How to Evaluate an Instructional Design Company: 10 Key Questions to Ask

With so many instructional design companies and consultants available, how can you find the right fit for your project? We break down 10 essential questions to ask when finding the best instructional design company for your training needs.

You are spoiled for choice if you are looking for instructional design support for your training project. There are thousands of different instructional design companies, consultants, freelancers, firms, agencies, and more to choose from. 

How can you make an informed decision about who to hire? How can you assess which instructional design company best suits your project needs?

We’ve created 10 key questions to help you determine the best solution for you. Using these questions to guide your decision, you’ll be able to:

• Determine how instructional design companies approach their client relationships
• Identify instructional design solutions that are suited to your eLearning project
• Assess the best option for choosing the right instructional design company

The Importance of Choosing the Right Instructional Design Company

Have you ever tried to tighten a metric screw or bolt with an imperial Allen key? Trying to make them fit together is time-consuming and frustrating, and there’s no guarantee it will even work. 

The same logic applies to choosing an instructional design company for your learning project. There may be a solution that fits your needs pretty well, but you also may be forced to change certain aspects of your project because your chosen instructional design company cannot accommodate them. 

The benefits of choosing the right instructional design company

The fact is: when you find an instructional design team that truly understands and delivers on your project needs, the resulting training will be more engaging and effective than if you choose a vendor without any prior research. The process of selecting an instructional design company is crucial, as choosing the right instructional design company will benefit your project in numerous ways:

• Understanding your project needs, training goals, and learning audience: An instructional design consultant who works with you to understand your project goals and addresses your learners’ unique needs will result in more effective training experiences and improved learning outcomes.
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• Relevant expertise and skills: Different instructional design firms have different specialties. Some may focus more on curriculum consulting, while others specialize in eLearning development or have expertise with AR, VR, or ILT/VILT program creation and delivery. Instructional design vendors may also possess topical expertise, specializing in creating compliance training, technical training, medical training, and other specialized areas. If you have a solid idea of what your project will entail, you’ll be better able to assess which skills and expertise to look for in an instructional design company.
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• Quality and consistency: Determine if your potential instructional design provider has experience working on similar projects and explore how they guided another organization’s learning project to understand how they will approach yours.
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• Customization and flexibility: As the saying goes, if there’s any constant in life, it’s change. An effective instructional design team will be able to adapt to your project’s evolving needs and provide guidance to ensure your project goals are fulfilled.
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• Brand and culture alignment: Successful training projects are built on partnerships founded on mutual trust. An instructional design team that understands what's essential to your organization will be better equipped to create learning resources that align with those values and resonate with your learners.

Let’s emphasize that last point: it’s best to assess instructional design companies in the context of a partnership. Learning projects are often detail-oriented and involve substantial collaboration between you and your chosen instructional design team. When both of you share a deep understanding of your project, the final product will be better tailored to your learning audience and ultimately be more successful. 

At Neovation, we fully embrace this partnership dynamic with our clients. Wherever you’re at with your learning initiatives, we help you assess how we can best support your goals, identify knowledge and content gaps in your training, and provide customized project plans through a collaborative process that prioritizes your unique needs. Even if you haven’t worked out the details, we can work with you to determine the right direction for your project.

Are you looking for an experienced instructional design company that’s worked on a wide range of projects for organizations across numerous industries? We encourage you to meet with us, discuss your project, and receive a customized quote to see how we can bring your vision to life as an impactful and engaging eLearning course. 

10 Key Questions to Help You Choose The Right Instructional Design Company

By asking critical questions of potential instructional design solution providers, you can assess their suitability to meet your project needs and align with your existing workflows, company and brand values, and training stakeholders. 

Based on our experiences with hundreds of clients, we created these ten questions to help you evaluate potential instructional design companies for your next project and act as inspiration for creating additional questions and criteria for determining which instructional design company to work with.

1. What is your pricing structure for instructional design consulting and services?

Pricing for instructional design consulting varies depending on the type of service required. For example, a freelance instructional designer may charge by the hour, whereas an instructional design agency may use project-based pricing. 

There may also be tiered pricing based on varying degrees of involvement in your learning project. You may only need guidance on applying instructional design best practices to your course structure if you have all the necessary content to build your training. In contrast, other projects may require content assessment and organization to create an effective eLearning project plan.

At Neovation, we offer clients a points-based pricing structure. There are two ways to use the points-based pricing:

These points can be easily traded to give you the flexibility to make informed decisions about your project and maximize your investment. With our points system, we can price your project in two ways:

1. Project-based points: We map out your project and translate the work into the number of points required to complete it. This approach works great when you have a precise vision of how you’d like us to assist you.
2. Open-ended points: You purchase points that you can leverage for various parts of your project without needing to know all the details upfront—just purchase, and we can get started.

