How To Leverage Design Thinking Process In Your LMS

Design thinking has proven to be a great way to organize critical thinking when adopted accurately. It’s a process that works not only for designers but leaders as well. 

Take onboarding training, for instance. When you onboard new employees, you check upon them to take an update or feedback. If it is brought to your knowledge that your new hires need help finding the training material on the LMS but don’t want to disturb their managers, how will you tackle the situation? 

As a Learning & Development Manager, you know that you need critical thinking. While there are easy fixes like trying to make searches more effective, there is an option to reorganize your entire content library. But do you want to put all your mental energy into doing that? 

That’s where design thinking can do wonders. It involves a human-centered approach to eradicate the problems instead of finding quick solutions.  

Design Thinking works for all LMS ranging from Looop to Talent. Here’s how you can leverage the process. 

1. Empathize 

The first step is stepping into the shoes of your workforce. Taking onboarding example only, think about the ways in which they might search for the training content. The keywords they might type, the locations they might look. Try imitating your employee’s actions. Applying critical thinking at this stage will help you understand the scale of the problem.

The chances are that you might find that your content is easily accessible. Then, all you need to do is shift the content to the main dashboard, and you’re good to go. 

2. Define

Once you’ve identified the core of the problem, you can now define it for your workforce in a single simple sentence. Make sure you mention your observations and result in a precise manner in your sentences. 

Share it with others in your company and understand if it makes sense to them. It will help keep all of you on one page. 

3. Ideate

Now that you and your workforce have a pretty clear idea about the challenge you are tackling, it’s now time to identify various solutions to that one problem. Brainstorm your wildest ideas. Note them down. Keep in mind that you need your ideas to be inclusive and accessible. 

Make sure that you review your learning management system during this stage. It’ll act as a great reference point and help you verify that you are not missing out on something obvious. Discuss with your IT professionals if anything was updated or changed in the LMS in the recent past. 

4. Prototype 

A prototype is a sample that acts as proof that your solutions work perfectly. Once you have your ideas, it is now time to create their prototypes. Always start small when it comes to prototypes. Something that will not require you to ask for any additional budget or approval. A good example for our case would be an explainer video. 

The main idea behind developing a prototype is to understand how viable your solutions are, how many changes are needed, and how you can make your solutions more effective. 

5. Test 

The most important step is testing. If you don’t test your prototype, the entire purpose of creating them in the first place dissolves. Run your solutions through your workforce. Ask them to share critical feedback. You need to make sure that you are noting it all down and incorporating them later. 

Testing is crucial because when you implement a new idea, you don’t have any data to showcase the effectiveness of your solutions. Testing will help you understand if you have failed or succeeded. If you have failed, you’ll know your areas of improvement. 

Once you have proof through testing, you can easily scale your ideas. 

Conclusion 

When you’re using design thinking, don’t be afraid of feedback and changes. It is this feedback that’ll help make content in your LMS more accessible and your software more user-friendly.