~ Winston Churchill
A Case Study
The first impression the company was making on its new hires was based on a request for the completion of an impossible task. While originally the LMS may have been designed with employee success in mind, a lack of content curation had left the system vulnerable to the ravages of entropy. The LMS structure now ensured user failure. Lacking the time to curate the content themselves, some experienced team members had even taken to using the Herculean task as a litmus test of sort - leading to new hire retention problems. The situation presented a perfect sandbox. The more painful the current system, the more open teams are to accepting the challenges change presents. And, of course, the bigger the mess, the more obvious the improvement. I was excited to begin.
Pain prompts change
The LMS users worked in a resource-rich environment. There were often too many resources available that might potentially hold an answer to the problem du jour. It was challenging for a user to identify which resource would be best suited to address the current need. To allow speedy identification of the best resource, we added a Resources category. Resources offered links to the many different content centers. It also provided descriptions of the type of content offered by each portal as well as the intended audience for each.
Finally, the less dynamic New Hire training content was moved from the top to the bottom. New Hire modules were only accessed during the first few weeks on the job. Moving them down and out of the way improved user experience by decreasing the amount of page-scroll required to view the more dynamic categories that provided ongoing and frequently updated training.
The work pays off
Visit the prototype
~ Amanda Mason