User Experience (UX) is an integral part of modern Instructional Design, yet the divergence of both has often been overlooked.

However, with the rise of the Learning Experience Designer as evidence, UX has become an important part of the Instructional Design toolbox. It’s only recently we’ve started to understand how important it is to gain a solid understanding of UX principles to improve our design. The prominence of technology and eLearning have certainly established UX as a valuable skill set and cemented its value in our methodology. So with UX and Instructional design sharing many common objectives in impacting human behavior, it’s a logical — and complementary — topic to learn more about.

Join our UX Playlist and learn from a talented group of speakers about the convergence of ID and UX.

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Session 1: Using Virtual Whiteboarding and Design Thinking Techniques on Your Instructional Design Team: A Case Study of Process Improvement Initiatives for eLearning

During this session, we will discuss how Instructional Design teams can use virtual whiteboarding software to collaborate on hard discussions and map out ideas through Design Thinking exercises. The case study of designing process improvements for an eLearning team will be shown - the step by step process of what our team did to understand what the underlying process problems were, our existing processes, and our ideas on how to make these better, all mapped out and captured in documentation. Abstract initiatives such as process improvement on a team don't have to be so scary - this session will show how to work through something like this step by step and make it more enjoyable.

Abstract initiatives such as process improvement on a team don't have to be so scary - this session will show how to work through something like this step by step and make it more enjoyable.

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📷In this session, Monica will be discussing lessons learned from building an educational app for adult learners. What worked, how we failed and how it's similar to instructional design.

Monica is an educator by trade and by heart. Working in higher education, ed-tech startups, and nonprofits, she's learned that knowledge is the currency of the world. So it is up to us to create the best learning experiences for our audiences.

So far in 2019, Monica has worked on the following:

BE MORE Lite- An educational app that teaches professionals how to measurably reduce their bias.

UX for ID- A FREE guide for instructional designers interested in learning about user experience (UX) or learning experience design (LXD).

The Learn By Design School - Making it easier for online learning entrepreneurs to build online learning opportunities for others.

A learning curation platform for corporations

Session 3: Learning is a Product, Think Like a Product Manager

Speaker: Matthew Daniel
Wednesday, September 18 | 8a PT/11a ET

Our learners are changing. They think and act like consumers. As consumers, their expectations around the quality of their workplace experiences – from their office space, to benefits enrollments, to learning, have changed dramatically. The skills we need as learning professionals have to continue to evolve as our learners do – we have to see our learning as products. Our tools and methods around really good content development aren’t enough, we have to deliver experiences and look to the field of user experience (UX) to grow our skillsets. Due to our own biases, we often design training for ourselves, but when we look to the field of UX, we should embrace the phrase “you are not the user.” The tools of UX, like design thinking, personas, journey mapping, and usability studies, will help us to continue to deliver on the quality of instruction we expect and the experience our learners expect.

The tools of UX, like design thinking, personas, journey mapping, and usability studies, will help us to continue to deliver on the quality of instruction we expect and the experience our learners expect.

Session 4: Creating Amazing User Experiences: Let's Get Inspired!

Friday, September 27 | 6a PT/9a ET

📷Designing great user experiences for your learners is critical to the success of how they engage, utilize content, tools, apps and focus on the task at hand. This session will break down what's important in designing great UX, provide you with resources to get you started and inspired from mobile to desktop and beyond. We'll discuss design strategies, what works and what doesn’t, how to plan & prototype and we’ll analyze several great examples. You'll get 10+ resources for taking your skills to the next level, building inspiration and growing.

We’ll dive into several apps including:

- Adobe XD : Quickly get started designing UX for learning, prototyping and collecting feedback
- Notability for brainstorming + sketching
- Google Forms to document feedback
- Dropbox Paper can make it easier for you to share and collect feedback
- Unscripted Live Demo: Demonstrating the UX process with Wireframing

The UX Playlist