Online Learning Lessons: Own Your Customer Experience

Who would have thought a year ago that we'd see the massive shift toward online learning that we're seeing now? And for you parents out there, are we having fun yet?

(Photo credit: Dan-Cristian Pădureț via Unsplash)

For the past 2 1/2 years the team at the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (aka PADI, the largest scuba diver training organization) worked on a massive refresh of their global online learning platform, and we learned some things that might be relevant to other organizations today.

This is the first in what will be a series of posts to share what I've learned in the hope that it helps other organizations make the shift quickly and successfully.

Today I'm hearing more from the media (and friends with kids) about college students taking gap years, families shifting to home learning or learning "pods," etc. Even though Primary and Secondary education is compulsory in the United States, parents have options on how to go about it.

Without seeing some quantified trends it seems there is some adoption and retention risk out there. The good news is organizations that are providing online learning can influence it through their choices.

I don't believe online learning is inherently "inferior," but complexity can get in the way. Business media is also starting to highlight increased sales of and investment in educational technology platforms. I suspect some organizations are getting caught up in the "rush to buy and implement" and that without thoughtful design and integration some projects will see mediocre outcomes.

Here's the first and one of the most important learnings I took away from working on a global online learning product launch: Online learning is a unique user experience "journey" unto itself. While there are some great technology platforms out there, they're not magic. You can't just bolt some vendors together and assume that your instructors or your students will successfully onboard and stick with the program.

What We Learned

As the category leader in scuba diver training, PADI was an early mover in adopting online learning. They had a legacy online platform that mostly ran on a single vendor and it generally worked but over time started to show it's age.

In 2018 when I joined we were rolling out a second generation of our online learning product that combined a few different technology platforms to create a best-of-breed experience designed to meet requests we had received from our customers (our members, who are diving instructors).

What we learned was that fancy features didn't matter if the student:

• Had trouble logging in or staying logged in as they traversed different platforms.

• Had limited or intermittent internet access (common in destination diving areas) which exacerbated the issue above.

• Had a device that wasn't modern and capable of using the newest capabilities/features.

• Lost track of where they were as they traversed platforms/segments of the experience (an orientation and navigation issue).

As it turned out, the newer experience had more customer issues than the older, less capable experience. And the issues were not "good platform/bad platform issues" but rather integration and user experience issues.

Specifically, the platforms "owned" certain portions of the user experience, and the total package was coming across as somewhat disjointed and occasionally buggy to our member instructors and their students. Instructors were slow to adopt our newer offering because they wanted a predictable experience for their students they could understand and support themselves.

We didn't stop here. We decided to fully own the customer-facing experience and created an “Option B” that I briefly describe below and will cover that in a subsequent post.

Key Takeaway For Organizations Deploying Online Learning

I suspect most people would agree that whether in a corporate setting or an academic one, if your students cannot navigate, absorb and complete your educational experience it doesn't matter if you've got a stellar reputation, are well ranked in some list of schools or have great faculty.

If your organization uses a lot of educational technology platforms, you are creating a risk of a fractured experience. Fractured experiences left exposed create customer support issues and will be what people associate with your brand. And as we're now seeing, some students may just leave.

In Fairness...

I realize that many organizations rushing into online learning now have well established learning experiences that worked just fine pre-pandemic, and that many had neither planned nor budgeted to design a bespoke online learning experience.

I also know that schools don't typically staff UX designers, software developers and integration architects.

I get it. There are some choices you can make right now.

What to do?

Step One: Don't get caught up in the rush taking vendor meetings and doing lots of "pilot implementations" that you'll need to unwind both technically and politically later. Resist the temptation to run out and bolt-together a bunch of different platforms to make everyone happy. Don't light a customer service fire you'll need to put out later.

Step Two: Make the hard initial choice.

• Option A: Unify around a single platform that addresses your "must-have features" and leave other features for later. You may find out you don't really need them after all. Build great how-to documentation and commit a resource to updating it as you see what kind of issues people encounter. Ideally you choose a platform that has some APIs you can use for further integration and customization down the road, but don't conflate satisfying your immediate user needs with R&D.

• Option B: Own all the customer touchpoints yourself by investing in user experience research & design, web/mobile experience development and systems integration that will go well beyond just implementing a Single Sign-On (SSO) capability.

For Schools operating in a pandemic reality, I'd highly suggest Option A as a first path combined with guidance to faculty hold off on introducing their own tools. Keep vendor contracts short with good exit options. This is a good "just for now" choice and it doesn't restrict you from evolving your offering down the road. Then, set up regular check-ins in advance with both faculty and students to learn what needs to be added, refined or removed.

Option B will be the topic of a future post - it's a cool way to create a great end-to-end experience and you see some organizations that have done just that if it was a key part of their growth strategy. It will require money, time and hard work, and it's what we did at PADI.

