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Compliance elearning that works — Methodologies for innovation

Blog posts | 12.10.2021

Compliance elearning

Helping you find your North Star

Transformation of your compliance-based learning won’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time, involving research, innovation, collaboration and experimentation. What methodologies can help you to do this?

Article no. 6 of 10 - The Kineo view on: Compliance elearning


It goes without saying that to transform the compliance-based learning of old, we need to innovate. In this article, we’ll look at the methodologies that can help you to do so, specifically design thinking, human-centred design (HCD) and learner experience design (LXD). Whilst they sort of developed simultaneously, they are very complimentary to one another. By looking at all three, you can learn from all three, and tailor your approach depending on what works for you.

Design thinking

Exploring the principles of design thinking is a good starting point - expand diagram.

5 Ds design process diagram moving from a trigger to finding the problem, to finding the solution through a process of ideation, prototyping and testing

Expand diagram 🡕

You may have seen this representation of design thinking before as many in the industry have evolved and embraced the core principles to support Learning Design. This has been driven by the need be more learner centric, delivering relevant content and reducing the barrage of information that we all receive daily.

It is ultimately about finding the real problem and then the real solution to fix that problem, drawing on a process that start-ups tend to do well: Ideate, Prototype, Test, Repeat. By doing that, we can understand an idea’s strengths and weaknesses. Test early, fail cheap, fail fast – and the faster the better, because the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve.

Methodologies that follow these principles also encourage us to go beyond thinking about content and assessment alone and to consider all aspects of a learner’s environment – be they physical, technical, social or emotional – which we believe is critical to your learning’s success.


Human-centred design

Integral to design thinking is human-centred design. If you think of the former as the bigger picture – the innovation and problem-solving piece – then human-centred design is all about the details: how usable is a design? How is it ultimately experienced?

One is a process to follow and the other is a mindset, and they are both equally important. You can’t really have one without the other, because design thinking is basically a human-centred approach to innovation.

Taking a human-centred approach to design sounds painfully obvious, doesn’t it? All design should be human-centred, surely? Yet all too often we’re more concerned about the topics we want in our learning or how many questions we need in a quiz.

It goes without saying that human-centred design means putting people – and that is all the people we are designing for – at the heart of our design thinking and processes. It is an iterative approach that makes feedback from these people critical to how a solution evolves.

When it comes to compliance, there are multiple human factors at stake, and the quality of your training is hugely dependent on your understanding of how humans behave and what your learners want and need.


Learning Experience design (LX)

Finally, we draw on learning experience design (LX), which whilst developed simultaneously to design thinking and human-centred design, aligns with both methodologies. It is more specifically relevant to instructional design, emphasising the importance of creating impactful learning experiences that place the learner front and centre of the solution.

“Learning experience design is the process of creating learning experiences that enable the learner to achieve the desired learning outcome in a human centred and goal-oriented way.” Niels Floor, Learning Experience Design Pioneer

LX is inspired by user experience design (UX), learning and cognitive sciences, learning analytics and interface design. It also takes cues from methodologies like Agile and Lean. It is about:

  • starting with a question, problem statement or learning challenge that needs to be solved
  • doing extensive research about the learner and the desired outcome
  • generating ideas
  • developing a concept
  • prototyping, experimenting, testing things out
  • iterating, adjusting
  • (only then) creating
  • launching the learning

When put together, these methodologies tell us to be systematic and learner centric in our approach to solving problems and driving change. Conduct research; develop concepts. Be bold with experimentation and learn from your mistakes. Have fun along the way!

We may not all be here now, but we think it’s the ideal place to be.



Check out the next article in this series: Driving change, to continue exploring The Kineo view on: Compliance elearning.

If you want to know more about how we create better learning experiences for compliance-based learning,Get in touch to book a free consultation with one of our learning experts.

Compliance elearning

Helping you find your North Star


In this suite of articles on compliance elearning, we take a helicopter view of the compliance landscape, talk you through our latest thinking and research, and share our recommendations for transforming your mandatory training – helping you find your North Star. We hope you find it useful and we welcome your feedback. Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss your own compliance training challenges with one of our team.