When we think about the quality of workplace learning, we naturally tend to focus on the content.
Is it accurate? Is it relevant? Is it engaging? Does it cover everything employees need to know?
All important questions. But there’s another question that can determine whether any of that content actually makes a difference:
How easy is it for people to use?
Employees don’t experience workplace learning in a vacuum. Every day they’re using Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn and countless other digital products that have invested enormous amounts of time and money in making their platforms intuitive.
Those experiences have shaped our expectations.
We expect to find things quickly. We expect navigation to make sense. We expect recommendations to be relevant. And we expect the next step to be obvious.
Then we arrive at some workplace learning platforms and suddenly we’re expected to hunt through menus, remember passwords, click through multiple screens and decipher what we’re supposed to do next.
That isn’t simply a technology problem. It’s a learning problem.
Friction can kill good learning
One of the ideas that stayed with me was just how quickly friction can undermine otherwise excellent learning.
You might have invested heavily in creating brilliant content, but if someone struggles to find it or has to navigate an unnecessarily complicated journey to access it, you’ve already lost some of their attention.
And attention is hardly something most employees have in abundance.
People are trying to learn between meetings, emails, Teams messages, deadlines and everything else competing for their time.
Learning experience design therefore isn’t only about making something look attractive. It’s about removing unnecessary barriers between the learner and the thing they need to do.
Sometimes that means something remarkably simple: fewer clicks.
It can mean clearer navigation, better signposting, shorter journeys and making the next action immediately obvious.
Every additional step asks something from the learner. Every screen has to earn its place.
Stop assuming everything needs to be remembered
Another important distinction is between information people need to remember and information they simply need to be able to find.
This feels particularly relevant as organisations continue to create increasingly large libraries of learning content.
Not everything belongs in someone’s long-term memory.
There are things employees genuinely need to know and recall quickly. In those cases, techniques such as active participation, feedback, spacing and retrieval practice can help strengthen retention.
But there is also plenty of information people might only need occasionally.
In those situations, perhaps the better learning experience isn’t a 45-minute course designed to make someone memorise something.
Perhaps it’s a two-minute resource they can find exactly when they need it.
That requires L&D teams to think beyond courses and programmes and consider the wider environment in which learning happens.
Sometimes the best learning solution might simply be helping someone access the right information at the right moment.
What happens when AI can create unlimited learning content?
Then there’s AI.
Generative AI has dramatically reduced the time required to produce learning materials.
Give an AI tool a topic and it can quickly generate course structures, quizzes, scenarios, scripts, summaries and first drafts.
That’s incredibly useful.
But it also creates a new problem.
If everyone can produce competent learning content quickly and cheaply, we’re going to end up with an awful lot of it.
Clare described the risk as a “sea of competence”.
I think that’s a useful way of framing what could happen next.
AI can help organisations create huge volumes of material that is perfectly acceptable. Grammatically correct. Logically structured. Factually reasonable.
And completely forgettable.
The challenge for L&D may therefore shift from “How do we create enough content?” to “How do we create something worth paying attention to?”
We don’t need more learning. We need better experiences.
This is where the human contribution becomes even more important.
AI can accelerate research. It can organise information. It can generate ideas and produce useful first drafts.
But humans still bring creativity, judgement, storytelling, humour, empathy and an understanding of organisational context.
Those things matter because workplace learning isn’t competing only with other workplace learning.
It’s competing with everything else on someone’s screen.
That doesn’t mean every compliance module needs to feel like the latest Netflix drama.
But it does mean we should acknowledge the expectations people bring with them when they enter a digital learning environment.
Clare uses the phrase “thumb-stopping learning”. It’s a deliberately ambitious standard.
What would make someone stop scrolling?
What would make them curious?
What would make them want to click?
And once you’ve earned that attention, what would make them stay?
Those are questions that marketers, designers and consumer technology companies have been asking for years. L&D can learn from them.
Don’t start with the platform
There’s another trap here.
When organisations want to improve learning experience, it’s tempting to begin by looking for new technology. But more features don’t automatically create better experiences. Sometimes they create more complexity. The starting point should be the learner.
What are they trying to accomplish?
What gets in their way?
What information do they actually need?
Where and when are they likely to need it?
What is the simplest possible journey between identifying that need and being able to do something about it?
Only then should we start thinking about platforms, tools and features.
Technology should support the experience rather than define it.
The real test happens back at work
Ultimately, however, learner experience isn’t about clicks, interfaces or even engagement.
Those things are important because they help us reach the real goal.
Behaviour.
What does somebody need to do differently as a result of the learning?
Can they have a better conversation with an employee?
Can they use a new piece of software?
Can they recognise a potential safety issue?
Can they manage someone more effectively?
Can they make a better decision?
Can they solve a problem they couldn’t solve before?
That’s where learning earns its value.
And it’s why the conversation about learner experience needs to extend beyond whether somebody enjoyed a course or completed a module.
The real measure of the experience is what happens afterwards.
Designing for the learner
As AI makes creating content faster and easier, I suspect learner experience will become an increasingly important differentiator.
Organisations aren’t going to struggle to produce information.
They’re going to struggle to earn attention.
The L&D teams that succeed will be the ones that understand the difference.
They’ll remove unnecessary friction. They’ll make learning easier to find and use. They’ll distinguish between what people need to remember and what they simply need to access. They’ll use AI to accelerate the work without allowing it to flatten creativity.
And, most importantly, they’ll design backwards from the behaviour they want to see in the workplace.
Because the goal isn’t to create more learning.
It’s to help people do something better.
Bill Banham is a Director at The Learning Network and host of The Voices of The Learning Network podcast.