At Enspire Learning, we pride ourselves on creating learning experiences that directly impact a specific target audience, designated by each valued client. So when we design those experiences, we take a great deal of care to investigate and understand who those end-users are.
As a timely metaphor, our best learning products are like well-wrapped presents, carefully chosen for each recipient. This holiday season, we’ve created a handy shopping list of the important questions we ask ourselves when considering what “gift” to give our clients and end-users.
1. What’s the occasion?
Gifts are rarely given without cause – they are usually intended for a recipient who is celebrating an occasion: birthday, shower, Kwanzaa, retirement, etc. You pick a gift to commemorate an important occasion.
When designing e-learning, we must have a deep understanding of the learning occasion – is it on-boarding for new hires? Does the company want its employees to better understand its security policies? Is there a need for management training? Start generally and whittle the need down until it’s a precise problem to be solved. For instance, if a client specifies a need for a new-hire orientation, investigate further to understand why the product is needed now. Maybe there’s been evidence that recent hires don’t fully understand their benefit packages. Maybe a certain group at the company plans to bring on a large number of new employees and wants uniformity in their on-boarding experience. Understand the occasion and you can better understand your intended recipient.
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After reading a recent Wired article about 
One thing that has always fascinated me is the question of what creates quality. Everyone strives to be the best at what they do. Quality is often mentioned as the secret ingredient that makes the difference in whether a company simply survives or truly succeeds. But when you are creating an experience, not a physical good, how do you define quality? How do you create it?
As we enter the final month of 2011, I suspect that many of us are looking back on the year and summarizing it in one way or another. What stands out for me was a common feeling that I had while at 7 industry conferences that I either attended, exhibited or spoke at – that as an industry, we’re missing a tremendous opportunity to apply innovations from the world of learning into the design and delivery of our learning industry events. 
