Kent State UXD Program- UXD in Practice Reflective Journaling Week 1

I am in the learning and development industry and one of the skills that has been getting some press is something called performance consulting.  It is really the act of making sure creating an online course (most common example) is really the solution needed to address a performance/business problem.  Since taking the UX courses at Kent State I've realized that a performance consultant is a kind of designer.  A performance consultant thinks about the experience of the audience in a very similar way that a UX professional does.  A performance consultant looks at the areas of motivation just as a UX professional leverages empathy in the same way to understand a specific problem or opportunity.  In fact, there are more similarities than differences.  A performance consultant is in a manner of speaking a UX professional that focuses on the design of business performance.  The biggest difference is that a performance consultant is more aligned with the business than a standard UX professional because that is the lane where performance consultants and learning professionals work so to speak.   The client in the case of a performance consultant is always the business.  While this doesn't create a lot of variety, the principals of UX can help ensure there is always an alignment to the business by using principals in visual design and techniques such as creating prototypes.