How Poor LMS UX Design Disenfranchises Employees
Tags: Retail, Employee Engagement, Restaurant, Learning And Development

Your company’s onboarding process is one of the first impressions that you get to make on a new employee. A good portion of that, especially in entry-level positions are going to be done, not face to face, but by the learning management system that you choose to train these new hires with. A great training can give your employees everything that they need to be successful, but a poor user experience can start a domino effect that leads to poor job satisfaction or high turnover rates. Here are four ways your LMS technology is holding you back, and ways to turn that around.

1. On-site Training LMS UX vs. Accessible Training LMS UX

Needing your employees to spend hours on a desktop computer in the back office is a thing of the past. Old learning managements were limited to software that was device-specific, with bad usability design if it left certain resolution or input parameters. But, nowadays, many learning management systems can be run on anything from a laptop to a smartphone or tablet, and are available anywhere, asynchronously. Trainings can be completed at home at the trainee’s convenience, while still giving the supervisor access to test results and the ability to give feedback.

2. Outdated Designs and Building for the Future

When choosing a learning management system and creating content for it, some designers get stuck in their current needs, and this can have a severely limiting effect on the future of the training. Trainings that are developed in one system don’t always translate to the next, or to other LMS programs. But with modern, flexible trainings that are developed with an eye for portability, all of that hard work doesn’t have to go to waste when your system gets an upgrade.

3. Ease of Use for Accurate Content

The more steps your content has to go through before it gets in front of the end user, the more the accuracy and vision of your subject matter experts is going to degrade. Explaining a process to someone who can put your content into a complex learning management system, or having to have a go-between any time you want to update content is simply no longer best practice. A modern LMS is one that can be updated in simple language, as often as is necessary, while keeping costs down.

4. New LMS UX Isn’t Always Intuitive

Not every new employee wants the same thing from their employee training, and not every training manager is going to use the data that they gather the same way. One employee who thrives on practical knowledge and gamification may find word-heavy slides intolerable, and the other may be the opposite. A good UI is flexible and diverse, while being customizable enough to fit the training in exactly the way that the designer had in mind. One corporation may have mandatory testing with a certain grade, while others may just observe how the trainee implements these skills.

If you’ve run into any of these problems, or if it’s something you’re worried about, you can read deeper into these issues and more with Your LMS is Holding You Back — 3 Steps to Move to an Integrated Learning Solution.