What’s your least favorite thing about your LMS?
I’ve probably used, tested, or implemented around 50 different Learning Management Systems in the last 10 years.
Having seen both the end-user and admin side of many of the most popular ones on the market now, I can confidently say I’ve never found one I love.
If training is checking a box, the LMS is designed as a checklist.
Somehow they all do the same thing, but each find a way to make it into a complicated and impersonal experience for their users and customers.
The obvious thing about most of them is that they are either sales or engineering driven companies, rather than design driven.
Meaning, they are often being sold to you by people promising you the world and underdelivering, hiding behind demos, trying to make a quick exit, and/or they are straight up clunky and unintuitive.
And while I can accept a crummy admin experience for myself or someone else getting paid to grit their teeth at the pain, I can’t forgive a bad end-user experience for the employees at a client’s company.
Then the challenge I see with buyers is them thinking that their LMS is like a storage unit that they’ll just fill with stuff, and the salesperson says oh we will throw a bunch of other stuff in too to fill it up!
When you have an LMS designed by engineers to be a checklist, sold by an overpromising salesperson, meeting a storage unit buyer—you have a surefire recipe for bad employee experience, and it’s really hard to crawl out of due to switching costs the longer you let it drag on.
All that to say, selecting an LMS from a third-party vendor will always be a trade-off. Whichever one you choose, it’s unlikely to do everything exactly how you want for your specific use case. They all have strengths and weaknesses.
So, before you make your choice, at least try to really imagine how it will feel for your end-users, test it out with your content, see how you can customize it to make it feel like a “place” that fits in your ecosystem.
🔍 Set up multiple resources, see how you are able to organize information, test how you can search, filter or sort.
🔍 Make sure it lets you embed or upload all the content types important to you.
🔍 If you’re making content in the LMS, test out how it formats it.
🔍 See how you can link to or share resources in a way that will be easy for people to access.
🔍 Focus on quality and relevance of content rather than quantity. It’s more important how it can be organized than how fast you fill it up.
These are the common areas I see people banging their heads against the wall if not set up properly.
The admin side of some of these systems is a whole other issue, but maybe that’s a rant for another day. 😂
