Tin Can API a quick overview: from SCORM or AICC to Tin Can

from Monique Yanamandra, Technical Architect

on May 16, 2013

Tin Can API, previously and variously known as project Tin Can, Experience API, and Next Generation SCORM, is the next generation of SCORM and AICC. It is such a departure in technical and design terms though that it has a brand new name. Tin Can API is ADL's (ADL owns the SCORM specifications) new content communication specification and AICC is adopting it to base its new specifications on. (See Tin Can API Big News). ADL reached out to Rustici Software to develop the standards. Rustici has a solid history of experience with SCORM development and they happily agreed to collaborate with ADL who will still "own" the standard. I recommend the Rustici site for specifics and technical details. This blog provides you with a basic overview of the new standard.

The gist is that Tin Can API can be used to track anything, anywhere, anytime, and send it anywhere. Unlike SCORM and AICC, the API does not dictate what to track or precisely how to formulate what you're tracking. It's wide open. Also, the learning activity may originate anywhere. It does not need to be launched from an LMS.

Technically speaking the API uses REST (standard web architecture style developed by W3C) and JSON (human readable data interchange open standard). Calls are constructed using object - verb - activity based statements and they can be any object verb activity. For example, "Lola" "read" a "Tin Can API blog". You decide what you track and the protocol does not determine what is called or how to describe it. Contrast that with SCORM, which made it mandatory for LMSs to only track a small set of defined information.

What's that about sending it anywhere? The information is sent to a Learning Record Store (LRS) or a couple of LRSs simultaneously. The information in the LRS can be queried by another LRS, an LMS, or another reporting tool. To work with Tin Can API, LMS's can either work with an external LRS or build one into their system.

Let’s say Tin Can gets so far that our favorite LMS decides to adopt the API - how will we know what information to send it in order for it to create standardized reports? Conveniently, for those of us that need to do basic tracking like we currently do, there are intentions to form "an agreed-upon starter list of verbs and activities". This should hopefully set a standard that allows us to take care of those basic reporting needs without reinventing them.

What happens to SCORM and AICC? There will not be new versions of SCORM and AICC. They have come to the end of their road. But I think they'll be around for a while. People will not be fixing what's not broken - assuming it's not broken.

What is refreshing about this endeavor is that Rustici is putting a lot of effort into making it understandable and they are very accessible. They've worked hard to describe it clearly and make the information easily available. There is more commitment to communication with the community than I've found in all the years I’ve worked with the ADL site. No disrespect to the ADL people, they just have different objectives. Already, I like the experience better.

If you read or listen to Rustici folks, you'll notice a lot of excitement about potential. What I'd like to see is that this simplifies our lives in doing what we need to get done while leaving the door open to anything you can find a use for or an interest in.

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Intersect meeting recap – CMS implementation stories

from J Hruby, Director of Marketing

on May 14, 2013

At the May 8 Intersect meeting, we had a meaningful, informative, and sometimes humorous discussion about Content Management System (CMS) selection and implementation.

Members from three organizations shared their experiences:

• Donna Mork of Stearns County
• Laura Winge and Christoper Sprung of MN DEED
• Megan Ryan and Kristi Tramp of the MN Housing Finance Agency

In addition, we reviewed the results of a survey that Amy Hoey of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board created as a part of their website redesign. We distributed the survey to the Intersect membership and had about 30 respondents. You may download the PDF of the survey findings here.

Thanks again to Laura, Chris, and MN DEED for hosting, and to everyone who participated. It was really an excellent, lively meeting.

Mark your calendars for our next meeting on Wednesday, August 14, 2013 from 2:00-4:00pm. See you then.

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Designing and developing mLearning: an interview with Fredcomm’s Tony Tao

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on May 08, 2013

In April I had an opportunity to deliver a presentation to PACT in Minneapolis on the challenges of designing a good mobile user experience. As more of us use mobile devices for different activities (50+% of Americans have a smartphone and 52.5 million of us have a tablet), interest in mobile learning (mLearning) continues to grow. But a successful mLearning experience has to be based on a good understanding of the constraints and opportunities that mobile devices present to interface designers and instructional designers. It will come as no surprise that designing for a smartphone is significantly more challenging than designing for a tablet. You can’t just convert or retrofit existing eLearning that has been designed for a PC so that it works well on a smartphone; you have to design specifically for that device. That means thinking differently about navigation, presentation, interactions, and content.

As a follow up to my PACT talk, I decided to sit down with instructional designer Tony Tao, Fredrickson’s expert on rapid e-learning development tools. I wanted to find out more about how well these tools can work for developing effective mLearning experiences.

John: So Tony, let’s start with a broad question: what tools do instructional designers have at their disposal to create mLearning for use on smartphones?

