Mobile Pocket Learning Guide

Designing for employee learning experiences on-the-go

🤔 THE CHALLENGE

Tackling compliance training

During my time at a consultancy, I worked with one of the top four banks in Australia to tackle compliance training for employees.

Employees were not complying with policies and regulations even after they've completed compliance training. The business found that employees simply weren't retaining their learning because it was time-consuming and not engaging.

(Please note that the details showcased have been edited and anonymized to maintain confidentiality.)



🙎 MY ROLE

UX Design Lead & Facilitator

I co-led the research with employees, facilitated ideation sessions, prototyped and tested an early stage concept with the bank's innovation team.

The outcome was a validated design for the compliance and HR teams to build and integrate with their existing learning management system.

✏️ USER RESEARCH

Learning pain points

On a mission to redesign the learning experience, I spoke with 6 employees to understand their experience and challenges with compliance training.


🎓 Learning is inaccessible

Compliance training materials are confidential which means employees need to complete them in an authenticated (logged in) environment on the computer. Because learning was not accessible, employees had to complete it after their commute home.


🤷 Not relevant to me or my KPI

Employees often found some of the compliance topics irrelevant to their daily roles, and that made it hard to retain the learning materials.


😫 Forced to learn

When employees feel forced to learn about compliance, this creates a 'push' rather than 'pull' learning experience. They feel 'pushed' to learn rather than driven by an intrinsict motivation to learn.

✍ FRAMING THE PROBLEM

How might we...


HMW design relevant and contextual learning experiences to increase knowledge retention so that employees can make more informed compliance decisions?

🖍️ IDEATION WORKSHOP

Reimagining the learning experience


I started off the ideation workshop by walking key stakeholders through the problem statement and research insights.

With a simple Crazy 8s exercise, I asked each team to share back their sketches and dot vote on their favourite ideas.

💻 DESIGNING THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Mobile pocket learning guide

This design addresses two main pain point areas: making learning accessible and increasing knowledge retention.

With a pocket guide, employees can easily access learning on-the-go as they are commuting into work, for example.

While everyone learns differently, having multi-modal content responds to employees' different learning modes - learn by listening (audio), by watching (video), by doing (taking notes or trying it out), or all of the above.

When employees are engaged, they are much more likely to retain their learning.

Finally, the content needed to be revisited to use more relevant examples employees can relate to.



Proof of concept design for the mobile learning pocket guide.

📈 DESIGN IMPACT

A more compliant business

When employees are engaged and retain what they learn, this means a more compliant business. The key metrics to measure are the number of compliance breaches and pass rates of the compliance training.

Although this MVP only focused on compliance training, this will be the new foundation to the organization's learning experience and eventually be scaled to learning across the organization.



☕️ REFLECTIONS

A universal learning framework


I recently tackled a similar problem space in a different domain where users weren't retaining any learning and as a result, constantly relied on support teams.

Reflecting on all the user research I've done, I noticed the same emerging themes around motivation, learning context (desktop vs on-the-go) and modes (learning by reading, watching and/or doing). These behaviours build the foundation to engagement and knowledge retention.

Putting all this together, this helped me shape a learning framework which I now use to design other learning experiences and is applicable to any other domain.





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