I did some research into learning styles – and found some excellent resources here: http://www.learning-styles-online.com/, which made me think with that amount of users, there was going to be a good mix of styles.

I did the online questionnaire about learning styles, http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/questions.asp, to reveal my own preferences. It was quite good fun.

I decided I would prototype different types of training materials, to do some user testing with. I also took some of the old materials and asked people what they liked and disliked about them. I registered with http://www.memletics.com so I could ask testing participants to complete the survey so I could get some sort of idea about the mix of preferences amongst the staff.

The clear winner with that group was a demo model of the new system where they could practice helping customers with their transactions, followed by computer based learning with some quizzes. The least popular – I’d go so far to say “most hated” learning method was using documentation of the features of the system. As this had been the method used last time, the users dreaded the arrival of tons of dull paperwork to wade through – they’d prefer the stress of struggling in front of real customers than reading 1000 pages of manual.

With the website usability course I am writing at the moment, I catered for all the learning styles and for my kinesthetic students, I created a dummy site that had a lot of problems. The bad site comes with a few brief notes saying what they have to do with the site to fix it, to give it a bit of structure, but the exploration and analysis is up to them. They’re given the option to pick and choose parts of the course as they work through making improvements (either prototyping, or using HTML coding skills, it’s up to them).

This dummy site could also be a “case-study” for people who didn’t have a website before they purchased the course, or something “neutral” and low-risk people could learn with before enhancing their own websites.

Hope this stuff helps and thanks for the question

We try to do that with chapters and “social learning features” which help users to share their learning experiences with others.

Now that we looked at these four categories it would be interesting to hear suggestions on how to improve learning experiences!