Tony: John, I’m glad we can get together and share our thoughts on mobile learning. Like you said, there’s a great interest in mobile learning now that smartphones and tablets have become so prevalent. The software companies have noticed this trend too, and so when instructional designers select authoring tools for mLearning, they have some good options. The traditional eLearning authoring tools, including Flash/AIR [Note: Flash can be used to publish a course as an AIR application, which is supported by both Android and iOS], JavaScript, and HTML, are still valuable in developing mLearning programs. I’ve also noticed some rapid development tools join the game recently. For example, the newly released Adobe Captivate 6 and Articulate Storyline offer templates for tablet delivery, as well as some limited options for smartphones. There are also some interesting tools for “non-traditional” learning development. For example, iBooks Author offers tools for developing electronic books, and Xcode provides templates to develop native apps for smartphones. In addition, the most popular video editing tools are also valuable in creating mLearning.

John: Last year, you wrote a very informative series of blog entries comparing Articulate and Captivate. Do these tools have benefits and drawbacks with respect to developing mLearning that we should be aware of?

Tony: Articulate Studio and Captivate are the most popular rapid eLearning authoring tools on the market. When I wrote my blog entries a year ago, these tools were being used mainly for developing regular eLearning courses for desktops and laptops. There are some drawbacks in using them for mLearning. The most obvious problem is the cross-platform support issue. Both tools publish courses in Flash (SWF), which iOS does not support, and so this means you would not be able to view Flash-based courses on an iPad or iPhone. However, the good news is that Captivate 6 and Articulate Storyline already provide options for publishing a course in HTML5 as a way to address this cross-platform issue. However, Articulate Studio users will have to wait for the release of Studio 13, which will become available later this year with the HTML5 option.

Another problem is with some of the user interface elements of the courses that you can develop with these tools. The default navigation buttons, such as Play and Pause, and Next and Back, are good on tablets. Storyline even released a player app for iOS, so that learners can navigate through courses comfortably with their iPad. However, these buttons are still not big enough for smartphones.

John:: The screen size of smartphones definitely presents a design challenge. Navigation targets have to be big enough to accommodate fingers and thumbs in place of a pixel-specific pointer. But the more space you give away to navigation, the less space you have for content. Text size can also be a challenge, impeding the ease of reading.

Reading comprehension is another problem. A study by R.I. Singh and colleagues at the University of Alberta found that reading comprehension is reduced when people read from a mobile device, compared with a PC. One of the reasons for this is that the user has to remember more, because less of the text is visible at one time. This places an additional cognitive load on the user, adversely affecting comprehension. In Mobile Usability (2013), Jakob Nielsen describes this as “reading through a peephole.” This has to be a consideration for instructional designers.

So Tony, moving from authoring tools for mLearning to instructional design for mLearning, the question should be asked: in light of the interface design challenges, and the way in which most people tend to use their smartphones in short bursts for communication and connection, what types of learning experiences and learning content are most suitable for smartphones, compared with desktops and laptops? Is there a way to leverage the strengths of these devices in a learning context?

Tony: This is a great question. It’s very challenging to put as much content on the small screen of a smartphone as we do on the bigger screen of a PC. This dilemma can be addressed to some extent by technology. However, the solution is related more to content.

Most people who learn on a smartphone are looking for “instant answers.” This is different from the “formal” learning experience they have with desktops and laptops. An mLearning lesson running on a smartphone has to be short, maybe two to three minutes, and it has to go right to the point of what the learner needs. A good example is an instructional video. It delivers loads of content in a short period. At the same time, it uses the default navigation controls that come with the smartphone. So it saves some time that would otherwise have to be spent developing customized navigation buttons. Meanwhile, the “auto hide” feature of the default playback buttons frees more space for the content.

Another example is a customized learning app designed specifically for a smartphone. These apps can use the full controls on the touch screen, and offer the possibilities of learning through interactions.

John: I agree – a sweet spot for mLearning is just-in-time performance support. I think of the Geek Squad tech who came to our house last year to help me figure out why our TV and audio receiver were not synching. He needed to be reminded of the setting to change on our TV and found it on a video he watched on his phone.

Podcasts are another option – though they obviously don’t have the visual element. Something to bear in mind with video is the cost of data transfer, which users will have to pay for if they are using their own phone and are not using an available wi-fi network.

Going the app route, I think the challenge is to come up with something that people can dip in and out of rather than dive into for an extended time. For example, games, flash cards, or other types of quizzes would work well. Whether you go with a native app or web app would depend on the context.

Tony: You might want to check out a recent report from the eLearning Guild called “How Mobile Learning is Done.” It presents nine case studies from organizations around the world. Despite the design challenges, mLearning is only going to become more popular.

John: Agreed. Thanks very much for the info and insights, Tony!

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Design thinking: strengths and (potential) weaknesses

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on May 07, 2013

In my first post on design thinking, I provided a description of how this term has been commonly understood over the last decade. In this post, I want to highlight some strengths and weaknesses of design thinking. So let’s start with four key strengths:

The power of stupid questions

One of the criticisms that can be made (unfairly) against design thinking is that it assumes a few designers without any specialist domain knowledge can waltz in and fix some previously intractable problem in a complex area like, say, healthcare or social services or financial services. A valid question to ask these designers, especially if they ask apparently uninformed questions of the client team, is, “What the heck do you know about it, anyway?”

