should determine the intersection between what both stakeholders and learners need, and what’s possible in the given environment.
