How do you design effective online support for self-service learners?

1 Know your audience

Before you create any online support material, you need to understand who your learners are, what they want to learn, how they prefer to learn, and what challenges they face. You can gather this information by conducting surveys, interviews, focus groups, or analytics. Based on your findings, you can segment your learners into different personas and tailor your support to their needs, preferences, and goals.

2 Provide clear and consistent navigation

One of the most important aspects of online support is to help learners find what they need quickly and easily. You can do this by providing clear and consistent navigation throughout your online platform, course, or resource. Use labels, menus, breadcrumbs, search bars, and filters that are intuitive and relevant. Avoid cluttering your interface with too many options or unnecessary information. Make sure your navigation is responsive and accessible on different devices and browsers.

3 Offer multiple formats and channels

Different learners have different learning styles, preferences, and abilities. Therefore, you should offer multiple formats and channels for your online support, such as text, audio, video, images, infographics, animations, podcasts, webinars, forums, chatbots, or FAQs. You can also use adaptive or personalized learning technologies to deliver customized support based on learners' progress, performance, or feedback. However, you should also ensure that your formats and channels are compatible, coherent, and complementary.

4 Encourage interaction and collaboration

One of the main challenges of self-service learning is the lack of social interaction and collaboration. This can affect learners' motivation, engagement, and retention. To address this issue, you should encourage interaction and collaboration among your learners and between your learners and your support staff. You can use various tools and strategies, such as discussion forums, peer review, group projects, gamification, badges, leaderboards, or live sessions. You should also provide timely and constructive feedback, recognition, and support to your learners.

5 Monitor and evaluate your support

Finally, you should monitor and evaluate your online support regularly and systematically. You can use various methods and metrics, such as surveys, quizzes, tests, analytics, or feedback forms. You should measure not only the effectiveness of your support, but also the satisfaction, engagement, and achievement of your learners. You should also identify the gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of your support and make improvements accordingly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?