Here's Don Norman's response (from "Rethinking Design Thinking"):

What is a stupid question? It is one which questions the obvious. "Duh," thinks the audience, "this person is clueless." Well, guess what, the obvious is often not so obvious. Usually it refers to some common belief or practice that has been around for so long that it has not been questioned. Once questioned, people stammer to explain: sometimes they fail. It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from. We need to question the obvious, to reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs. That is design thinking.

Ignorance is one thing (more on that later), but a fresh perspective (perhaps from a different field altogether) is another, and that comes from a willingness to ask basic questions that everyone thinks they already know the answer to.

User/customer involvement

I can’t think of a single project I’ve worked on that involved observing and hearing from customers/users that did not yield valuable insights into how to make something better. And by better, I don’t just mean better for the user or customer. I mean better for the business or agency as well, because happier customers tend to buy more and cost less to support.

For example, the issues that are identified after user research into customer use of an existing product or service tend to fall into three main categories:

1. Those that the client staff was aware of and that were validated by observation of actual users.
2. Those that the client staff was aware of but that were more serious than expected.
3. Those that the client staff was not aware of.

Involving customers in the design process does not always result in radical innovation. As Norman says, radical innovation is rare and not often successful when it does occur. However, observing and listening to customers is a relatively easy way to find paths to substantial improvements.

Iterative, rapid prototyping

Creating rapid prototypes and then testing them as a way of determining a better solution – before investing all of the time and money required to build – is by no means a new approach, and its value seems to be well understood. Talk with anybody and they’ll say they get it. And yet, it’s not always (or maybe even usually) done. Why? Because of the apparent limitations of budget and schedule, which are often out of the control of a project team. A business manager has a need, which she conveys to the project lead, and says, “We need this next month for no more than [insert gross underestimate here].”

And of course that same business manager demands big improvements over whatever the current state is. But it’s very likely that those improvements are not going to be realized. Why? Because there was never enough time to ask questions, explore alternatives, and get user and stakeholder input/feedback. You can’t have the benefits of design thinking without, well, design thinking.

The “lean UX” approach described by Gothelf and Seiden in their book of that name, which marries the Agile methodology to design thinking, is a good way to deal with this dilemma. The bottom line for managers who fund projects and want to see real improvements is this: allow the time for questioning and exploration, and for prototyping to visualize alternative solutions. Don’t go into the project assuming the solution is already obvious and that the real goal is simply to implement it.

Multidisciplinary teams

There’s nothing new in having multidisciplinary teams on design projects, even though they are not quite as common as they should be. The value is in having team members from different backgrounds with different strengths and skillsets (e.g., research and analysis, facilitation, lo-fi prototyping, visual design, developing/building, writing, project management, various types of domain expertise, and so on) work together to solve a problem or set of problems. Unfortunately, what I see often happen is that in the interest of keeping a tight budget one person is asked to wear more hats than is really appropriate given their skill set.

Key point: Unless your design team involves genuine collaboration among people with different skills and experiences, you’ll lose much of the value of design thinking.

Now, let’s turn to four potential weaknesses.

Fuzzy terminology

In my last post, I said that though I agree with the tenets of design thinking, the label itself is not very satisfying. It’s too fuzzy. And like so many other terms that those of us in the fields of user experience, service design, interaction design, information architecture, etc., use to describe what we do, it requires too much explanation to people who don’t work directly in these areas (such as those who can fund projects). I think the issues that some people have with design thinking result from their dissatisfaction with the label more than with the methods and techniques associated with it.

Design alone is a complex enough word, but the more problematic word in the label is thinking. If told that a project would involve design thinking, a decision-maker who doesn’t have endless leisure to read, ponder, and debate this topic might rightly wonder if anything would actually get delivered. The term alone doesn’t suggest knowledge or action. You wouldn’t know unless it was explained that the term describes both a mode of thought and a methodology. So in this way the term design thinking itself is a potential weakness.

Lack of domain knowledge

This is the flip side of the fresh perspective coin. On the one hand, there’s power in questioning assumptions and conventional thinking. On the other, practitioners risk appearing uninformed when they’re not aware of what might have already been tried in the past, or of complex political or policy constraints when working on public sector projects, or of the financial impracticality of a proposed solution, or of the unintended consequences of a proposed solution.

The obvious response is for some designers to focus on particular domains, like healthcare, financial services, taxation, or transportation. But then some of the power of fresh perspectives and “stupid questions” may be lost. So there needs to be a balance: designers need to learn quickly and clients need to allow that learning, with the understanding that the fresh perspectives that come from outsiders will be well worthwhile.

Short-term involvement

This criticism has been made of consultants in a variety of contexts – that they appear, deliver their assessment and recommendations, and then leave. It must be admitted that for initiatives that aim to address complex problems, short-duration design thinking projects involving consultants may accomplish only so much.

An important part of a design thinking project should involve a plan by which the initiative is made sustainable beyond the formal involvement of the consultants. This will likely involve some teaching and knowledge sharing by the consultant team. A good example of this is described in a video about a service design thinking project for the Lewisham Public Housing Options Agency. Oliver King of London-based Engine Service Design has also made the point that his firm's engagements typically end with some type of training.

