The Power of UX: Examples How UX Design Can Solve Business Challenges

Interface designer is a fairy godmother of your eLearning application. They can make it simpler to use, more engaging, and more suitable to the context. 

But unless UI is done right, your interface carriage may turn into a pumpkin even before the clock strikes midnight. To make sure it doesn't come to that, let’s learn from the best eLearning interface designs.

You're about to see some examples of eLearning platform design — award-winning ones, ones that you’ll recognize as soon as you set eyes on them, and ones that you’ve never seen before. 

Those examples are here not only for you to pull some inspiration from. Each of them represents some general principles of user interface design, and some ways you can go about creating your own educational application. 

Later in this article, we’ll explore applications designed to look good at any device and those that enhance user engagement. But first, let’s look at user interface design examples that add to learning applications’ usability.

UI design can improve the learning experience

Throwing too much info at your readers at once is a good way to drive them into overload. Luckily, a masterful UI can turn any bunch of content into a simple minimalistic app. Let me show you how it works with our first example of an eLearning system.

TypingClub design for maintaining focus

TypingClub is an online touch typing course that works really hard to minimize all the information unrelated to the lesson. The app controls dissolve as soon as a student starts typing to appear only when a mission is accomplished. They are minimized to a tiny menu button in the top left corner and a few icons in the top right one.

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Such a minimalistic interface has a calming effect on the viewer. It allows the learner to focus. It promotes clarity. But white spaces shouldn’t entirely replace controls, orientation signs and visual cues — otherwise, users would fail to find the needed spot in your app.

iSpring Learn presents navigation and orientation best practices

When students struggle to orient themselves inside eLearning courses, it’s a design problem. Because students should use their cognitive capacity for learning their lesson rather than learning how to use your application.

Below, you can see a screenshot from the iSpring learning management system that shows how one of the eLearning industry leaders ensures successful customer journeys.

To help users orient within a course, iSpring shows all the topics on the right. To navigate within each topic, you have a bottom menu that allows you to start or stop, move forward or backward, or return to the main menu.

If you want more details about LMS design, we highly recommend you check out our LMS UX design rules article.

Duolingo masters bite-sized learning content

With over 150 million users registered around the world, Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning apps on the market today. It takes a gamification approach to education, it takes eLearning graphic design to a whole new level, it became a meme after all.

All of this makes Duolingo the perfect candidate for us to explore learning interface design. But let us draw attention to the feature that hides behind Duolingo’s bright graphics, points, and badges. It’s Duolingo’s bite-sized content.

When signing up for Duolingo, you can choose between learning for 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes a day — and the app will provide you with snackable lessons that fit that time gap. 

Such eLearning architecture design makes perfect sense. Microlearning fits perfectly into the natural flow of users’ workday with its little time spans and tiny smartphone screens. Such short pieces of content work in favor of learning on the go. You can learn a lesson while staying at a bus stop or waiting in a queue for a morning coffee. 

User interface design can make your app look good on all devices

Responsive eLearning design sounds like a good idea, since learners will use whatever devices they have to access their training. However, squeezing a web course to mobile, or mobile learning course to VR triggers some non-obvious design challenges.

PublishXI LMS and its mobile UI eLearning approach

On the web, we control the interface with clicks and mouse scrolling. On mobile devices it’s not the case — the layout should allow one to finger-scroll, zoom, or pinch the screen. That’s why you can’t easily adapt desktop interfaces to mobile.

When we at Eleken created mobile and web apps for the PublishXI learning management system, we designed two different apps for two different devices. 

For instance, given that most people navigate on their phones with a single hand, we put mobile navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen and made them large enough for users to tap with their thumb.

VR eLearning presented by LabTrainingVR Biosafety Cabinet 

Education in a 360-degree interactive environment is by default much more exciting than just sitting in a classroom listening to some dude spelling things. Like, students can experience first-hand the life of an Ancient Greek artisan instead of visiting a museum or virtually travel to the Easter Island statues instead of just looking for Polynesia on a map.

However, virtual reality is a very specific medium that lives by its own rules, differing from those for web and mobile design. In web design, for instance, we have a series of tricks to make functionality obvious for users. Like, a pointer icon that changes to a hand icon every time you point the mouse cursor on something clickable on the web. How would the same work for VR?

