How Learning Experience Designers Make Design Decisions: The Role of Data, the Reliance on Subject Matter Expertise, and the Opportunities for Data-Driven Support

Learning Experience Designers (LXDs) play an increasingly consequential role in the creation of courses and training materials that meet the needs of diverse learner populations and the growing class scope. Emerging design requests for scalable and effective course-ware introduce new challenges in Learning Experience (LX) design practice while providing an opportunity for researchers to understand LX workflows and design new tools to improve them. This paper presents an interview study with 21 LXDs from 18 different organizations with the goal of understanding LXDs' collaborative relationships with subject matter experts (SMEs), data needs, and contextual challenges. We further perform a survey study to validate the challenges and probe into LXDs' attitudes toward a suite of data-driven solutions. We find that LXDs demonstrate a strong desire to collect data to inform their design - including target learners' prior knowledge and relevant design precedents. LXDs want support in better collaborating with SMEs, acquiring and processing diverse learner data, identifying relevant research studies to communicate their design decisions, understanding domain-specific material, and creating quality materials (especially questions). We discuss LXDs' concerns regarding automated solutions such as the lack of contextual understanding, over-reliance on automation, and data privacy before elaborating on the implications for future work.