Idealism and inflated claims

There’s a streak of idealism in some of the literature on design thinking and service design that is both engaging and maybe, just maybe, a little bit naïve. Not all challenges in social services, for example, have clear, feasible solutions. Practitioners of design thinking need to be careful that they do not present it as a panacea. Again, there needs to be a balance – in this case, between imaginative idealism and practicality. Not every project needs to result in radical innovation to be worthwhile. Something as modest as substantial improvements, which wouldn’t otherwise happen without design thinking, will still deliver in increased sales and/or a reduced need for customer support many more times the cost of achieving them.

Conclusion

For me, the strengths of design thinking far outweigh the potential weaknesses. Still, those of us in the field need to be very aware of these potential weaknesses and work to counter any negative perceptions stemming from them. Our continuing challenge is to demonstrate the business value of design thinking in the face of often constricted budgets and narrow horizons.

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Coming to terms with “design thinking”

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on May 07, 2013

Design thinking is a term that causes some people to cheer and others to express irritation, or, in the case of Don Norman, to do both at different times. In a 2010 article called “Design Thinking: A Useful Myth,” he wrote:

Design thinking is a powerful public relations term that changes the way in which design firms are viewed. Now all the mysterious, non-business oriented, strange ways by which many design firms like to work is imbued with the mystical aura of design thinking. Yeah, we do things differently than you do: that's why we are so powerful and unique.

But on March 13, 2013, in an article called “Rethinking Design Thinking,” Norman declared he had changed his mind, sort of:

I am here to say that I now have rethought my position. I still stand by the major points of the earlier essay, but I have changed the conclusion. As a result, the essay should really be titled: Design Thinking: An Essential Tool.

And in a new, revised edition of Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things, the chapter that was called “Human-Centered Design” in the earlier edition is now called “Design Thinking.” (The new edition will not be released until November 2013, but you can find the preface on his jnd.org website.) He explained his change of mind this way:

[T]he more I pondered the nature of design and reflected on my recent encounters with engineers, business people and others who blindly solved the problems they thought they were facing without question or further study, I realized that these people could benefit from a good dose of design thinking.

Even before I read Norman’s posts, I was both intrigued and dissatisfied by the design thinking label. But I’m coming to terms with it because I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. For example, it’s described as one of the foundational elements of “Lean UX” in Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s recent book. It’s in Robert Curedale’s book on 200 ways to apply design thinking, and it appears frequently in the literature on service design (e.g., This is Service Design Thinking).

Concerns about the label aside, I agree with the tenets of design thinking – it is an approach that can be very valuable. At the same time, those practicing it should be aware of some potential weaknesses. But before I give my two cents on its strengths and weaknesses, it’s probably a good idea to describe what design thinking is. If you already know, then skip what follows, go on to the next post, and let me know what you think.

So what is design thinking?

First, if you’re looking for a rigorous academic analysis of design thinking, see Lucy Kimbell’s two-part article in the journal Design and Culture (November 2011), called “Rethinking Design Thinking.” (It’s just coincidental that Don Norman’s later blog entry has the same title.) In Part 1, Kimbell explores the provenance of the term and notes that one of the earliest discussions of it is in Peter G. Rowe’s 1987 book Design Thinking. (Rowe is now a professor of architecture at Harvard.)

The way that design thinking has been understood and used most often over the last decade has been strongly influenced by Ideo founder, David Kelley, and Ideo CEO, Tim Brown. In a 2009 profile in Wired, Kelley recounts a meeting with Brown in 2003 in which he had “an epiphany: They would stop calling Ideo's approach 'design' and start calling it ‘design thinking.’ ‘I'm not a words person," Kelley says, 'but in my life, it's the most powerful moment that words or labeling ever made. Because then it all made sense. Now I'm an expert at methodology [my emphasis] rather than a guy who designs a new chair or car.'" Ideo describes its design thinking process as –

…a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

An even better source for understanding design thinking methodology (or so I think) is the British Design Council. Its Double Diamond Design Process Model is organized around four stages: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. The first diamond represents the exploration of divergent possibilities during the Discover phase, followed by a convergence on the definition of the problem to be solved. The second diamond represents the second period of divergence as alternative design solutions are prototyped and tested, ending in a second convergence at the point of an accepted solution. As is evident from this process of divergence and convergence, a key feature of the design thinking process is that it is highly iterative, beginning with exploration, questioning and insights about and from end users/customers. Norman underscores the importance of the “iterative and expansive” quality of design thinking:

Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don’t try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called “Design Thinking.”

Another key feature of design thinking is that it is human-centered as opposed to technology- or organization-centered. In other words, a goal of design thinking is to be strongly empathetic toward users/customers, working to make technology and organizations serve them rather than vice-versa. The design thinking methodology includes users and stakeholders in the design process, so that they can provide input and feedback at all stages. Being human-centered, however, does not mean being impractical: design solutions need to be technically and financially viable.

Design thinking is also highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary, involving various participants with different types of expertise and domain knowledge, depending on the specific objectives of the project. It is not, in other words, the exclusive property of professional designers.

Design thinking and user-centered design: what’s the difference?

