How would you take this course to the next level? I've been asked to make it less e-learny. The feedback is that "At the moment there's no pay off for clicking through it other than just reading more information."
Add more interactivity. Make people click on things in order to get the info. Incorporate an scenario if possible at the beginning, to gauge how much people know about the subject. Present the information accordingly based on their answers.
Phil, thank you. I like your idea about creating infographics for some of the data. As to micro-interactions, could you please point me to some examples.
There's probably a number of different but equally good directions you could go with bringing this to the next level. Without knowing more about the goals for the course and the time/resources you have for putting this together, it's a bit tricky to make suggestions that will definitely work. But here are a few things that might be worth considering as you narrow down your options.
The visual design of this e-learning is very sleek and attractive. I'd bet you make amazing slide decks, because those title slides are beautiful! But I do wonder if there are parts of the design that are at odds with making this particular course feel easy to get through? For instance, each section is rather short (which is great!), but having the section titles on a separate screen from the content adds a click each time. And having the titles separate from the content that way sometimes makes it hard to remember the subject of a section as you're moving quickly through them.
As well, the course images are attractive and cohesive, but they're more setting up a mood than carrying any of the weight of sharing information. The more you can use the images in a course to take on some of the weight of sharing important content, the more they're able to tighten up the text and make important information easier to understand and remember. Phil's suggestion of converting some of the great data in the content into something more like a simple infographic is an excellent example of how your images can do some heavy lifting for you.
The image backgrounds also make the text harder to read. You've helped to boost the contrast with the semi-transparent text backgrounds, which was a smart move. But they're still transparent enough to reduce the readability. That one is an easy fix though: decrease the transparency and increase the size of the backgrounds so there's more white space around your text.
Then there's the text. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with reading text if that's the right experience for the goals, content, and audience. But you want to present that content to your learners in a way that makes reading as easy as possible. In the case of this copy, Rise 360 might be a better fit than Storyline 360 if just because that user experience is designed to make reading longer blocks of text smooth and easy. And Rise 360 could still also support infographics and other media that helps enhance the information you're sharing.
If you want a different-looking design from a Rise 360 course, though, or the kind of custom interactivity that Storyline does best, it could be worth looking to Nancy Duarte's Slidedocs approach. It was originally created for using Powerpoint/Keynote to create eBook-like documents. But there's no reason you couldn't take inspiration from the way the approach creates very readable screen layouts, uses visuals, and chunks ideas in this project too (particularly if you're not able to adjust the copy much). And you could still add in full or micro-interactions too.
I hope that helps with some ideas! If you've got any questions about these ideas or have some additional info about the project that might help us all come up with even more targeted solutions for you, just let us know.
You have given me lots to think about and here are the module's learning objectives:
All employees should be able to:
explain to colleagues and where applicable, customers, the different fuel choices currently available to support the energy transition and a move away from diesel.
highlight the considerations and benefits of alternative fuels.
The learning objectives help a lot! Thanks for sharing them.
If you're thinking about small interactions, something that helps learners try out using the information about the different fuel choices in a conversational way could do a lot to support that first objective. And interactions like that wouldn't have to be too technical from a development perspective to reinforce the objective.
Even a few text-based multiple-choice questions that are written like a conversation between the learner and a co-worker or customer could work (although you could always use the characters in the Content Library to make that look a bit slicker).
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Add more interactivity. Make people click on things in order to get the info. Incorporate an scenario if possible at the beginning, to gauge how much people know about the subject. Present the information accordingly based on their answers.
At the moment it just feels like a slide show with text.
You definitely need back navigation, add in some micro interactions/animations
Make it interactive, use questions. Convert some of the data to infographics. It doesn't feel like elearning at the moment, more a powerpoint.
Hianna, thank you very much for your feedback. I'd like to use a scenario however, I don't have the resources to develop one at the moment.
Phil, thank you. I like your idea about creating infographics for some of the data. As to micro-interactions, could you please point me to some examples.
A microinteraction is a tiny interaction/animaton that improves the users experience and ultimately increase user engagement.
This may help a little: https://userguiding.com/blog/microinteraction/
Hi Phil,
Thank you for the article, a very interesting read and the examples at the end really helped.
Hi Henry,
There's probably a number of different but equally good directions you could go with bringing this to the next level. Without knowing more about the goals for the course and the time/resources you have for putting this together, it's a bit tricky to make suggestions that will definitely work. But here are a few things that might be worth considering as you narrow down your options.
The visual design of this e-learning is very sleek and attractive. I'd bet you make amazing slide decks, because those title slides are beautiful! But I do wonder if there are parts of the design that are at odds with making this particular course feel easy to get through? For instance, each section is rather short (which is great!), but having the section titles on a separate screen from the content adds a click each time. And having the titles separate from the content that way sometimes makes it hard to remember the subject of a section as you're moving quickly through them.
As well, the course images are attractive and cohesive, but they're more setting up a mood than carrying any of the weight of sharing information. The more you can use the images in a course to take on some of the weight of sharing important content, the more they're able to tighten up the text and make important information easier to understand and remember. Phil's suggestion of converting some of the great data in the content into something more like a simple infographic is an excellent example of how your images can do some heavy lifting for you.
The image backgrounds also make the text harder to read. You've helped to boost the contrast with the semi-transparent text backgrounds, which was a smart move. But they're still transparent enough to reduce the readability. That one is an easy fix though: decrease the transparency and increase the size of the backgrounds so there's more white space around your text.
Then there's the text. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with reading text if that's the right experience for the goals, content, and audience. But you want to present that content to your learners in a way that makes reading as easy as possible. In the case of this copy, Rise 360 might be a better fit than Storyline 360 if just because that user experience is designed to make reading longer blocks of text smooth and easy. And Rise 360 could still also support infographics and other media that helps enhance the information you're sharing.
If you want a different-looking design from a Rise 360 course, though, or the kind of custom interactivity that Storyline does best, it could be worth looking to Nancy Duarte's Slidedocs approach. It was originally created for using Powerpoint/Keynote to create eBook-like documents. But there's no reason you couldn't take inspiration from the way the approach creates very readable screen layouts, uses visuals, and chunks ideas in this project too (particularly if you're not able to adjust the copy much). And you could still add in full or micro-interactions too.
I hope that helps with some ideas! If you've got any questions about these ideas or have some additional info about the project that might help us all come up with even more targeted solutions for you, just let us know.
Bianca,
Thank you very much.
You have given me lots to think about and here are the module's learning objectives:
All employees should be able to:
Kind regards,
Henry
Henry,
The learning objectives help a lot! Thanks for sharing them.
If you're thinking about small interactions, something that helps learners try out using the information about the different fuel choices in a conversational way could do a lot to support that first objective. And interactions like that wouldn't have to be too technical from a development perspective to reinforce the objective.
Even a few text-based multiple-choice questions that are written like a conversation between the learner and a co-worker or customer could work (although you could always use the characters in the Content Library to make that look a bit slicker).
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