The LabTrainingVR course was created for public health laboratory professionals, to help them apply knowledge and practice setting up a biological safety cabinet. This virtual lab shows how the principle of discoverability can be applied to virtual reality technology:

• Proximity implies a relationship with objects.
• Objects available for manipulation are large and easy to select. They have bright colors, as compared to light monotonous backgrounds.
• The highlight around the selected objects works as a cue to show what items can be manipulated.

UI has the power to enhance user engagement

eLearning UX design services can offer scenarios, branching, storytelling, gaming, assessments, and more to inspire instructional design. Here we have examples of such engagement techniques well implemented.

Sololearn and its engagement triggers 

Learner engagement triggers, also known as gamification, are a popular way to increase user motivation and retention. Sololearn is the world's largest community of people learning to code, and it has a full set of gamification mechanics such as challenges, badges, rankings and progress bars. Let’s take a look at them.

Thanks to its community-driven engagement techniques, Sololearn has grown by word of mouth to 21 million registered users in 12 months. Its gamification is so good it makes learning addictive for some users.

Shady Sam presents the very essence of eLearning gamification

Congratulations! You have been hired by Shady Sam, and your job is to rip hard-working Americans off by providing questionable loans with hidden interest rates. Work diligently, and you’ll get cool stuff for your desk.

That’s the story told by Shady Sam, a browser game from Mckinney designed to demonstrate how loan terms can hurt you, if you don’t pay attention.

Instead of listening to a boring lecture about mortgage and interest rates, users take the role of a loan shark. Trying to trick others in the game, players easily understand the logic behind such tricks. 

This learning app was created according to all gamification best practices:

• It offers a simplified, easy to grasp model of a complex financial system.
• It makes players take on a new role and make decisions in that role. Namely, users learn by simulating new experiences. 
• Finally, the game immerses players into the new world and makes people take their lessons seriously.
  

Interested in gamification techniques? We have a dedicated article about how to use gamification in eLearning.

So how to design an eLearning platform?

Now that you are inspired by some awesome learning examples, time to move to the next level. User experience is the backbone of any application, so we recommend checking out our guide to UX strategy so that you can build the foundation of your eLearning project.

If you’re looking for designers to implement your ideas, you may find the article on how to build a design team useful.

Need a bit more information about UI and UX? Read our comprehensive product design article. Or better get in touch with Eleken designers. We’d be happy to help.

According to a recent Forrester survey, 77% of customers prioritize companies that provide a personalized user experience or service. And the fact that more and more businesses strive to enhance personalized UX isn’t surprising at all.

Personalization and customization are efficient UX techniques that help users avoid generic and unnecessary content. Instead, they provide people with more relevant, up-to-date, and individualized experiences. At least, that’s what they say. 

In many cases, however, personalization causes additional challenges for end-users, making people feel frustrated about their experiences as they find the content irrelevant, redundant, or unhelpful. Moreover, too much personalization can make users think that a service compromises their privacy, making them leave as fast as possible.

We at Eleken constantly provide effective UX solutions that address users’ needs. And we know exactly how to keep the right balance when applying customization and personalization in product design. In this article, we are going to share these insights with you. But let’s define the basics first. 

What is personalization in UX design?

Personalization allows UX designers to create user journeys that meet customers’ unique requirements and deliver experiences based on their individual needs. If we say that the product or service is personalized, we mean that it predicts users’ expectations and is tailored to their goals. This makes design solutions more helpful, engaging, and easier to perceive. 

Many confuse personalization and customization, believing that these terms have the same meaning. However, there is a significant difference between them.

• Personalization is when UX elements based on customer data address the individual needs of each user. 
• Customization allows users to adjust UX elements to their individual needs on their own.
  

Learn more about personalization and customization in UX design in our blog post.

Now, let’s explore how different types of digital products personalize and customize user experiences. 

Who takes advantage of UX personalization and customization?

Most commonly, UX personalization is used in e-commerce apps, streaming services, and social media platforms. Here are three typical examples of a personalized user experience in these types of digital products. 

• E-commerce apps. For example, Amazon uses a machine learning service, Amazon Personalize, to help e-commerce stores create individual recommendations for their customers. It combines and analyzes user interactions, user metadata, and item metadata to generate the most relevant offers for online shoppers.

• Streaming services. The entire user interface of such platforms is built around individual user preferences. For example, Netflix has adopted a personalized movie recommendation system that predicts how much a person would like to watch a movie depending on a member's previous activity. 

