EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Festo is establishing its learning platform on the market. The platform is available to users in different industries, which results in different needs and use cases. Therefore, not all user needs, or behaviors have been discovered by now which is a challenge when it comes to optimizing the user experience.  

In addition, Festo expects an opportunity to gain competitive advantages by increasing the customer satisfaction with the offer of a superior experience on their own platform. To achieve this, it is crucial to understand the needs, wants and pain points users are having while using the platform. 

Due to this, Festo decided that user journey maps can enable the further improvement of LX. Both, the teacher, and the learner role, are supposed to be examined using usability tests.

Goal

Festo Didactic recognized room for improvements on their learning platform Festo LX in terms of the user experience. The goal of this project is to draw a coherent picture of the current user journey of Festo LX users, find out about the pain points users are experiencing on the platform and give strategic recommendations on how to improve the experience for all users. 

Methodology

The methodologic approach is split into three broad categories: secondary research, usability tests, and a gap analysis resulting in strategic recommendations towards Festo.

Results

Recommendations for the sign-up phase: 

As 69% of users did not expect the sign-up link under “free access”, one could rename the free access labeling to "register”. It is understandable that detailing that the sign-up process is completely free is important. However, as a compromise one could re-label the button as “register for free” to make it clearer that the button will lead to a sign-up page.

Recommendations for the Password creation process: 

To avoid having a user click several times until the password meets all requirements, it might be beneficial to include the instructions for the password requirements above the “password” field and not as a small info button next to the screen. In addition, this instruction text could then change colors to e.g., red to make it clear to the user that he needs to follow all instructions. It might be useful to either rename “Give us Feedback” to “Support” in general or add a separate “Help” button for example on the top right of the screen, so that users will automatically know where to find assistance. Currently, “Give us Feedback” seems to have a connotation with providing e.g., ratings for an application but not a way to request technical support. As 14 % of users had problems understanding the difference of certain terminologies like “eTheory” and “eLearn”, it might be helpful to add a small info button next to each of the terms, that will provide the user with a one sentence summary of what is meant by the term. As half of our interviewees were confused by the term nugget, it might be beneficial to add a clarification when first hovering on the nugget option. Most users still seem to connect the word nugget with “a small chunk of a substance” and not its implied meaning as a “valuable idea or a fact.

Currently, the options to create a question seem to be overwhelming for most users with 68% of users having problems finding the single choice question block due to the number of blocks available. It might be advantageous to reduce the number of blocks available or else rearrange them in another manner. 27% of interviewees expected to have a preview of the learner view and could not find it when editing a course. Thus, implementing a clearly visible “learner view button” that will help a teacher understand how their content will be presented later for their students.

Cooperation Partner

• FESTO

Contact Person

• Dr. Ute Gebhard - ute.gebhard@festo.com

Student Team

• Tobias Stichler

• Nino Hofmann

• Julian Moosbrugger

• Philipp Markopulos

• Markus Krampl

Project Manager

• Caroline Fabian, M.Sc.

• Shtefi Mladenovska, M.Sc.