Ready to Deliver a Positive Learner Experience? Brand Your LMS

For continuing education (CE) providers, preserving brand identity across software platforms is more than a “nice to have” feature – it’s a critical component of the learner experience. After all, learners know your brand. Your logo and colors help them distinguish between proprietary software and software you purchased from a vendor.

Unless, of course, your vendor builds brand consistency into the learner interface.

Brand consistency for learning management software

Brand consistency isn’t exactly a new concept. For decades, it has enabled companies to market themselves under a banner that is both recognizable and reproducible across advertising mediums and product designs.

Nowadays, branded design is something CE providers should require when they select a learning management system (LMS). More vendors are prioritizing it, and others, like Rievent, even make “visual integration” a standard component of every agreement.

Why the buzz around the “old” concept of consistent branding? As the Digital Communications Division of the US Department of Health and Human Services explains, visual elements have a profound impact on product usability:

Users have become familiar with interface elements acting in a certain way, so try to be consistent and predictable in your choices and their layout. Doing so will help with task completion, efficiency, and satisfaction. […] It is also important to create patterns in language, layout and design […] to help facilitate efficiency.

CE providers certainly have an imperative to “create patterns” that optimize “task completion,” and “facilitate efficiency” among learners. But can brand consistency alone help you get there?

Achieving a consistent, flexible brand

Since learners demand an online experience, you want to deliver the best one you possibly can. The presence of consistent visual elements across software platforms is key, but it’s also important to reconcile consistency with the requirements of a particular piece of software.

Consistency matters, but you’ve got to be flexible, too.

As an Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, Jose Martinez Salmeron wrote about the consistent, but flexible, branding required for a positive user experience across platforms. Brands, he contends, must now possess:

[The] ability to be flexible while keeping intact [their] core principles and attributes […] This fresh approach to defining a brand […] tends to result in more immersive, delightful and rewarding customer experiences.

In other words, your brand needs to remain consistent while adapting to the format in which users (that is, learners) will encounter it. It needs to shift to fit inside different containers.

Branding the Rievent Platform as your own

At Rievent, we take your existing brand features and incorporate them into the Learning Portal. Any time learners browse the CE activity catalog, complete an activity, or view participation history, they enjoy an experience that is visually consistent with the rest of your website:

• Logos and colors are the same ones learners see on your website and in other branded documentation.
• Consistent branding complements single sign-on (SSO).
• Recognizable visual patterns promote efficient task completion per usability best practices.
• Branding a third party software platform offers a more streamlined, professional experience to a professional audience.

The way we see it, learners shouldn’t feel like they’ve left your website to use a different application. By branding the Rievent Platform as your own, learners will experience continuing education and your website as a single, integrated whole.

We think it’s a solid combination of consistency and flexibility.