• Social media. Have you ever noticed that Facebook (or Meta, as they call it today) delivers only specific content to your feed, something you were recently looking for? That’s because the platform collects data about each user to create customized experiences, including ads, news, and so on.

These are just a few personalization UX examples in modern digital solutions. More and more products turn to personalization and customization. Individual recommendations and helpful notifications are great when it comes to making digital products engaging.

At this point, it may seem that the more personalized UX is, the more users will convert into loyal customers. However, this is not always the case. Too much personalization may have the opposite effect and here’s why. 

When does personalization turn into overpersonalization?

It’s pretty obvious why personalization matters in UX user experience. It allows products to deliver more relevant, and valuable content. Customization provides users with freedom and enables them to adjust interfaces to their own requirements. But will these benefits become even more significant if you increase personalization and customization in your product’s UX design? 

Well… not really. In fact, the line between enough and too much is quite thin here. At some point, a customer will likely find this “extra personalization” boring, overwhelming, or even creepy.

According to comprehensive research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, too much personalization in UX leads to a lack of diversity, content fatigue, and homogeneous user experiences. As a result a product fails to deliver the content users actually strive to receive. 

That is why UX designers should be careful when implementing personalization and customization. Here are the most significant pitfalls we always keep in mind when turning to these solutions in our designs. 

Main issues caused by too much personalization and customization

Let’s take a closer look at the most common personalization and customization challenges and consider their negative impact on user experiences. 

Lack of diversity

When trying to provide users with as relevant content as possible, a product may feel strictly limited to users’ core interests. As a result, it lacks diversity because of missing out on a broader range of content that could potentially interest users. In this case, focusing on a single preference of an individual user prevents an organization from learning more about their target audience and delivering more diverse content that would still be based on their needs. 

For example, imagine an app allowing users to browse images. If a person is interested in funny cat pictures, overpersonalized recommendations will provide them with hundreds of those. However, this approach also limits their access to other types of content. But what if this person would also love to see dogs and bunnies in their feed? That is where overpersonalization becomes a problem both for the organization and end-users:

• Organizations lack an understanding of individual user needs
• End-users will eventually get tired of the same-looking content

Homogenous experience

In the same research we mentioned above, NN Group describes one of the most critical impacts of overpersonalization as a homogenous experience. This survey showed that the participants quickly get bored when viewing the same content on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Besides, they experienced the same feelings when receiving similar product offerings on Amazon. In particular, users complained about outdated recommendations based on their previous purchases. ​

The outcome of this issue is quite frustrating. According to NN Group’s report, “In some cases, this level of overpersonalization has caused users to lose interest in these platforms or abandon them altogether.” 

Placing users into a narrow audience group limits their freedom. So instead of pleasing people with attention to their individual interests, personalization becomes annoying if not implemented wisely. 

Content redundancy

Content homogeneity is also related to another common personalization issue. Users may find the targeted content not just boring, but redundant if it is duplicated, especially in cases when the person bumps into identical (or very similar) posts, ads, or recommended goods lots of times. 

This effect is also caused by overpersonalization that occurs when a system considers a particular type of content a user’s primary interest. However, many people prefer avoiding such duplicates and having unique online experiences.  

One of the most common examples of content redundancy is the Instagram feed . People, when following certain trends, make tons of similar pictures. There’s even an @insta_repeat account that points out this phenomenon. It shows multiple similar posts made by different users at different times, and they are just identical.

While being a bit annoying on social media channels, redundant content is a main deal-breaker when it comes to ads. MarketingWeek reports that nearly half (45%) of customers abandon brands that repeatedly show the same advertisement or creative messaging. As you can see, personalization doesn’t help here. 

“Creepy effect” of personalization

It’s not a secret that personalization and customization are based on data that organizations collect about users. However, people don’t tend to think about that when these methods work properly, providing them with helpful and relevant experiences. In contrast, if overpersonalization occurs, users may find it not just excessive, but creepy. 

In other words, if a user takes a single action that snowballs into receiving tons of related content, they will likely get worried about their privacy. 

In particular, many users consider personalization creepy if they don’t understand how certain information was gathered. For instance, let’s say a person searched for cosmetics from their phone on a specific website and then started to receive related recommendations on another website when using a laptop. In this case, a user won’t understand how their data was processed and used, which leads to anxiety and mistrust.

Besides, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that certain information is sensitive. Personalized content based on such data should not come to a user out of blue. Good UX should consider this factor when applying personalization and avoid misusing private information (from pregnancy and medical issues to the need for psychological help or addiction treatment, and so on). 