Of course, we can work with partial plans or anywhere between these two ends of the spectrum. The key takeaway is that our point-based pricing structure is incredibly flexible and helps our clients achieve a result they love, no matter how much or little is determined before discussing their project with us.

We encourage you to check out our Custom eLearning Buyer’s Guide for an in-depth look at eLearning project pricing.‍

2. What expertise do you have working with our industry? Have you worked with companies in our industry before?

Learners from different industries can have vastly different training needs. Certain instructional design companies may have a preferred industry for their clients based on familiarity with relevant regulations, experience within that industry, and knowledge of industry best practices.

It’s important to ensure that your chosen solution’s expertise aligns with your industry before hiring an instructional design company. Many companies, including Neovation, allow you to review past projects to give you a sense of how they’ll work with you on your project. You can check out select past projects in our eLearning Development Gallery. 

To learn how we’ve helped companies across various industries and project needs, reach out to us for a chat.

3. How do you work with clients to ensure a successful project?

It’s crucial to understand how an instructional design agency approaches client relationships. As mentioned, learning projects require intense attention to detail and rely on effective collaboration between the consultant and the client. 

Understanding how an instructional design company will work with you—from initial meetings to project planning to resource sharing—will help you find a solution that suits your organization’s existing workflows. 

At Neovation, our instructional designers prioritize open and consistent communication with you at every stage of your project. Integrating your ongoing feedback into the creation process helps us ensure the project aligns with your exact needs.

Our Custom Learning team has well-established tools and workflows for project planning, risk identification and management, and collaboration on project assets. We also check in with you regularly during the project to ensure it progresses toward a solution you’re thrilled about. ‍

4. How do you support learner needs when designing your courses? 

People learn and retain knowledge in many ways, making personalized learning experiences all the more crucial. Personalization can extend to considerations such as the use of appropriate language, various interactivity types, learner experience, and other aspects of your training modules.

Be sure to ask potential instructional design service providers how they have created eLearning uniquely suited to specific learner audiences during past projects. For example: 

• Mobile-first training for learners who aren't working from computers, like field workers or frontline employees
• If your core issue is engagement, adding gamification elements can grab and hold your learner’s attention
• Boost understanding, knowledge recall, and practice core concepts by creating learning simulations or branching scenarios can help learners practice in a low-risk environment
• Dividing eLearning content into micro-modules or short videos can help learners with less time available for training, and to learn in short doses, making the material easier to consume and retain
• Supporting learners with various multimedia options to support various learning preferences, such as videos and infographics for visual, narration and podcasts for auditory, and simulations and interactive exercises for kinesthetic, can enhance engagement and knowledge retention

Neovation’s Custom Learning team includes instructional designers, graphic designers, and course authoring developers who have created learning resources and take a learner-centric approach to all of our projects. 

By understanding the unique needs of your learners, knowledge gaps, and learning outcomes, we make recommendations on modalities, learner theories, and overall approaches to get the best result for your project, whether that be mobile-first, gamified, or other specialized requirements.

If your project requires unique learning materials tailored to the preferences of your learner audience, we encourage you to contact our team and explore whether we are the best choice for your organization.

5. How do you work with existing content, and what if our content is incomplete or outdated?

Many organizations lack the necessary content to build their training projects. Incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated information and resources must be addressed before the project can proceed. If an instructional design company requires you to provide all the content for your project, you may be left on the hook for organizing and updating your content before the project starts. 

Find out whether an instructional design team can work with you to organize your training material for your project. For example, at Neovation, the first step in our instructional design process is knowledge appraisal, where our team will work with you to assess the state of your training materials. If we identify gaps in your training, we will work with your subject matter experts (SMEs) to help your organization close those gaps. 

6. How do you handle mid-project changes or scope adjustments?

As we mentioned earlier, it’s common for projects to change as they progress. You may encounter a setback mid-project that causes you to reassess what you need your training to accomplish. Your project may also be subject to changing organizational priorities, which can cause the scope to change.

Ask potential instructional design companies how they handle mid-project changes, how they help clients pivot their focus on underway projects, and how they deal with the risk and impact on project scope and timelines. 

For example, during a past project, Neovation’s Custom Learning team had a client who had a bold vision of using 3D animation in their training. However, the cost of producing 3D animation exceeded the client’s budget, so we demonstrated how the client could convey the same message using a 2D animation instead of a 3D animation. Not only did this solution fit their budget, but they were ultimately happier with the final project than they had been with their initial idea.

