Learning Experience Design

The ways that humans learn are complex. Learning Experience Design, or LXD, is a relatively new field where learning sciences, interdisciplinary design standards, and creativity are applied to create learning experiences that create meaningful transformation and new opportunities in people’s lives.

LXD provides a framework for engaging, impactful, and personalized learning experiences. With the right mix of techniques and strategies, learning experience designers can create experiences that are not only efficient and effective, but also memorable and engaging. Most importantly, a great learning experience should be a catalyst for transformational change in the learner’s life.

What Is Learning Experience Design?

​​Learning experience design (LXD) is an emerging field that applies cross-disciplinary design principles to learning. It starts with the assumption that the learning experience must satisfy the needs of the sponsoring organization, as well as the needs (and often aspirations) of the learner. In the end, it involves creating engaging, interactive, and personalized learning experiences that cater to learners’ needs and preferences.

LXD focuses on a human-and-systems-based approach, emphasizing empathy and awareness of environmental factors influencing learning.

Learning experience design is also about making learning experiences more inclusive. Learning experience designers use LXD courses to create experiences that consider individual learners and their ages, races, abilities, languages, cultures, and more. 

What are the basic principles in learning experience design? Dr. Kim Round, the Associate Dean of the WGU Teachers College, describes learning experience design in this way: 

“Learning experience design begins by putting the learner’s perspective at the center of the work and designing from a lens of empathy. The discipline combines empathy, design thinking, gaming design, cognitive psychology, experiential learning, user experience or UX, graphic design, and instructional design in the effort to create a holistic learning experience.”

In addition, LXD prioritizes meaningful goal-oriented learning experiences. Professionals specializing in learning experience design learn how to create experiences that help users achieve specific learning outcomes. 

What Are The Responsibilities of a Learning Experience Designer?

Some responsibilities of a learning experience designer include research, data-driven design decisions, and creating an effective experience for the entire learner journey. Seeking learners’ feedback is also critical to continually improve the learning experience. Ultimately, the learning experience designer has to focus on creating materials that serve the purpose of the institution creating the learning experience. When the learners succeed, the institution does too. 

Thanks to continuous research in online and hybrid learning, behavior change, UX, and educational technology, the way we design for how people learn is always evolving. Evolution is critical, as people have come to demand high quality experiences in all areas of their lives. Most people are now seeking out learning experiences that are designed with empathy and based in research. 

In summary, LXD is an interdisciplinary design field, and it involves a context and learner-first approach to creating educational content.

What Is The Difference Between Learning Experience Design And Instructional Design?

What are the differences between Instructional design (ID) and Learning Experience Design (LXD)? ID is primarily concerned with designing instruction. It is content-first. LXD focuses on how educational materials are used to transform the learner’s life rather than on the instructions or materials themselves. It is learner-first and context-first.

Unlike ID, LXD considers what the learner’s environment looks like, how their learning fits what their personal and professional goals are, what supports they need beyond the material, what motivates them, and what keeps them interested and engaged. With LXD, it’s not just about how the learner is learning – it’s about understanding and acknowledging how the learner is feeling and what the learner is thinking during the learning process, as well.

Instructional designers specialize in developing instructional materials such as courses and curriculum. Learning experience designers work on a broader spectrum of learning experiences that extend beyond the digital realm. Essentially, LXDs are equipped to create learning experiences across in-person, hybrid, and fully online modalities that can enhance the learning journey.

Instructional designers often work closely with subject matter experts (SMEs) to design and develop instructional materials. LX designers work with SMEs as well as learners and key stakeholders in organizations to design and create effective learning experiences.

What Are Examples of Learning Experience Design?  

Here are three different examples of how Jackrabbit LX has utilized learning experience design principles to solve problems for some of our major clients.

Example 1: Online Learning And Development For Cyber Security Professionals 

Jackrabbit worked with a major cyber security company that needed to create both short professional development courses as well as longer certification prep courses in both instructor-led and self-paced formats. In short, this company needed both a learning hub and individual branded courses.

