At D2L, our passion for enhancing the learning experience is at the heart of everything we do. This commitment recently led us to a remarkable milestone: Brightspace has been named the #1 Easiest to Use Learning Management System on G2. Alongside this achievement, Brightspace was recognized as a leader in 20 other categories.
Our journey to number one was no easy feat.
Five years ago, Brightspace ranked 13th in usability, and just last year, it ranked ninth. This leap in rankings reflects years of working with our users and community to take learning to the next level.
In this interview with Christian Pantel, senior vice president, user experience design and product development at D2L, we explore:
- the strategic vision behind D2L’s user experience (UX) design
- how we keep users at the centre of our focus
- what the future looks like for Brightspace
What were some of the primary UX and usability concerns you identified in the past few years?
Quite a few years ago, we recognized that our primary challenge was modernizing and improving our core workflows, as well as enhancing the experience on mobile devices. Brightspace users needed, and wanted, a consistent, intuitive experience that allowed them to confidently engage with our platform.
We embarked on a multiyear project to enhance the overall UX by focusing on making daily tasks simple and ensuring that less-frequent tasks were still discoverable and intuitive.
When planning this project, what was the overall strategy and vision that guided your improvements?
Our strategy centered on three main pillars: focusing on core tasks, ensuring consistency and prioritizing accessibility.
We aimed to make everyday tasks for every Brightspace user not only functional but also enjoyable. This means that activities like adding or organizing materials, evaluating student progress and communicating within the platform had to be intuitive and efficient. By improving these fundamental workflows, we were able to shave time off everyday tasks for admins, educators and students.
Our focus on consistency across all devices and throughout the platform made it easier for users to build confidence as they navigated through Brightspace. If they knew one part of our system, they could take that knowledge and apply it elsewhere within the platform. Consistency in design reduces the learning curve and empowers users to explore and utilize features they weren’t before.
Accessibility has always played a role in our design—we’re the only ed tech company that has been a member of the National Federation of the Blind’s user Strategic Nonvisual Access Partnership program since 2016. We pay special attention to creating a platform that is accessible to all users, including those using assistive technology. Our accessibility (a11y) team is integral to this process, consulting with research and development teams and conducting user testing with people with disabilities to ensure a high standard of usability for everyone.
How did you ensure that the right features were focused on and that clients felt these improvements? How does user feedback get incorporated into your design and development process?
D2L has always taken a balanced approach to prioritization, with UX being a strong consideration in our decision-making process. Our UX leaders are deeply involved in planning D2L’s road map, so we can decide what and how we deliver user value in Brightspace. Our engineers and designers work closely together on everything we build at D2L, ensuring that intuitive UX, user interface, and accessibility considerations are incorporated throughout the development process.
User feedback is integral to our design process. Our UX research team conducts daily user studies, surveys and interviews with learners, educators and administrators. We learn directly from users so that we have a deep empathy and understanding of their needs.
At D2L, we capture diverse perspectives and have multiple feedback channels, including customer success managers, our Community, interactions with customers at events like D2L Fusion and even review forums such as G2. This user-centered approach guarantees that we address real user needs effectively.
Can you share some specific examples of changes or new features that had the most significant impact?
We’ve made and will continue to make multiyear investments in our core workflows—the tasks users frequently do in Brightspace—which has brought in some great feedback and ensures that users have a great first and future experience with Brightspace.
We have built up a great design system and library of web components. We put tremendous effort into ensuring these are of the highest quality and are accessible. These components are then reused throughout the platform and by multiple users. This results in a polished experience throughout Brightspace, which our users really appreciate.
In the past year, we’ve also focused on settings across different activities, including making changes in bulk, to make tasks easier and faster for educators. Quiz timing is a specific example of a simple feature that we introduced so that instructors can easily set time constraints and have the quiz auto-submit upon completion. Alongside the educator experience, we considered what a learner might feel with those changes. Through feedback and testing, we found that a quiz timer created anxiety for some learners, leading us to add an option to hide this countdown while occasionally notifying the user of the elapsed and remaining time. Our testing with those using assistive technologies helped us ensure that the timer has the right balance of alerting users without being distracting—or too “chatty,” as some of our users described.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during this transformation?
Brightspace is a powerful, feature-rich system. It is leveraged in a wide variety of organizations by users with very different needs, goals and abilities. The challenge is to make it feel like a perfect fit in all these different contexts, serving the youngest learners in schools through to students in college and universities, and on to adults continuing their lifelong learning journeys at work and beyond. Creating an intuitive and easy-to-use system for all these contexts is challenging due to the many variables involved. However, our UX teams excel at distilling this complexity into a simple and intuitive experience, ensuring that all users can easily navigate and utilize the platform.
What feedback have you received from users since achieving the No. 1 ranking?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Over the past year, we’ve facilitated 299 sessions to ensure we’re continuously improving and meeting our users’ needs. Users appreciate the caring approach we take in crafting product experiences, which is integral to our mission of transforming the way the world learns.
What are your plans for continuing to innovate and maintain the top spot for usability?
Maintaining an easy-to-use system is critical to D2L’s mission. Our passion for transforming learning drives us to create the best user experiences. We will continue to innovate in areas such as artificial intelligence, competency-based education, course authoring, assessment and learning analytics. Our user-centered approach ensures that these new experiences are easy to use for everyone, keeping us at the forefront of usability.
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