The Soul of User Experience and “Hit Record” Training

User experience has beenimportant for a long time, and not just in eLearning.

In 1957 Memphis, JimStewart had a dream. Although working a bank job during the day, he had visionsof starting a record company. A country fiddle player, he loved playing andsharing music. Very early on he decided that it was important to release musicthat people were passionate about and wanted to hear, and not just music thatwas “safe.”

That was difficult atthe time because Jim was white and he loved the R&B soul music that wasbeing created and performed by the African-American community. Despiteobjections from many white friends and family members, Jim went ahead with hisdream and, with his sister, Estelle, founded the now legendary Stax Records. Hemade his customers a priority and broke down walls to work alongsideAfrican-Americans to bring us great artists like Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes.

Figure 1: Stax Records was a walk outside Jim Stewart’scomfort zone that paid off

There are many lessonsin Jim Stewart’s courage to launch Stax and we can learn much about userexperience from him. As Stewart and the Stax success proved, you must goto the users to understand what their needs and desires are. Youshould beware of playing it safe by repeating your same longstanding process,and you need to be willing to take a risk so you can learn from your mistakes.

On the surface it seemsvery logical that you should understand your users, customers, or learners, butunfortunately it is commonplace to overlook them. In the world of training thishappens when we deprioritize learners because of factors like budget orinaccurate assumptions and then the result is usually a resounding thud withusers. Training developers must exerciseaudience empathy in every effort so as to understand learners’ needsto help them do their jobs better. This usually means spending time with thetarget audience to understand their world and how they consume information. Ittakes humility, but empathy requires the developer to make the audience’spriorities their priorities even if it means taking a fresh perspective on theoriginal goals of the project. The end user is the key stakeholder in anyproject so it only makes sense to give them a clear and strong voice at thetable. Jim Stewart was in the streets of Memphis alongside his potentialcustomers and could hear how soul music could break down color barriers and reacha wide audience. Before he released his first record he knew the audience wasthere.

That being said, hischoice meant change. For him to execute change he would need to leave hiscomfort zone, which has been learning creator’s challenge. When mobile devicesstarted to become more ubiquitous about a decade ago, and training began tomove to phones, developers and designers simply moved eLearning modules thatwere made for desktop screens to the small screen. Understandably, the userexperience was terrible. Page-turning training with lots of text was squeezedonto the smallest of stages and called “mobile learning.” We need to evaluate alltraining to determine the best delivery method that will resonate withlearners. Is on-time, on-demand performance support needed? Then mobile devicescould very well be the best choice. Is mentor-style training required? Perhapsaugmented reality could deliver a powerful experience. The point is not to putthe technology first but to consider emerging technologies in your objectives.Sometimes you must ignore your “muscle memory” and admit that the old processwill actually hinder the training and not help it. And if your new trainingdoes involve change, your learners will be open to the new idea if you showthem the value of the change. That’s why the records being released from Staxwere being bought not only by African-Americans but by white listeners, too.Their ears and hearts told them it was exceptional music and it was worthlooking beyond the musicians’ skin color to purchase a new 45.

It was risky for JimStewart to start a record company, not only for the reasons above but becauseit was a competitive and sometimes shady business. Every time he released arecord it was a roll of the dice. To minimize risk, Stewart opened a recordstore in the recording studio and played their releases both in the store andon the front sidewalk to gauge the responses of the customers before manufacturinglots of vinyl records and sending the song out to radio stations. That was his“user testing.” User experience benefits a great deal by conducting usertesting which means delivering the product on a small scale and getting user feedback.You can do this with a prototype or proof of concept to potential users. Letthem use the proposed training in the context of the full build of the solutionand measure their interactions and responses. Making mistakes on a new type oftraining on a smaller scale can save time and money by not making those samemistakes when delivering to the wider audience. Take the risk, but make it a measuredrisk.

Understand and listen toyour learners. Don’t be afraid to leave your comfort zone. Minimize your riskby starting small and launching a prototype of your product. All of these stepscan help lead to a more powerful user experience. Jim Stewart realized what ittakes to deliver excellence in user experience design (UX) and we benefit everytime we hear “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” on the web or the radio. Bymaking user experience a priority, training professionals can increase theirchances of releasing a “hit record” to their learners.

From the Editor: Learn More about UX in Upcoming Online Event

Scott McCormick will bepresenting in The eLearning Guild’s upcoming Spotlight on August 1, ExploringUser Experience Design. Scott will present Getting User ExperienceRight: The Keys to UX Success. Other presenters at the event include LynneMcNamee (Lone Armadillo Marketing Agency), Melissa Milloway (Amazon), and BeccaWilson (IBM).

This live online event, available for free toeLearning Guild members with packages, will discuss practical ways to useapproaches from the UX field in your own work, review techniques and strategiesthat will help you better understand your audience, and look at ways to designand test solutions based on that information. Registernow!