While shortlisting the learning management system for your organization, the primary focus areas are integration, reporting features, compatibility, scalability, responsiveness, pricing, etc. However, when we think from end-users vision, they will experience these options only if the LMS provides an interactive and intuitive design that is simple to use and easy to navigate.
Designing the course with the relevant content and focus on learner engagement, and a good and intuitive user experience can make or break the overall learning experience. This not only affects the course completion rates but becomes an important factor in keeping the learner engaged which helps in successfully transferring the training objectives. Further, these training objectives become the accelerating factor in better individual performance and company growth.
Features of good user experience on LMS
This can be divided into four factors :
1. Ease of Use: Having a good design layout and visually appealing LMS does not suffice. It is important to ensure that it provides ease of integrating the course with other existing systems, managing the content that is to be learned should be easy. Automation, customization, and support are the features that truly make the LMS easy to use.
As the interface is the first thing that the learner comes across after logging into the course, ease of navigation along with the appealing design is the key factor that can help in providing a good user experience
2. Intuitive Design: In continuation of ease of use, the learner should be provided with a design that makes it easy for them to understand with minimal instructions. With data algorithms, the LMS does have the capability of reading and understanding the learner’s preferences and choices thus making the suggestions accordingly.
The LMS must have the feature to cater to a diverse group of learners. With intuitive designs, you can make it user-friendly for the learner as you surely would not want to add on the burden of teaching how to use the LMS. Additionally, this will provide a sense of inclusiveness to the learner.
3. Design Consistency: Yes, the use of a uniform color pattern and similar layout is important to provide a consistent feel throughout the course. However, it is equally important that the LMS provides consistency in visual design and functionality too. Non-consistent design can lead to breaking the continuity of the program distracting the learner focus. The navigational tool should be placed at the same place in every module or page of the curriculum. As the learner moves forward learning the course, the predictability will help in keeping the focus on the content rather than distracting them to search for the navigational options at a different place on the page.
4. Accessibility: Lessons that explain the content and the concept easily are best understood and retained. The ease of use of the platform plays an important part in understanding and absorbing the content that can easily be applied in practical scenarios. LMS that provides smooth accessibility features for all kinds of media is widely accepted. LMS that allows to include and access various interactivity tools smoothly is considered to be user friendly. Easily accessible automated reports make it accessible for the trainer and the learner to assess themselves and the content. Additionally, a good LMS shall provide similar accessibility to specially-abled learners by including the features like screen reading, ADHD, color adjustments to broaden the reach of the learning audience by creating an inclusive environment.
Conclusion:User experience (UX), though, is used interchangeably with user interface (UI), however, is very different. UX may play a very small role in attracting the user, it plays a very critical role. Compare Thinkific vs Teachable for the features of LMS and choose the one that is more suited to your organizational needs.