You might be thinking, as I have, that this all sounds like user-centered design (UCD). The distinction between design thinking and UCD is not completely obvious because they share so much in common. They both involve –

1. A clear definition of business goals
2. A human-centered focus
3. Multidisciplinary teams
4. Multiple iterations
5. Ongoing input and feedback from users, stakeholders, etc.

So what’s different?

1. Scale and scope. The focus of UCD has tended to be on products, specifically digital products (usually websites and applications), and more specifically the interfaces of those products. The emphasis of design thinking now is on addressing big and challenging organizational, social, and public policy problems, in addition to more traditional product and digital design. This involves a more expansive understanding of design that goes beyond objects to experiences, processes, and organizations. A project to which design thinking is applied could begin with a problem that is limited to a particular service interface, but through the discovery process and use of a technique like the Five Whys, it might be found that the root problem lies well upstream in a particular process or even in organizational culture.
2. Emphasis on empathy. Empathy is a hot word now in discussions of design, innovation, and user experience. The earliest reference to empathy in association with design and innovation that I know of is the Dorothy Leonard –Jeffrey Rayport November 1997 article in HBR, “Spark Innovation through Empathic Design,” in which they made the case that “Empathic design is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to identify potentially critical customer needs. It’s an important source of new product ideas, and it has the potential to redirect a company’s technological capabilities toward entirely new businesses.”
3. Use of more ethnographic research. The emphasis on deep empathy is related to the greater interest in using more ethnographic research techniques to understand users and their needs – going beyond surveys, focus groups, and usability testing to move out into the field and observe and interview users/employees/customers where they actually live, work, and play.
4. Emphasis on using both intuitive and rational modes of thought. One of the things that is confusing and unsatisfying about design thinking as a label is that it is intended to describe both a methodology and a mode of thought (a “cognitive style” in the words of Lucy Kimbell). In his response to Don Norman’s first (skeptical) piece on design thinking, one of Ideo’s founders, Bill Moggridge, wrote:

   Design thinking harnesses the power of intuition. It is a process, evolved gradually by designers of all kinds, which can be applied to create solutions to problems. People of any background can use it, whether or not they think of themselves as designers. It uses the subconscious as well as the conscious mind, subjective as well as objective thinking, tacit knowledge as well as explicit knowledge, and embraces learning by doing.

So yes, you can identify differences between UCD and design thinking, though these are differences of degree more than kind. In the ongoing debates between lumpers and splitters, I’m usually more in the lumper camp: I see design thinking, service design, experience design, empathic design all as children of human- or user-centered design – these are all closely related in goals, tools, techniques, and objectives. For me, the similarities are more significant than the differences. Regardless of specific labels, what’s most important to me, and what attracts many of us to these methods, is the potential to come up with at least incremental innovations to continue improving products, experiences, processes, environments, and organizations. In the next post, I’ll focus on the strengths of design thinking as some potential weaknesses.

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What are common misconceptions or mistakes are made during an LMS purchase or upgrade?

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on May 03, 2013

Author’s Note:This blog entry is the third in a series I started to capture what I thought were important points from the April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting. The discussion topic of this Roundtable meeting was Building a Better Relationship with your LMS Vendor. Here's a link to my first entry and the second entry in this series.

The April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting topic addressed the question of how to build a successful relationship with your LMS vendor. The discussion around answering the question on common misconceptions or mistakes made in an LMS purchase or upgrade was quite fruitful. Here’s the list we compiled from that discussion. Notice that the list is affirming – meaning it's a list of the positive things to look for and do to be successful.

1. Understand the need for flexibility on both sides.
2. Approach the question from a solution angle. Ask what do you need it to do, not what problem does this solve?
3. Allow the vendor to understand your company and business and make an effort to understand theirs.
4. Ask the salesperson what they know about the system –have used it themselves?
5. Have a staff that can learn, then know and support the system and can act as interpreters of the business need.
6. Keep your commitments; if you promise to get back about something then do it.
7. Don’t make a decision based on the vendor demo. Get into the sandbox and figure out if it really does it.
8. Recognize and plan for the time it will take to understand how the system works. Make sure more than one person has this understanding.
9. Implementation doesn't end when the system goes live; keep the vendor support on-site through at least the first 90 days.
10. Put good, strong project managers in place – one from the client side and one from the vendor side.
11. Don’t short change the budget for implementation – do it right up-front and you won’t be sorry.
12. Make sure you have stakeholder involvement and support and keep management informed using open communication.

What other items belong here? Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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How do I understand the support I’ll get from my LMS Vendor?

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on April 11, 2013

Author’s Note:This blog entry is the second in a series I started to capture what I thought were important points from the April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting. The discussion topic of this Roundtable meeting was Building a Better Relationship with your LMS Vendor. Here's a link to my first entry in this series.

The April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting topic addressed the question of how to build a successful relationship with your LMS vendor. During the sharing of tips, both our vendor representative and our audience raised the question of support. Everyone agreed that defining and understanding the support to expect to receive from your LMS vendor was important. In discussion, the following list emerged as questions to ask your vendor to help you understand what they mean by support.

