It’s a familiar story to many in the e-learning design space: You kick off your project and your client or subject matter expert (SME) hands you a mountain of content. Your task is to create a course that makes an impact — not just by hitting the right outcomes, but by eliciting positive responses from learners — all within a 30-minute scope.

You begin with a content workshop with the SME to better understand what content she feels is critical to convey. At the end of your workshop, you have a better idea of what the course is about, but there’s much more content than you can cover in the scope.

Your design work begins. You craft narratives for your content and build in interactivity. But, as you try to find a place for all the information, it sometimes feels as if you’re stitching a quilt from mismatched fabric scraps. Still, you soldier on and produce something that you think covers all the content and achieves the objectives.

But does it? Far too often, our training falls flat, resulting in a content-heavy, page-turning experience. Even worse, it doesn’t move the needle on behavior or performance in any meaningful way.

As designers, it’s our job to lead our clients through the process of creating effective and engaging learning solutions. But all too often, the process we use leads us astray and inadvertently takes us down a path of designing to the content, rather than designing to the need. The good news is, we’ve discovered a simple way to reset the table so that business sponsors, SMEs, development teams, and, most importantly, learners are all happier and get more from the work we do.

Where do we go wrong?

Experts, while intrinsically familiar with the subject at hand, don’t always make the best teachers. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important to a new trainee, and how training content can best support actual performance. To most experts, everything in a training program is important. From a learner’s point of view, however, the scope of content needn’t be so broad.

Yes, we need our SMEs and their expertise. But we don’t need it right away. But if we get in their heads too soon, we set ourselves up to design to the content rather than to the desired outcomes.

What should we do instead?

It’s time to ditch your preconceived notions that limit your e-learning development to, “What does this course need to cover?” and instead, ask yourself “What does this course need to accomplish?” In other words, rather than focusing on what learners need to know, as designers we should focus on what learners need to do after the training and what learning experience will get them there. Asking some key questions will get you to the right place:

• What’s the business need?
• What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
• What do learners need to do?
• What do they need to know?

Then, use Post-it notes or hand-drawn sketches to prototype the ideal learning experience and indicate which content topics to cover and where. 

But what about the content?

Ah, I haven’t forgotten about the content, and nor should you. But keep a lid on that content until after you get your design deliverable locked down. Here’s why I’m pushing for this: Waiting makes gathering your content so much easier.

Rather than gathering content and then having to sort through and organize it into meaningful learning chunks, you can instead go into the content gathering process with a much clearer picture of what you need. In fact, you can build content gathering templates with specific questions that you can send to SMEs to complete. And guess what? SMEs love it. No longer do they have to guess at what information and level of detail they need to provide.

So how does that help me design better?

The subtle shift in starting your project with a design workshop rather than a content workshop has a profound and liberating impact. Let me illustrate.

What would your design look like if your stated goal was to teach learners about the company’s information security policy? You might begin with a few screens to introduce the importance of the policy and to orient learners to the structure of the policy. Then, you might present learners with some scenario-based questions to practice applying the policy in different situations.

What would your design look like if you knew the problem was that employees fail to recognize and avoid or report breaches of information security and that the training needs to help reduce the number of breaches? You might design a game-based environment where learners “spot” risks and hazards. For each identified hazard, you deliver content that explains why something is a hazard and what to do about it.

Can you see the difference? Can you feel the difference?

In the first approach, the content is the primary focus and the exercises secondary. The second approach, driven by a business need and an understanding of what learners need to do, models and builds awareness of a desired behavior. The content is secondary — it’s there to support the learner through the exercises and help them know what hazards they may encounter and what to do once they’ve spotted a hazard.

Great, so how do I do it?

This approach can be successful with any client as long as you, the designer, take responsibility for facilitating the process.

Kickoff. In a kickoff meeting with the client team, describe the overall process you’ll be following throughout the project, the meetings you’ll need to have, the desired outcomes of those meetings and who should attend.

Design Workshop. Schedule your design workshop to include all key stakeholders with a vested interest in the design. Create and send a questionnaire that your client team can complete as pre-work so that they come to the meeting already having thought through the business needs, target audience, metrics, post-training behaviors and goals, and content topic areas.

Use your design workshop to map out what people need to do/how they need to behave, what mistakes they make and what kind of information they need to be successful. Then, move to design. Get the whole client team discussing the kinds of exercises that would help teach the skills and reinforce the behaviors. Do some Post-it-note-prototyping and capture your output in a design document.

Content Workshop. Once you have your design in place, you’re finally ready for your content workshop. Create and send to your SME a content gathering worksheet where you outline the topics of content you identified as part of your design workshop. Let the SME complete this in advance of your content workshop. Then, use your time during the meeting to get any clarifications needed and to make sure you and the SME are clear on what content will and won’t appear in the course and what content will appear as additional resources.

Does it work?

Leading with a design workshop enables you to develop a design framework tied to the client’s business need, that you can then use to focus your content gathering on what content is needed to populate that framework. The result is a more thoughtful learning experience that’s focused on solving the actual business need, versus delivering content for content’s sake.