Cognitive overload caused by overcustomization

All cases described above definitely prove that too much personalization causes many challenges for end-users. But what about customization? Could it be too much? 

Well, too much of something is never a good thing. Customization provides users with more freedom and control over interfaces. However, at some point, this freedom causes so-called cognitive overload. 

According to numerous studies, users don’t want to think too much and develop their expertise sky-high when interacting with digital products. Instead, they want to get a design that issimple, intuitive, and result-driven. So while customizing certain features to users’ individual needs sounds cool, asking users to set every single aspect of a digital solution on their own is not a good idea. In fact, overсustomization causes friction, requires too much learning, and may even question the value of the product.

Now that you know all the potential pitfalls and misuses of personalization and customization, let’s explore how to make these solutions work as intended. Here are the most effective ways to avoid overpersonalization and overcustomization in user experience. 

How to prevent overpersonalization and overcustomization

When designing an app or platform, a product team should find the right approach to implementing personalization and customization. Of course, the need for these UX techniques entirely depends on the product’s specifics, such as its type and the target audience it’s supposed to serve. 

However, there are several best practices we at Eleken recommend following to avoid unwanted friction. Let’s look at them in more detail.

• Find the right balance. To avoid the lack of content diversity caused by overpersonalization, find a way to consider users’ individual needs while still delivering various content. For example, Pinterest allows users to add more categories to their primary interests, this way expanding their feed if they like. 

• Combine targeted and general content. Users who can access only personalized content may quickly feel bored with a product. It’s better to mix different types of content and allow users to discover new information or goods, even if it’s not based on their inital interests or previous purchases. 

• Be careful with potentially sensitive information. Users value their privacy, especially when it comes to sensitive data. Providing personalized recommendations based on such information should not be out of a relevant context. Otherwise, personalization may seem creepy or even hurt users’ feelings.
  
• Provide users with control. Users should be able to control and manage personalization applied by the products they use. Such an approach builds trust because it allows people to establish the level of their privacy on their own. Moreover, users will not be scared away if they understand how the personalization algorithm works.
  
• Take advantage of user feedback. If users face any kind of issues related to personalization or customization within a product, they should be able to report those problems. This will allow you to improve the user experience and prevent potential churn.
  
• Don’t let users’ freedom affect their comfort. The level of customization should be limited to people’s actual needs. Provide users with control over the interface only when it’s relevant and helpful. Avoid abusing custom features, as they may overwhelm users and make your platform less intuitive. 

When personalization and customization work properly

As with any other aspect of UX, personalization and customization are effective only if applied wisely. If used too much, they may damage user experience and cause problems instead of solving them. These issues lead to higher churn rates which is critical for a SaaS customer journey. That is why we at Eleken always pay extra attention to the level of personalization and customization in our designs. 

For example, when working on the Acadeum, a platform selling courses for universities. We got the right balance in terms of customization and personalization in our UX strategy. Check out how we implemented it here: 

• Personalized content based on the user's individual choices. During the onboarding process, newcomers go through a brief interview that allows the system to determine which courses fit their needs best. As a result, users get the most relevant recommendations later on. 

• Personalization based on user roles. Personalized content depends on the roles that users select on their own. Every role accesses information that fits its needs most. 

• Well-balanced customization. Users can customize certain interface elements, including the background color and typography. However, the customization level doesn’t go too far. The app remains simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate. 

Moreover, if users don’t need to customize the interface, they can turn to the default themes and quickly pick the most suitable one. 

Without overwhelming users, Eleken designers created a more personalized, individual design for the online learning digital product. For more insights, read the case study. 

Final thoughts

Personalization and customization work great only when carefully thought through. Product teams have to find the right balance when implementing these solutions in their designs. Overpersonalization may seem stereotypical, making content boring and generic and in some cases, it also makes users feel they’re being stalked. Too much customization, in turn, overwhelms users. Instead of creating a sense of freedom and control, it limits their interactions with the product and doesn’t meet the principles of accessibility in UX. 

That is why when building digital products, it’s worth avoiding overpersonalized UX, as well as too customizable interfaces. And only an experienced design agency can handle this challenge. Looking for such professionals? We at Eleken are ready to help you out! Our UX design experts will make sure the user experience of your product is well-balanced and meets your users’ needs. Get in touch, and we will find the most effective design solutions for your project.