I hope this was helpful and I welcome feedback.

About Me

I'm not a "career" online learning professional and I'm not an educator. The bulk of my career has focused on applying customer-centered design approaches to digital product and marketing experiences at consumer destination websites like Edmunds.com, Kelley Blue Book and Consumer Reports. For the past 2 1/2 years my career has taken a little side detour into the world of online learning which has been a lot of fun with an amazing team.

In 2018 I joined the Professional Association of Diving Instructors to increase digital product adoption. The PADI System of diver education is used by 137,000 PADI professionals to teach underwater life support to over a million students per year in 183 countries. Roughly 65% of the educational products sold by PADI are now consumed online, up from 35% roughly three years ago.

Anchoring Your Product and Marketing Core Propositions with Mad Libs

I have found that when a new product or service is being conceived, people on the team often explore different aspects of the offering, creating variants or describing the solution and its results in ways that vary from short-term tactical to long-term market-changing sets of fundamental principles.  This behavior is natural and shows you that your team is really investing themselves in the product.  It shows they are internalizing it and they are engaged.

There is a risk of taking this too far, and you’ve probably seen it in action: The exploration can quickly turn into an echo chamber, where ideas are reflected back and forth among the team and executives until the group polarizes around a common idea using language that only makes sense to the group.  Your risk is taking the echo-chamber product / message combo outside and receiving…a TOTALLY BLANK STARE from your customers and the industry, because your team has iterated itself into a corner that nobody can understand.

The key to avoiding the blank stare is to transition the team from “talk” to “try” before you get embroiled in group-think.  Whether your team uses a Product Discovery* process to learn about your customers and the right solution (which I advocate - see note below) or develops and markets products using some other method, you need to sense when the echo chamber is starting up and stop the discussion there.

One way to crystallize things is to force the team to discuss and complete a single “Mad Libs” style Anchor Statement that clarifies what the product is solving, for whom and to what result.  People often don’t have a clear thought process on this, and may struggle to articulate it.  Here’s an example of what I’ve put on whiteboards during team discussions:

You’d be suprised how much this simple exercise can make people think, challenge each other and clarify their understanding of the core proposition they are thinking of taking to market.  From there the Product Discovery process (or whatever method you use) has enough to get started in a practical way.

If you are running a team that is struggling to get to the core of things - or worse - is spinning around trying to get to a core strategy by summarizing all the conversations to include every point of view, you should give this a try.  Constraining the story often forces clarity.

Go create!

* I’ve grown to be a real fan of a clearly delinated Product Discovery process and believe that many problems in both product development and marketing stem from a lack of clarity on what the customer actually needs and what is being offered.  Many people have written about this and Marty Cagan does a particularly good job of encapsulating the key ingredients of good product strategy, product discovery and other aspects of a product-led culture. Because this has already been written about extensively, I will not reprise it here but will refer to it in this post.

Thanks, Steve.

Yesterday Steve Jobs passed away and there have been a flurry of reactions from people all over the world.  Many of those reactions came from people who purchased the products that Steve and his team designed but have never created a product themselves. Some reactions also came from colleagues, some from real leaders who know what they’re talking about and some who are just leadership pundits not wanting to miss out on this week’s press cycle. Some of those reactions have come from people who create products - products that touch millions of people at a time.

This post is written from the standpoint someone in the latter group, and I have been a member of that group for the last twelve years.  Steve’s approach and his story has been tremendously influential to product people the world over and to me as an individual.  Through the world’s reaction to his death I was struck by how effective Steve has been at creating a daring vision and then projecting that vision in a way that people saw how to conform reality to their dreams.  This applies equally to internal employees, stockholders, the press and pundit crowd or consumers who are buying the products and integrating them into their lives.  People have gotten used to joining in with Steve’s vision, and now that Steve is gone they miss him and are wondering who will lead them next.

While showing us how to make our dreams a reality, Steve has also had a strong hand in shifting global tastes to emphasize design. Instead of going for lower cost, bigger marketing spend, fancy distribution strategies or other methods, Steve showed how loyalty and owner evangelicism can shift the framework through which we ascribe value to things at a fundamental and economically disruptive level. 

Steve has touched many of us personally and I believe that Steve’s full impact will not be known for some time. In a world where development costs and barriers to entry have lowered to the point where anyone can make and distribute a piece of crap to efficiently address a “market” - and many do - Steve taught us to care about elevating our existence in an almost Renaissance-like fashion.

Thank you Steve, for showing us that there is a way to grasp greatness and that “grokking” the consumer and the solution can change entire economic systems for the better.  But now it is our responsibility to stop waiting to be led…instead we must take the torch that you lit and carried for two decades and to learn to carry it on our own.