We created a course landing page using client brand guidelines, where users could quickly access their courses and materials in an easy-to-navigate space that reflected the brand’s aesthetic. 

We employed many different strategies to engage these learners, including creating custom narrative animations where characters solved cyber security challenge examples in real time, giving learners a chance to test out their newfound skills in less-than-clear-cut real-life scenarios. 

We also created scripts for the organization’s subject matter experts to use in creating additional training materials and custom immersive exercises that tested what students had learned against real-world cyber security challenges. 

The end result was an engaging and on-brand set of courses that set students up for continuous professional development. 

Example 2: Training Courses for a Well-Known Social Media Network.

Jackrabbit LX worked with a major social media network to create highly customized and branded marketing courses. 

The challenge of this project was to stay on brand for the client while also implementing best practice in learning and development design and including robust LMS capabilities. 

To tackle this, we focused on transferring the brand’s video-focused format into the courses and employed a more lighthearted tone that fit the brand’s audience (for example, employing graphics with emojis.) At the same time, we also utilized a customized version of the Docebo learning management system to make sure the course implemented best practices. 

For example, gamification techniques informed by behavior science were used to reward users for completing sections of the course and encourage them to move to the next section. We also shot original video content based on scripts written with best practices in mind.

The result was a set of courses that kept the brand’s lighthearted look and feel while also offering an effective learning experience that fostered learner success. 

Example 3: Moving An Intensive In-Person Course Into An Online Format For An Ivy League School.

Let’s look at an example with a completely different brand and tone from the social media example. In this example, Jackrabbit LX worked with an Ivy League School of Education to create a professional learning experience where community leaders could become more involved in fostering better educational outcomes for local k-12 students. 

This program was originally an intensive face-to-face course that spanned entire days for one-two weeks. The challenge was to reimagine this class as an online course that offered learners an intensive introduction to their roles along with the tools needed to immediately begin making an impact. 

This project included custom text, video and motion graphics with branding appropriate to the university. We also facilitated an interview with the president of a major university to help create on-brand, accurate, and reputable material for the course. (This is an example of how Jackrabbit LX is able to seamlessly facilitate working with in-demand higher education faculty members and other busy individuals in order to create the resources needed while taking as little time as possible from their calendars.)

The end result was a professional, easy-to-navigate and interactive online course that maintained the original spirit and goals of the in-person course.

What Are Tips for Creating a Great Learning Experience? 

While there are many different theories and principles regarding LXD, here are some great tips to make sure that you are creating effective learning experiences. 

LXD Tip 1:

First, since LXD should be human-centered, one solid tip is to make sure that the learner always has as many choices as possible. This might involve thinking about the learner deeply and offering more choices regarding the kind of content used and different ways of processing the content. In one scenario, the learner may be prompted over a period of time to create their own playbook or job aid so they are applying new content to their own context. At the same time, that learner might be working with others through a case study in which they use new information to solve a novel problem. Making sure that your learner has choices is an important aspect of designing a great learning experience.

LXD Tip 2:

Second, a great learning experience design must motivate and engage. While instructional design focuses on the content, LX designers must find a way to intrinsically motivate learners in every way possible: emotionally, behaviorally, and cognitively. 

This might also include making sure that your LX incorporates elements like discussion or role-playing to make sure the learner is actively doing something of personal value rather than just passively consuming content. Other ways to make sure that learners are active include frequent low-stakes self assessment or projects that build toward a takeaway that is immediately useful in the learner’s life.

LXD Tip 3:

The third tip is to focus on social context. Human beings often learn most effectively in a social context, so it’s important to recognize the importance of social learning while designing learning experiences. Many LX designers are focused on understanding how to create and encourage entire learning communities, since this can help learners communicate and collaborate.

LXD Tip 4:

The last tip is to break learning experiences down into small chunks. Life can move quickly for learners, and microlearning can be a successful option for a good learning experience. Microlearning has emerged as a popular and effective learning design principle in recent years, due to its ability to provide learners with easily digestible and targeted information. It is particularly valuable in today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving business environment, where individuals must constantly learn new skills and knowledge to stay competitive. By delivering content in bite-sized chunks, microlearning enables learners to quickly and efficiently acquire knowledge, without the need for lengthy and time-consuming training sessions.

