Conquering common L&D challenges with customer-focused research [Product Update]

Last year we set out on a journey to help our customers overcome some of their biggest L&D challenges. A year on, we couldn’t have known just how crucial that research would turn out to be. Let’s explore the journey that led us up to one of Elucidat biggest releases to date.

What we heard through the L&D grapevine

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do at Elucidat. To ensure their success, we focus on helping them overcome the online training challenges they face on a daily basis.

Over the last year, we were hearing more and more about the needs of our customer base, as well as the wider L&D community. Common themes we were hearing:

• Wanting to get novice authors up to speed with producing elearning quicker
• Wanting to produce online training faster, without sacrificing on quality
• Wanting to open up authoring beyond the L&D team whilst maintaining central control

With an increased demand of elearning, these needs become more and more critical.

Working from the ground up

Although we had a pretty good idea of ‘what’ these issues were, we needed to dig deeper to determine ‘how’ we were going to solve them. Our user experience team got on the case – speaking directly to some of our biggest, global customers.

Following three rounds of interviews, speaking with 25 customers from 12 organizations, we gained a wealth of knowledge.

Something we found surprising was that a lot of authors creating digital learning were doing this on top of their ‘day job’ – i.e. they are not learning design experts! These novice authors lacked the time to produce digital training that they were really proud of, and found they could be spending weeks trying to finish one project in between other work.

What did we learn?

Following the research phase, we realized we needed a solution for:

• Novice authors
• Time-poor users
• Dispersed authors, e.g. factory/shop floor, department heads, international locations
• And subject matter experts (SMEs)

To help:

• Improve speed to competency
• Improve the quality and consistency of elearning output
• And to make it easier to collaborate with SMEs

Using what we had learned, we built a prototype tool that would guide users through producing elearning at an increased rate. Authors received recommendations based on their project goals and were able to choose from a ‘template’ to start from.

Each template came with in-line learning design guidance and a downloadable storyboard. The aim was for the prototype to do the heavy lifting, so the user could focus on making the best of their content.

The feedback we got was an exciting step forward:

“The power of having recommendations based on a few simple questions removed the need to check every template to manually find the most appropriate template.”

“I love how you give these options because sometimes you don’t know where to start.”

“I think this is going to accelerate people to hit the mark.”

We saw a rise in speed and efficiency as a direct result, as well as novice authors producing content they thought was out of their skillset.

“[Authors] could get a course built and out in 20 minutes and it wouldn’t be the usual boring stuff.”

It was an instant hit with our research group. Learning managers “couldn’t wait” to share it with their teams. It was time to make it happen. Development began on this new feature, which came to be known as Learning Accelerator.

Launching in uncertain times

We knew we were planning something that would add huge value to businesses wanting to scale up their elearning – what we didn’t know was that just around the corner there was a skyrocketing demand for it!

COVID-19 resulted in organizations flocking to digital learning, some with tonnes of face-to-face content to convert. New challenges were appearing, both for our customers and the wider community, including:

• A need to take classroom training and convert it into elearning
• A need face-to-face trainers, and those not familiar with elearning to produce it – quickly and at a decent quality
• A need to ensure compliance in rapidly changing times
• A need to adapt to a changing workforce dynamic – office-based to remote

With more people needing to produce digital training to keep up with this new set of challenges, it’s never been more important to ensure authors have a simple and efficient authoring process.

So, we’re really pleased that Learning Accelerator has come at such a business-critical time for so many of our customers. Face-to-face content can be converted quickly and easily, by anyone anywhere, without sacrificing on quality or best practice design.

See a full breakdown of Learning Accelerator here.

What’s next?

Be among the first to test-drive Learning Accelerator, and start producing elearning 4x faster. Book a personalized demo for you and the team, and we’ll get your free trial off to a flying start.

Already an Elucidat customer? Three free Learning Accelerator templates are in your account now – ready to explore! If you’re ready to unlock the full feature, talk to your Account Manager. It includes a growing library of over 20 templates and a powerful recommendation engine to find the right template for your next project.