In order to create a user-friendly learning experience for your employees, you have to consider a lot of factors. A small sample of these includes: how easy your courses are to find, how familiar the system feels to its users, and how quickly tasks can be completed on your system without outside instruction.
At the top-level, this is why investing in a user-friendly LMS, perhaps one created by a company that invests a lot in User Experience research is a vital part of improving the learning experience you offer, which will in turn increase completion rates.
Let’s take a look at how this works in a bit more detail. Here are the top 6 ways a user-friendly LMS can impact compliance training completion rates in your organisation.
Holding learners’ attention
Think of the time you spend on the internet. If you Google something and click on a search result, how long does it take for you to determine whether or not this page actually has the information you need? For many of us, the answer is as little as five seconds. While using an LMS for compliance training is a less voluntary use of our time than Googling something of interest, the principle is similar.
If your learners can’t easily navigate their way through your system, they are far more likely to not even reach the courses they need to undertake, much less complete them. The longer employees have to spend searching for their compliance training courses, the less engaged they’ll be when they do find them, and the more likely they will be to either abandon them part way through or not pay attention and fail to meet the required standards.
Creating easier access to information
This leads us onto the next point: ease of access. Given the importance of compliance training to both your organisation and the individuals undertaking it, making the courses easy to access is vital to your completion rates. One of the ways you can do this is by investing in an LMS with a learner dashboard which clearly presents your learners with their upcoming and completed courses on the first page that loads once they’ve logged in.
A user-friendly LMS will promote the needs of your organisation in a way that meets the needs of your learners. Additional features like gamification and leaderboards can be a great way to encourage engagement, but when it comes to completion rates, simple is often the best way forward. Clean, simple, and easy-to-navigate design lends itself to the easiest User Experience which will help you on your way to improving completion rates.
Tapping into learners’ motivations
One of the most insightful parts of developing a user-friendly LMS is conducting the research into learners’ motivations. Everything from wanting to develop themselves to taking time out of their working day to working towards a promotion can drive learners to undertake courses on their LMS. With compliance training, however, the motivation is perhaps a little simpler: it has to be done.
Why then is it that so many organisations struggle with compliance completion rates? Well, the answer is likely to sit within the design of the LMS they’re using. Understanding the motivations to learn, including their learning objectives and developing skills in new areas of your organisation, allows you to prioritise the information available with the least amount of effort required.
Prompting them with notifications
Notifications are nothing new in our digital-heavy world. They are used by apps like Facebook and Instagram to encourage us to spend more time there. In principle, it works very similarly on a user-friendly LMS. Notifications are used on these systems for a number of reasons. The compulsion to check and/or clear notifications is one of UX’s oldest tricks. Create a red bubble to alert someone of a notification, and it will draw a user’s attention until it’s gone.
Notifications are a great way to inform learners that something either needs actioning or has been successfully completed. In-app notifications aren’t the only important part of this process though. Email notifications driven from your LMS are also a great way to increase completion rates as they prompt your employees to complete training that is due soon.
Allowing freedom of access with a design fit for multiple devices
This brings us to the anytime, anywhere philosophy of eLearning. Alongside email notifications, which could be seen or received on any device where the user is logged in, choosing to use an LMS that is mobile-ready allows your learners to access their compliance training on any number of devices. This goes a long way to improving completion rates as it reduces the chances that learners will forget about their upcoming deadlines in the transfer between a mobile device and an HQ-based desktop.
A big part of creating or using a user-friendly LMS is also allowing learners to access their training from other geographical locations, whether from home or overseas. Flexible and remote working are on the rise, particularly within UK-based organisations, so allowing this access away from your main office(s) will significantly aid completion rates across your compliance training.
Shortening courses to improve engagement and completion rates
Something we’ve spoken about before, microlearning, is an important part of the completion rate puzzle. Breaking up your eLearning and compliance training into Microlearning chunks ticks many of the boxes above. It holds learners’ attention by allowing them to dedicate five minutes at a time rather than half an hour to an hour. It taps into their motivations by encouraging a greater sense of achievement.
Microlearning, when housed in a user-friendly LMS, will lead learners on personalised pathways, encouraging them to move from one Microlearning chunk of learning to the next. This form of eLearning is also primed and ready for use across a wide range of devices and requires a lower level of internet access than longer courses. Essentially, investing in microlearning is the cherry on top of the UX-friendly cake when it comes to implementing a fulfilling learning experience.
There you have it, 6 ways implementing a user-friendly LMS can not only impact but improve your compliance training completion rates. When it comes to learning engagement and completion, experience is everything.
Written by Claire Moloney Claire is an enthusiastic and meticulous content writer whose passion is to support growth and continual learning for everyone.