How To Create A Great Learning Experience Design?

At Jackrabbit LX, we know the world of learning experience design can be a tough one to navigate without a plan. That’s why we’ve created a unique process with five macro phases that can be used to solve any learning experience challenge. 

The steps of the process include:

Discover

In the Discover phase, we get to know the client and uncover anything critical to success, such as looking at competitors, factoring in client KPIs, gathering data about the current version of the program, looking at unique learner needs, deciding how to best work with subject matter experts, and more. This process gives us the big picture of what our partner needs for a successful outcome.

Clarify

In the Clarify phase of a project, we take what we’ve discovered in the first phase and start to make it functional and useful for the rest of the project. 

One thing that differentiates Jackrabbit LX is our focus on clearly quantifying our work and results for reporting purposes. 

The Discover and Clarify phases usually focus on the following deliverables: 

1. A Project Brief and a Design Document that clearly communicate any critical decisions about the program.
2. A “Core Evidence and Standards” document that explains all of the success metrics and quality standards that were discovered in the first phase of our process. This document is used as a checklist during course development to make sure our work stays on course and is meeting predetermined goals. 
3. A Project Roadmap that explains project timelines, workflow, roles and responsibilities, etc.

Prototype

In this phase of the process, we take the ideas and standards created in the previous stages and select a portion of one course that has each element we need to design and develop to complete our roadmap. This portion is designed first and becomes the prototype for our project. We use this prototype as a sample to test with learners and review with stakeholders. We then use any feedback to refine our design before doing anything at scale. The prototype serves as a reference point for the rest of the materials.

Playbook

Next, we create a playbook. The playbook is a collection of resources that contains everything needed to help us create courses at scale with our partners. The playbook includes things such as templates for design and development processes and best practices that can be used for each element of the course. Creating this playbook begins with deciding who the learners are, what their needs are, and the end-goal the client wants to achieve with the course. We then start to define the how of specific learning outcomes and assessments. 

This is followed by an in-depth look at all elements of the learning model (instruction, assessment, collaboration, etc.)

The playbook grows throughout the development process to accommodate a larger scale design and production effort. It ensures that we meet the critical goal of ensuring consistent quality of learning experience across an entire course (including media and activity types, assessment styles, look and feel, and more.)

Scale

The Scale phase of the process is where we really dive into course creation using the Prototype and the Playbook. At this point, we know exactly what should go into the product and what the end goal is, which allows for quick action.

During the full-scale production phase, project management and communication are important to keep track of all of the moving parts. Courses are created in stages and are required to meet certain benchmarks laid out in the Evidence and Standards Document. 

Jackrabbit LX follows this five step process to ensure that nothing is neglected or mishandled during the project creation timeline. Our process gives our clients clear insights and deliverables for each stage of the project, which fosters transparency, trust, and collaboration. 

How Jackrabbit LX Simplifies Learning Experience Design 

At Jackrabbit LX, we have a proven multi-phase process for creating human-centered, research-based experiences that both delight the learner and satisfy the performance standards of our clients.

Learning experience design offers an alternative to traditional teaching methods that often fall short in addressing the specific learning needs of individuals. It’s particularly effective in teaching complex topics by customizing the learning experience to match the learners’ unique needs. By adopting LXD, businesses and organizations can gain a fresh perspective on what their people need to know and do, and enable it in an engaging way.

Jackrabbit LX can help you create and design accessible and extraordinary learning experiences. Our team’s experience can provide unique insight into the learning experience design sector. We’re able to transform and galvanize organizations thanks to our process, where we create a custom roadmap to define your organization’s idea of success, prototype and iterate to design the learning experience, and then scale your program accordingly. 

Contact us to find out more about how Jackrabbit LX can clarify and execute your specific learning experience design goals.