Recently, I’ve noticed a shift happening within the learning field. The role of Instructional Designer (ID) is evolving into a Learning Experience Designer (LXD). So, what’s the difference? Ceren Korkmaz¹ offers a distinction between the two terms that resonates with me: “instructional design emphasizes the source of knowledge – in other words the planning of the teaching activities. However, learning experience design concentrates more on the destination of knowledge, or the learner.”

Having worked as an ID in the eLearning space for several years, much of the focus of my work has been on the design of content – the source of knowledge. The organisation and breaking down of information. The placement of text and images. The use of interactive elements – clicking, dragging and hovering. The creation of scenarios. The addition of resources and hyperlinks. The creation of assessment questions. This was always designing for the end user. However, LXD is about designing with the end user.

What I’ve also come to realise is that I’ve been an experience designer for some time. I never really thought about it that way. When I created an eLearning module, I was also creating an experience for the end user. I just wasn’t involving them in the design process. And it’s not just eLearning modules that create an experience. All types of learning solutions do – classroom sessions, curated content, social learning, videos, scenarios and job aids. If they’re not useful and relevant to the end user, then the experience will be poor no matter how beautiful they look or how much time they took to create.

The move from ID to LXD means I’ll need to develop new skills and mindsets. My wanting to find out more about designing experiences has led me to field of User Experience (UX) design and design thinking. I’ve joined the Interaction Design Foundation and have completed one of their online courses User Experience: The Beginners Guide (they have a large selection of online courses and you can take as many as you’d like as part of your membership). I’ve started to expand my personal learning network by following some UX groups and people on Twitter:

Interaction Design Org @interacting | UX Links @uxlinks | UX Collective @uxdesigncc

Doug Collins @DougCollinsUX | Sarah Doody @sarahdoody | Danny Seals @thedannyseals 

I now find myself thinking more broadly about user experience in many everyday things like using websites and products. My workplace has adopted Human-Centred Design (HCD) further fuelling my curiosity and desire to integrate this way of thinking and working into the design and creation of learning experiences.

LXD presents an opportunity to better understand the problem that we’re trying to solve. To find out about the context of the work end users do. To prototype and test ideas. To use feedback to make improvements. I’m not suggesting that LXD is about creating whatever the end users want. It’s about involving them to ensure we create experiences that are what they need in order to perform.

¹ Korkmaz, C., (2018), Driving Educational Change: Innovations in Action eBook, Chapter 3: ID 2 LXD” From Instructional Design to Learning Experience Design: The Rise of Design Thinking.