How Can Instructional Designers Learn about Customers?

By Cheri Lockett Zubak | STC Associate Fellow

My first “real job” out of college as an editor in a publishing firm was a jack-of-all-trades role. In other words, I did any task the editor-in-chief assigned to me, including getting on the phone with customers who needed help using our products. Later, when course development became one of my responsibilities, I found myself in an ideal situation for instructional design: I understood the customer. After those many phone calls, I knew what problems customers ran into and how drastically these problems could interfere with their work. I had spoken with customers about business situations, so I knew which scenarios were meaningful. And after helping customers discover better ways to approach and resolve their problems, I had developed and tested a set of best practices. I could directly apply all of these experiences to instructional design.

Since moving into mainstream technical communication as a writer and instructional designer, I have learned a great deal about designing learning experiences. Yet I often have to maneuver through organizations to establish the fluent understanding of customers that I had in that first job.

These days, a key aspect of my work is to conduct customer research not only to support my learning projects, but also to help the people I work with understand customers better. In this article, I’d like to share some techniques I practice to learn about customers and how I apply what I learn to my work.

Spoiler alert: It’s not always easy to get firsthand information about customers. But persist and it will happen.

What is learner analysis? And what’s this talk about customers?

Learner analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data to inform the design of learning experiences that improve job performance. Learner analysis helps instructional designers to:

Identify and gather relevant data about target populations who engage in the learning experience
Understand the impact of a knowledge and skills gap for these target populations
Develop meaningful problems, tasks, and scenarios
Make defensible design decisions instead of assumptions
Gain empathy for customers

If this process really involves learners, then why am I talking about customers? In the workplace, learners are customers. Whether internal (they work for your organization) or external (they buy products or services from your organization), when they engage in the learning you design, they have a business purpose to achieve. Although you are supporting them as learners, it’s important to keep in mind that you have a business relationship; they expect business outcomes as a result of what they learn. For me, thinking of them as customers (yes, and learners, too) has helped me to keep in mind that I am accountable to them in this business relationship.

Do these tasks before you begin learner analysis

It’s a good idea to get grounded in the project before starting learner analysis. You should:

Get an overview of the project from stakeholders. Have a conversation to understand scope, customer situation, and expectations about what you will deliver. This meeting is your first opportunity to find out about customers.
Take a good look at customer organizations. Before you look too deeply into specific learner populations, spend some time researching the organizations where they work. Review the strategies, goals, business environments, and industry trends of these organizations to better understand the context of the problems that affect your customers.
Document the gap. The performance gap is the difference between the current level of job performance and the expected level of job performance. Your learning experience will be targeted at reducing or eliminating this gap. You will continue to refine your understanding of this gap as you develop the learner analysis and learn more about why the gap occurs.

Apply adult learning science as stable characteristics

Some characteristics that you apply to learner analysis are about people in general—how they think and remember, what motivates (or demotivates) them, and how they learn. You can think of these as stable characteristics because they apply generally to adult learners. For example, learning science tells us that adults want to learn from experience (which includes making mistakes) in problem-based situations. We also know that while most learners prefer materials with visuals, graphics are most beneficial to novice learners.

The learning and development profession also has its share of myths—that is, beliefs we might have that are not supported by science. An example is learning styles. According to this popular theory, people learn best when instruction matches their preferred style: auditory, visual, or kinesthetic. However, this theory has consistently been disproven.

As an instructional designer, it is crucial to understand learning science so you can develop instruction that supports adult learners. The Suggested Reading list for this article contains resources that I have found helpful for understanding how people learn.

Gather general information about customer groups

Next step: Begin to gather information about the customer groups who will engage in the learning experiences you plan to design. During this process, you begin to create the learner profile for each target population. This profile describes:

Relevant characteristics about the customers that affect the instructional design, often categorized by role, experience level, or job tasks
Specific details from your research that support your understanding of these customers
Initial ideas about instructional design implications

Avoid the “I just know” stance—that is, the idea that you have picked up sufficient information about the customer just by going about normal business activity. That’s probably true to some extent, but until you do the work of investigating the performance problem, you won’t be able to distinguish myth from reality. Think of it this way: If you went before a tough manager who wanted to know where your design decisions came from, could you defend them? Would “I just know” be good enough?

Start broadly by reviewing job descriptions for customer roles, current LinkedIn group discussions, and articles or user forums on professional sites. Look for themes that tie your products and services to concerns of the customer. Look beyond demographics such as age, gender, and educational background. This kind of information is typically too general to inform design decisions. Instead, find out what you can about customer pain points so you begin to understand why the subject of your learning project matters to the customer.

Talk to customers and customer-facing SMEs

Talking to external customers should be your goal, so get ready to network and pull in favors. When it comes to direct access to customers, who you know might be the most important condition. Or, if it’s not who you know, it’s who your manager knows. And onward up the organizational chart!

Interviewing and observing external customers can be tough because many organizations restrict access to customers. The key is to find out who in the organization is having customer conversations and either support or shadow them. Groups to partner with include customer experience, customer support, market research, consulting, sales, and user experience. Look for opportunities to listen in on customer interviews or support calls, or join the user experience staff in field research. Come up with a few targeted questions around issues you haven’t been able to figure out through secondary research, and request that the interviewers ask these questions. At times, you might have to glean what you need from other people’s questions, but you would be surprised how often issues around job roles and tasks come up in these conversations. Given the opportunity, customers always talk about pain points in their jobs.

