The mark of a great online training course isn’t just about the content. Because such courses rely on a multimedia, interconnected experience to train and teach learners, all aspects of the course’s design – from images and text to overall site functionality – must work in harmony to meet and exceed the expectations of the course’s user base.

There are several potential issues that could serve to hamper your online training course’s user-friendliness and leave a bad taste in your learners’ mouths. Here are six of them:

1. Too Reliant On Text

Corporate learners just aren’t likely to be interested in massive walls of text with little interactivity to be had. To engage learners in an online training course environment, a balance must be struck between needed text and multimedia, such as images and videos. Give them something that keeps their attention, something that mimics the sites they already use on a daily basis.

2. Not Utilizing Opportunities To Integrate

If there is an opportunity for your online training platform to integrate with websites and online services employees are already using, seize it! Not only does it boost their viewpoint of your offerings in relation to things they already care about or are already useful to them, it also keeps them from having to remember yet another password and set of log-in credentials. 

3. Navigation Issues

This is the most pervasive area of opportunity that a lot of online training courses fail to address. If your course isn’t intuitive and doesn’t give users a clear path for navigation to needed resources, you’re simply going to frustrate the vast majority of corporate learners using your training program. Make it simple, make it neat, and make it worth their time.

4. LMS Onboarding Struggles

If you don’t find ways to garner the attention of corporate learners and get them familiar with the offerings of your Learning Management System, they’re not going to care. You have to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the system and give them ample opportunities to learn its features in order to utilize them to their advantage. You can even host a live launch on social media to address any questions that you may have neglected to address in the course materials.

5. Neglecting Needs Of Certain Consumers

Translated texts may be necessary for users from other countries who are unable to read the original language of the course, and they’re easy to decline for those who don’t need them with the proper LMS functionality. You have to take into account the wide depth and breadth of potential users for your online training course, creating subtitles and functionality tweaks that serve psychological and physiological concerns alike.

6. Too Few Assessment Opportunities

While people claim that they hate being tested, assessments are a critical way of motivating corporate learners to pay attention to your online training materials and parrot it back during the assessment. If learners don’t feel like there is an endgame where they’re going to have to recall the things they’ve learned, they’re unlikely to pay attention to key aspects of the course. Assess them on those key aspects and help ensure the retention they need for their jobs going forward.

In Conclusion

There are many things that can make eLearning courses fail, but these six issues often make the most impact on user-friendliness. Since keeping customers is extremely important, make sure you avoid these six pitfalls.