Our Custom Learning team supports our clients and their evolving project needs with project management tools that enable us to provide clients with the information they need to maximize their investment.‍

7. How do you ensure a balance between project timelines and quality deliverables?

Training success, like business success, is predicated on the future. Predictable, achievable timelines help companies plan future projects and initiatives. Additionally, many organizations must adhere to government regulations with set dates, which can impact project timeline milestones and completion deadlines. 

When working with instructional design consultants, it’s crucial to collaborate with your instructional design vendor to ensure project benchmarks and deadlines are met while still delivering adequate training resources and project guidance. 

To ensure we provide clients with realistic expectations about project timelines, our Custom Learning team features a dedicated project manager to keep you informed of your project’s progress. We create work-back schedules and perform pre-project risk analyses to identify and plan for potential risks. 

Compared to freelance instructional designers or in-house teams, we have a large team that uses waterfall-style project management, allowing us to work on multiple aspects of your project simultaneously. 

8. What software/authoring tools/technologies are you proficient with?

Most organizations administer their training through a Learning Management System (LMS) and must ensure that new eLearning content integrates seamlessly within their learning system. LMSs can require different source files to work, so it’s crucial that your chosen instructional design vendor can accommodate the requirements of your LMS.

The most common standard file format for LMSs is SCORM, which stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. An instructional design company specializing in eLearning content creation will likely work with SCORM files. 

It’s important that your chosen instructional design vendor can work with eLearning authoring tools used by your organization, as this allows your teams to edit and update files created by your vendor in the future. 

Neovation’s Custom Learning team is proficient with a wide range of authoring tools and strives to work with tools and formats that our clients already use. We provide clients with the source files for their projects, which the client then owns and can revise as they see fit. These source files are based on the client’s LMS, ensuring that the resources we’ve created work seamlessly when implemented. 

9. How do you ensure learning materials are accessible for all learners?

Providing accessible training to your learners helps ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. When researching potential instructional design companies, ask how they ensure that training projects adhere to relevant accessibility best practices, such as the WCAG AA accessibility guidelines. 

What does accessible eLearning look like in practice? There are countless things you can do to ensure your training provides a productive experience for every kind of learner:

• Add captions or transcripts for all videos and audio.
• Use high-contrast colors and avoid color-only cues.
• Ensure full keyboard navigation (no mouse required).
• Support screen readers with semantic HTML and labels.
• Include alt text for informative images.
• Allow text resizing and responsive reflow.
• Use clear, simple language throughout.
• Offer multiple content formats, including text, video, and audio.
• Avoid strict time limits or allow time extensions.
• Provide clear error messages and correction suggestions.
• Ensure the layout of eLearning slides avoids extraneous elements that cause cognitive overload.

Our instructional designers have experience creating accessible eLearning content that adheres to AA-level WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Read our accessibility improvements articles to learn more about how Neovation can make your training fully accessible. ‍

10. How do you ensure a good cultural fit between your team and our organization?

By understanding what’s important to your organization and your employees, instructional designers can design eLearning that truly meets the needs of what drives your learners. We encourage you to look for an instructional design vendor that understands your values and culture. 

It can be tricky to assess culture alignment with potential instructional design providers. A good indicator is whether a company is genuinely interested in learning about your organization’s culture and values. Should one of your shortlisted instructional design companies take the time to understand where you’re coming from and what’s important to you, it’s more likely they’ll apply that attention to detail to your actual project. 

At Neovation, our Custom Learning team takes time to learn about you and your organization. We would like to hear about your past successes and challenges, as well as the values that are important to your learners and organization. We are transparent about our approach to eLearning projects because we want to create a partnership with clients that results in a smooth project process and a stellar final product.

If you’d like to share your eLearning project vision with our team, we’d be happy to meet to discuss whether we can help guide your project to success. Book a meeting with one of our learning experts to learn more about our partnership approach to instructional design and eLearning.

The Right Decision is an Informed Decision

In addition to the questions listed, we encourage you to develop further key questions to ask when assessing potential instructional design companies. Doing your due diligence now will set your eLearning initiatives up for success. 

Want to learn more about how you can assess instructional design companies? Consult our Custom eLearning Buyer’s Guide for various topics related to instructional design services. We cannot overstate the importance of a solid relationship with your instructional design provider, and we encourage you to gather as much information as possible to make the best-informed decision for your next project.

And if you are you ready to start your next project contact us for an eLearning project quote today!