Discovery about learner management experience for HIT Training Ltd
HIT Training Ltd (HIT) is the leading specialist training and apprenticeship provider for the UK’s hospitality and catering industry. They called on us for a discovery focused on its learner management experience across its three training divisions.
Project overview
The discovery gathered evidence to better understand the end-to-end service journey experience, to identify and understand the user needs, pain-points, and opportunities to better meet these needs and reduce learner attrition.
Project goals
The main goals for the project were for the client to understand:
- The steps in the end-to-end learner management journey experience across apprenticeship levels (2-5)
- Who all the users are in the journey (not just the learners)
- Their user needs throughout the service journey and to validate those needs
- What data is being collected (to meet those data needs)
- The systems and technologies involved in each step
- The pain points and opportunities for a) shorter term tactical wins, and b) longer-term strategic decisions to:
- Better orientate users (so they know what to do next), e.g. remembering lots of passwords
- Better meet user needs and improve the user experience – particularly where learners are confused / disoriented, demotivated, and their learning is impeded
- Promote retention / mitigate learner attrition
- Improve data quality (e.g. more robust data validation)
- Improve business processes (quality, efficiency, standardisation and adoption)
Project team
To do this, the Lagom project team consisted of a dedicated Delivery Manager, Service Designer and two User Researchers.
What we did
- Reviewed 24 online and documentary sources
- Conducted 12 stakeholder interviews
- Conducted 33 one-to-one user interview and observational sessions
- Analysed an internal user experience survey with 132 responses
- Analysed 3 user needs surveys with 163 responses in total
- Developed 6 user personas
- Created and prioritised 77 user needs
- Created a 69 step user journey map
We carried out a programme of qualitative research with service users, including learners, employers and internal users at HIT (such as training consultants, local operations managers and quality assurers).
This included 20 one-to-one interviews with learners across the three training divisions that operate under HIT Training Ltd and at different levels of apprenticeship programmes, including 5 interviews with learners who left their programme early. We also carried out an additional 13 user interviews with internal users and employers.
We presented back our research findings and validated the needs with a wider group of users through a survey, before prioritising them with the client. We also ran a storyboarding workshop with users to develop ideas of how a future service could meet some of the prioritised user needs.
Project outcomes
The Hit team now has the evidence, a prioritised backlog of user needs, a target service blueprint, a suggested roadmap, and a set of nine recommendations to inform decisions and improve their end-to-end service.
“We’ve already started to act on the quick wins identified in the discovery by Lagom. And we’ll continue to get value from the rich findings and recommendations in the discovery report for a long time to come.”
IT and Change Director, HIT Training
