Refining the User Experience in Your Office

There’s always been an onus for business owners or marketing teams to consider the ‘user experience’ (or UX) when selling products or establishing B2B connections. However, a sometimes overlooked consideration the psychology behind the user experience for internal training and team engagement.

Here are a few factors that may influence your team and their response to internal communications.

Colour Choice Can Encourage Learning

Colour isn’t regularly considered in office environments. But colour schemes often deployed in the design and stylings of restaurants and bars to evoke sensory responses; such as feelings of relaxation, hunger, or the desire to leave quickly — a technique used by fast food restaurants.

Colour can be equally important in an office setting.

Many studies have shown that natural settings help us focus and stay calm — two of the many merits of forest therapy. Furthermore, research shows that you can effectively harness the soothing and inspiring power of nature simply by using green tones: green is a proven colour for maintaining long-term concentration and clarity, which makes it an ideal colour choice for education in the workplace.

Streamlining team learning is crucial; it’s essential to take any opportunity to enhance the user experience when creating learning modules or training packages. This is true whether you design and create them yourself in-house or if you work with a team of specialized presentation designers. Experts like this can craft persuasive, engaging; branded presentations and training tools that will in still confidence and inspire action in your team.

Whatever route you take, consider the power of colour in your next internal communications and training guides.

Identifying Learning Styles

It’s important to factor in learning styles when it comes to employee training; — be it during the onboarding process or ongoing training throughout the year. People absorb information differently, so it’s crucial that they feel catered to. Teaching different learning styles will boost knowledge retention and help acknowledge employees as individuals.

Some alternative learning styles are:

Visual: These employees will respond better to and retain more information from graphics, videos, and custom animations.

Audio: These team members will be able to successfully complete training modules if they’re presented by a fellow team member or external trainer with the supporting use of videos and audio.

Reading: Some people retain information better through text. If they allowed the time to read information onscreen or on paper, they’ll likely absorb it better.

Environmental Factors: Social and solitary are also considerations that should be kept in mind. Some team members may prefer the support and input of their coworkers when they learning, with quiz components and verbal participation. Others may thrive in a solitary, focused environment.

With this in mind, consider using business presentation PowerPoint templates; these can seamlessly cater to all learning styles and environmental preferences. This is especially valuable if you have a small team and don’t have the ability; or the people power, to facilitate various forms of training.

Jakob’s Law and Consistency

When creating training modules, office memos and internal communications, consider the rule of Jakob’s Law. Jakob’s Law encourages consistency with templating and formatting for routine or recurring documents.

For example, if every chapter of a training module is laid out differently; team members will spend valuable time re-familiarizing themselves with the new layout. This will cause a small level of stress and frustration (and an immediate feeling of ‘where do I find this’?) when the real focus of the exercise should be on learning the content.

Consider your team when you’re creating office communications. Identifying and providing a rewarding, seamless and fulfilling user experience is key to having a satisfied, proficient, and happy team.