Sometimes you need to reach customers indirectly. For example, get in the habit of observing the user forums on your corporate website where you can engage in social listening. Be sure to talk to customer-facing subject matter experts who understand the problems or tasks around the performance problem.

Focus conversations on these factors:

Customer work environment—Is anything happening in the work environment that might interfere with the ability to perform the tasks or solve problems? Are customers well supported in their work environment? Do they have appropriate information, such as documentation or job aids?

With internal customers, address these issues before investing in any kind of training development. Otherwise, the problem will persist despite your best efforts at instructional design. For external customers, keep in mind that your product or service is part of their work environment. If the product has usability issues, even the best instruction is only going to help so much. Which aspects of the product are complex or difficult to use? Even if the product doesn’t improve, you can focus instruction on these features.

Individual factors—What motivates people in this role? Do people in this job tend to have the capacity to learn the tasks they need to perform? Are they motivated to improve job performance? What kinds of knowledge and skills do they have?

Knowledge and skills are often the focus of instructional design, but knowing something about these other factors can help you to develop an appropriate design by influencing decisions such as module length, pacing, or feedback. As part of this research, keep track of tasks. Learner analysis blends into task analysis: you won’t really have a complete picture of the learner until you understand the tasks they need to perform. I typically track tasks in two columns: What does the customer do well? And what do they have problems with? Use this information to improve the gap analysis that you developed before starting on learner analysis.

For a model to help you with these aspects of customer research, check out Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model or one of its variations, such as Six Boxes. Gilbert’s model provides some starter questions for researching environmental and individual issues that can inform the learner profile.

Develop learner profiles to understand the customer

Now that you have a good handle on your customer, you can wrap up that learner profile. At minimum, the profile should describe characteristics of:

Figure 1. This clip from a learner profile for a typical learner identifies individual (row 1) and environmental (row 2) factors

Exemplary performers—customers who excel at the problem or task. Think of these learners as the top performers in an organization who set the standard for knowledge and skills. These people are critical to an organization’s success because they produce results the organization highly values, such as greater sales volume, completed and successful projects, innovative ideas that spur new product growth, and more satisfied customers. By studying how these people do their jobs, you can identify how they produce results—critical information for your learning project.
Typical performers—customers with average abilities at the problem or task. What is the difference between the job performance of typical and exemplary performers? The learning experience you are designing should improve the knowledge and skills of typical performers, and should especially target areas they find difficult to understand or complex to do.

Often, instructional designers align the typical performer and exemplary performer as the extreme ends of the performance gap. As you design instruction, your goal is to support typical performers in achieving the job performance of exemplary performers—that is, close the performance gap.

Develop personas to relate to and communicate about the customer

After you have developed the learner profile, transform these profiles into performance personas to communicate the customer learning experience to your team or stakeholders. For the purposes of instructional design, personas are data-driven (but fictional) design models that illustrate the behaviors and motivations of a group of customers who share a performance problem. For example, the persona in Figure 2 provides key details about the attitudes and behaviors of a typical learner who is struggling to develop meaningful presentations for quarterly status meetings.

In my experience, personas are beneficial for helping you to work through specific design issues and relate to customer problems. They bring life to the often dry analyses in your learner profiles. Personas are also excellent tools for communicating customer behaviors as they relate to design decisions.

Your organization’s user experience or marketing groups might already have developed personas that can become a starting point for your work.

Figure 2. Example of a performance persona

Test and refine your learner profiles and personas

Why didn’t this process end with the last step? Aren’t the learner profiles complete? In my experience, you need to test the learner profiles and personas before putting them into practice. Until you apply these design tools to a realistic problem, you don’t know whether they are ready for use. The good news is that the way you test learner profiles contributes to the instructional design.

For example, I often test profiles and personas by developing scenarios (or variations such as user stories and customer journey maps). Think of scenarios as a “pre-flight” method for understanding the learner well enough to push into the design phase. One of my favorite techniques is to develop a crisis scenario—that is, a situation in which the customer is going through a crisis that involves the tasks they are having problems with. I prefer these situations because they help me to work through many issues that can matter in instructional design—from the customer’s emotional state to the need to perform a task both accurately and quickly. (For a discussion and example of a crisis scenario, check out Eric Meyer’s video in the Suggested Reading.)

After you’ve done these tests, you are ready for your next steps: refine the performance gap based on the learner analysis and then do task analysis.

That accountability thing

Are you thinking: “Hey, I just create software demos and tutorials. Features, functions—that’s what our customers want to know about! Do I really need to do all of this research? Can’t I just read the specs and play with the builds?”

You’re right: Customers of software products want to know about features and functions. But they also want to know why they should care about these features, and how those functions directly relate to the work they do every day. They want to know the best practices that experts use to work faster and better. Your smartly crafted eLearnings will be more meaningful to customers and have greater business impact if you design them to target the customers’ performance problems. Remember: these are customers, not just users of your software application. They expect business outcomes.

So do the work. While you don’t want to make learner analysis a job in itself, gather as much information as you need to make defensible design decisions and to design a learning experience that results in positive outcome for the customer. Paying attention to customer research not only results in learning experiences that truly matter to your customers but also can open new avenues for your professional growth. But that’s a tale for another article.