Questions to ask to probe the support question:

What happens after I sign?

1. What does implementation look like? Specifically:
• What is the timeline for implementation?
• What are your expectations of us?
• How does integration of our business processes to the solution work?
2. What does the support look like?
• Is there one number I can call and expect to get an answer?
• Will you stay (the sales person) stay in touch with me?
• What about upgrades, releases and/or version changes?
3. What % of support calls are addressed to resolution the first time I call?
4. What type of optimization support is included?
5. What type of integration support is provided?
6. Once implementation is done, what type of support is available and is there additional cost?

Are there other questions that you’ve used when trying to understand the support question? Please share them in the comments below!

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Tips for Building Successful Relationships with your LMS Vendor

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on April 05, 2013

The April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting topic addressed the question of how learning professionals can build a successful relationship with their LMS vendor. The session was so packed with information and ideas worth summarizing, that it will take more than one blog entry to do it!

This blog concentrates on sharing the top tips, from both the vendor’s and client’s perspectives, for building and maintaining your relationship. Feel free to add to or comment on these lists below.

Tips for vendors in establishing and maintaining a good relationship with your LMS/TMS clients:

1. Guide the client about the technology and educate them on what's coming in the space.
2. Frequently reach out on new updates, help your client understand both the near-term and long-term changes that are planned.
3. Give your client a heads up on release notes. Tell them why the change is happening and what it means to them. Provide the client with a calendar of releases/changes for the up-coming year.
4. Provide documentation that's easy to read and follow; don't bury your documentation in hard to understand techno terms. Set a proper expectation for the documentation you provide. Encourage your client to document and maintain their own documentation on use of and business practices for the system.
5. Push the client to ask what they get for implementation support and what they get for after implementation support. Make sure you know how it works.

Tips for clients to establish and maintain good relationship with an LMS vendor:

1. During selection, don't let your team get hung up on the feature parade, push through to understand what the feature can really can do.
2. Consider using a neutral third party consultant during the selection process, someone not associated with a particular service offering but knowledgeable in the capabilities and requirement gathering process.
3. Get clear on expectations - what do you want and need from the vendor, what does your implementation team expect, what does the rest of the company want and what are you really getting?
4. Probe and find out what type of user feedback channels are offered - how do we communicate and collaborate when we need something different?
5. Define the meaning of support with the vendor up front. Get both the process for feature/function/fix support and the process for business questions/consulting support?

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Learning How To Isn’t Always The Best Choice

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on February 08, 2013

Emulating successful people and learning how to duplicate their methods and models can have big benefits. Sometimes, however, it's better to say no to learning how to do something yourself and say yes to the experts instead.

Indeed, we can learn by studying the attitudes and behaviors of successful people. We can be coached, read their books, attend classes, or learn from YouTube videos about everything from models for business change to PowerPoint presentations.

Not everything is worth taking time to learn, however.

Take, for example, replacing a walking belt on a treadmill. Fixing a walking belt that slips is so easy to do that apparently no one ever calls a technician. So when the walking belt on my treadmill started slipping a year ago, I couldn’t find anyone to fix it. I didn’t want to fix it myself, but even Google search couldn’t produce a website or local phone number for someone to call. To be sure, there are numerous websites and YouTube videos that demonstrate how to fix a walking belt that slips. I watched lots of them. But my effort to duplicate what I saw was ineffective.

On the verge of a decision to get rid of the treadmill and buy a gym membership, I decided to try one more time to find a technician who could help me. I called the manufacturer. They had a technician call us and make an appointment to come to our home. When he arrived, I showed him where the treadmill is located and then went back to doing my own work.

As it turned out, the treadmill needed two new belts. The technician installed them, and now I can use the treadmill again.

What the websites and videos don’t discuss is the “other” belt that often needs to be replaced when a walking belt is slipping. I’m happy that I don’t have to figure out how to do something I never wanted to do, and because I’d rather go downstairs than to the gym when I want to walk.

Now, I also have more time to study things that do matter to me, like Presentation Zen and Learning in Adulthood and…well, you get the picture.

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NNG Study Finds Teens Have Most Trouble with Government, Non-Profit, and School Websites

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on February 04, 2013

It's a common misconception that all teenagers are web savvy by virtue of being digital natives - that simply because of their age, they know how to use the web more effectively than older digital immigrants do. While it's certainly true that some teens are web super users, it's not the norm. According to a new study by the Nielsen-Norman Group (NNG), "Teens are not as invincible as some people think. Although teens might feel confident online, they do make mistakes and often give up quickly. Fast-moving teens are also less cautious than adults and make snap judgments; these lead to lower success. Indeed, we measured a success rate of only 71% for teenage users compared to 83% for adults."

The three reason teens perform worse are as follows:

• Insufficient reading skills
• Less sophisticated research strategies
• Dramatically lower levels of patience

The biggest challenges teens faced in the NNG study were on "large sites with dense content and poor navigation schemes. Government, non-profit, and school sites were the biggest culprits of poor usability."

