ACE’s Fitness Nutrition Specialist Course Update
In response to valuable feedback from our adult learners and to address technical challenges arising from hefty content modules, ACE's Fitness Nutrition Specialist course underwent a comprehensive update. The revamp involved strategically breaking down the course content into smaller, more manageable modules. This not only aims to tackle technical issues, ensuring smoother navigation and seamless access to essential information without compromising the quality of the educational content.
My Role:
Project leader, UX Designer, Learning Design Coordinator
Project timeline:
December 2022-February 2023
User Feedback in the Form of Helpdesk Tickets
Fitness Nutrition is a course that ACE has been offering for many years. Like all courses offered in our learning management system, it has technical issues from time to time. The graph below illustrates the workflow for resolving technical issues for learners. Through this workflow, myself and the customer service team were able to identify Fitness Nutrition as a course that consistently had the same technical issues—learners were passing quizzes, but their quiz data was not updating in the LMS (learning management system).
Identifying the problem
Learners' quiz results were not being registered, causing a lot of frustration on their side and not providing a good user experience.
As data from the helpdesk tickets was gathered, we were able to identify a breakdown between the learning management system software—LearnUpon—and the software used to create the course—Articulate Storyline.
To visualize this, I created a learner's journey as they navigate from their MyACE site all the way to receiving their completion certification to identify where the issue is stemming.
Possible Solutions
Because this issue was affecting customers regularly, it was imperative to find solutions quickly, so an agile approach was necessary.
Since we knew that the software was having a hard time communicating, an initial solution was to add a 60-second loading screen before the quiz results page to give the systems more time to communicate.
Outcomes: This reduced issues by around 25%, but ultimately wasn’t a final solution.
A second solution was to redesign the structure of the course, as the current course featured two massive modules.
Re-Organizing the Course
I conducted an audit of the current course to identify ways in which we could split it to make sense from a user experience standpoint and also to alleviate the technical issues we have been experiencing with quiz results. With the help of two SMEs, the content split shown below was approved.
The idea was to divide the course into four modules from the previous two. This was done to enhance the learner experience by reducing the amount of content needed to be completed before taking each quiz. It was also done to decrease the amount of data stored in each module by reducing the size of the quizzes by 50%.
Course Updates
The content of the course wasn’t changed or updated from the previous version, but UX elements were added to enhance the learners' experience by bringing more clarity to the course.
Below are screenshots taken of the course that highlight a few UX changes in which I led the design and implementation.
Old Course
New Course
Module Description
The module description was updated to not only represent the content included in the module but also to provide technical instructions on navigating through the module.
Course Menu
Since the content was split between more modules, the amount of content in each module was significantly reduced, allowing for an easily digestible course menu.
Quiz Slide
Since the quiz was the main factor in making this update, I paid close attention to setting up the quiz page to help learners avoid technical errors and provide them with as much information as possible without it becoming overwhelming. Icons were added to help learners associate graphics with the instructions. A checkmark was included to prompt learners to take action and linger on the page for just a couple of seconds longer before starting the quiz.
eBook
A link to the associated eBook has been added to the beginning of each module (not included in the previous version of the course) to help learners keep track of the text associated with the content in that specific module. This feature aids learners in staying within the module without needing to reference the syllabus.
Outcomes
We have seen a 77% reduction in helpdesk tickets related to quiz results for this course.
We have also observed a 62% decrease in customer service calls related to this course