We have seen many, many adults struggle with exactly these issues, and so it's interesting to see that younger people struggle with them even more. If you have a site with a target audience that includes teenagers, here are some quick guidelines to bear in mind, courtesy of the NNG study:

• Write in short chunks, concisely and clearly, preferably to a sixth-grade level. Make generous use of white space.
• Avoid font sizes smaller than 10 points. Teenagers don't like small fonts any more than their parents do.
• Make content fun and interactive - quizzes, games, polls, and features and forums that allow for sharing of questions, photos, and comments.
• Make social tools available but don't force teens to register and use them.
• Design for small screens - smartphones, tablets, and small laptops. Teenagers are not usually using the big monitors some of their parents have at work.

It's important to emphasize that people under the age of 20 are not a monolithic group. There are differences in behavior between older and younger teens, as there are between teens and kids under 13. The NNG study is a great place to get some basic guidelines, but it's also wise to listen and observe as users in your target audience interact with your site.

1 comments

Bringing Service Design to the Public Sector – Webinar Recording and Resources

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on January 31, 2013

Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar yesterday on service design in the public sector. We had a great turnout from various state agencies, the Metro Council, counties, and cities. If you want to review the presentation or share it with others, here’s a recording of our January 30 session. For those who couldn’t attend this session, we’ll be doing it again on February 13 at noon, Central time.

In our discussion, we recommended some resources that you might want to check out further. I’ve listed these, plus a few others, below:

“10 Ways that Design Thinking Can Save Government,” by Steve Ressler, GovTech.com, January 24, 2013.
I listed this resource first because if you are looking for a quick overview, this isn’t bad. The best part is the list of 10 “design thinking questions” to get you thinking about ways to improve service delivery in your organization.

This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases by Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider, and co-authors. John Wiley, 2011.
A very good overview of the subject that provides insight into the sheer scope and variety of service design projects.

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine. Forrester Research, 2012.
Even though the term “service design” doesn’t make an appearance in this book, everything Manning and Bodine discuss is based on the principles and practices of service design. The examples in this book are particularly useful. I wondered if the authors owe their title to the Government of Canada, which in 1998 introduced a new "outside-in, citizen-centred approach to Government of Canada service delivery.”

The Customer Experience Revolution: How Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks have Changed Business Forever, by Jeoffrey Bean and Sean Van Tyne. Brigantine Media, 2012.
A short, clear, persuasive case for the business value of a systematic focus on customer experience.

The Service Design Network.
This is a European-based organization with members from around the world. Birgit Mager is a leader of the SDN and one of the founders of this relatively new field.

“The Road Ahead for Public Service Delivery: Delivering on the Customer Promise,” by the Public Sector Research Center of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Well worth a read for its expansive look at the value of re-thinking service delivery in the public sector, with a focus on breaking down the hierarchies and vertical silos that can get in the way of a truly customer-centric approach.

Service Design Research
A good list of articles on designing services written between 1976 and 2008.

You also might want to check out the recordings of our two previous webinars:
Online Forms: Extreme Makeover
Self-Service Nation: Improving the user experience to maximize digital government efficiency and ROI

3 comments

Six Tips for Discussions with Subject Matter Experts

from Jill Stanton, eLearning Lead

on January 25, 2013

I pulled up to my garage one cold 11-degree morning and pressed the button on the garage door opener remote. Nothing happened. Pressed it again. Nothing. So began a just-in-time learning process for me.

After opening and closing the door manually, I called the Subject Matter Expert (SME) I always call when something needs fixing at my house: my Dad. He went out into his own garage and looked at the opener – a similar model to mine – and started to describe the mechanisms to me and what I could do to potentially fix it over the phone…..in great detail and assuming I knew what the parts were called. As I struggled to understand, I asked some questions like, “Do you mean the small piece of metal between the two nuts?” and, “Is that in the motor behind where the light bulb is?”

Later that day, I was at a client meeting discussing how we work successfully with SMEs, and my conversation with my Dad came back to me. I’ve had conversations like this garage-door-trouble-shooting one with him many times, and the process I automatically go through with him to allow me – the novice – to understand him – the expert - applies to working with SMEs in any setting. Here are a few tips that came to mind for working successfully with Subject Matter Experts , whether you're designing training, receiving coaching, or are a Subject Matter Expert yourself.

1. Simplify Language – Think of the simplest possible way to describe the content. This varies depending on your audience, so consider what they know. Do you understand what the “automatic capacitor bolt” is? (I hope not, because I just made it up). Would describing it as “a small bolt which goes into slot A” be easier to understand, learn, and remember? Case in point – I don’t recall the first term my Dad used to describe the item later called, “the metal piece between the nuts.”
2. Go to the First Step, then Rewind – If you’re describing a process, make sure you’re beginning at the very beginning. For instance, if you’re discussing how to use software, have you covered how to access or log in to the system? With my Dad, we made sure to talk about how to re-program the remote for the garage door opener before I could trouble-shoot any fixes. Keep asking, “Is this really the beginning? Do I know what’s needed to start?”
3. Ask a lot of Questions and Confirm Understanding – Information-gathering should involve good listening, but it should not be a one-way conversation. Ask lots of questions. Ask stupid questions. Say, “Am I getting this right?” and repeat what you just heard. Ask questions about things that might not seem to be the focus of your discussion. For instance, if a SME is explaining a step that includes clicking a button on a screen, ask about other menus or buttons on the screen too…get the complete tour. With my garage door, we made a point of talking about checking to see what kind of spring mechanism was on the opener. Even though the springs weren’t broken, their presence and position made a difference in how I approached the repairs.
4. Slow it Down – When stepping through content with an expert, be sure to take time to cover each point, step, or concept carefully. With an emphasis on efficient meetings these days, it can be easy to rush through a discussion, constantly looking for “need-to-know” information. However, information-transfers with SMEs are about getting more information than you need, then paring it down later. So set up discussions in a way that allows you plenty of uninterrupted time. Fixing a garage door opener in 11-degree weather brings an urgency of its own, so I made a point of having most of my conversation with my Dad indoors, and putting on many layers when I went outside while talking with him so I wouldn't be rushing through trying to understand.
5. Once You’ve Learned it, Describe it to Someone Else – My repair attempts involved a trip to the hardware store on our block. While I wasn’t thrilled to make the trip and spend the money, the experience of explaining the issue to the store clerk so he could help me find the right part was invaluable to cementing my understanding of the mechanism and issue. If you’re an Instructional Designer, you’ll already be doing a version of this by creating some form of learning, but consider explaining key concepts to a colleague before you start developing content…it might make development faster.
6. Be Humble and Generous – This applies to both the expert and the novice. Keep in mind that both parties have something to learn from the conversation and remind yourself that no one person “knows it all.” Be humble and generous when asking others to explain content to you or when trying to impart understanding of content to someone else. This can require some patience to get the best results. If my Dad had been impatient or frustrated about what I didn't know and asked me things like, "Don't you know how that chain works?," it would have made me start to rush the conversation and not ask as many questions, which could have prevented me from getting the information I needed.

What are your top tips for exchanging information with experts?

7 comments

What Makes for a Successful Learning Staffing Engagement?

from Nell Gelhaus, Staffing/Recruiting Specialist

on January 21, 2013

As Fredrickson’s Staffing and Recruiting specialist, one of my primary goals is to match our employees with appropriate opportunities within our clients’ organizations. I feel my job has been done well both when our client is happy with the work of our resource, and our resource feels positive about their work experience. However, many elements contribute to our clients’ “happiness,” and likewise, our resources will feel positive about a particular work experience for a variety of reasons. This three-part blog will examine what makes for a successful staffing engagement from my perspective, from our clients’ perspective and from the resource’s perspective.

Perspective #1: Staffing Specialist

After each engagement, we reflect upon and analyze the outcome. Did our employees accomplish what we sent them out to accomplish? Did they meet or exceed their expectations? The first element contributing to the success of a staffing engagement is having clear expectations set and met.

To set expectations clearly, we ask our client to consider:

• What problem(s) are you trying to solve?
• How much time will be needed to solve this problem, or, how much of a resource’s time do you need?
• What is that estimate based on?
• In solving your problem/completing the work, what hard and soft skill sets are needed?

Clear expectations allow us to choose precisely the resource best for you. Why bring a person in to work full-time when there’s only thirty hours of work to be done per week? Or, if the resource is able to accomplish your goal in thirty hours, are there other areas they can assist you with that extra ten? It’s helpful to be prepared to use the resource’s time to your advantage.

Once our resource is onsite, success depends on clear direction throughout the engagement.

• What are their primary and secondary work goals? Remember, all work has “starts” and “stops,” and each task has a beginning and end. Everyone needs something to move on to when one task is awaiting a decision, review, direction, etc.
• Make sure your resource has knowledge of the chain of command. Will the person need to reconcile conflicting feedback from SMEs? Or will you as the client take care of this?

It’s also important to remember that interim workers are co-workers too. Interim workers have many of the same needs as your own employees. Providing the context and background for the work being done will allow for deeper understanding of their piece in the puzzle. It can be easy to forget that an interim worker will also benefit from the same “nuts and bolts” information that may seem common knowledge to you and your team. Time invested up front in showing the interim worker how to navigate the corporate campus, getting access to the right systems and IT resources, and so forth will pay dividends later in terms of efficiency.

We also appreciate it when our client realizes that good feedback is constructive too! We understand that you're busy, but any information provided about the performance of our resources is valuable. We want to continue to do right what we’re doing right and eliminate pain points.

In short, anticipating obstacles prior to the engagement will ensure an effective and successful relationship between the resource and the client.

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Meeting Clients Where They Are

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on January 16, 2013

A while ago, I came across a blog post from Clive Shepard titled, Do instructional designers need to know about what they are designing?

I was eager to dive into Clive’s blog and finally get some clarity on this issue. Instead, what I read was a classic pro-con argument for both positions, but with only “I’m undecided” for a conclusion. A bit deflated, I shared the article with our team, asking others to comment. What I got was a more satisfying answer, one that illustrates how we typically work with our clients. Here’s what one of our instructional designers posted:

“I think the strongest learning engagements happen when the subject matter expert and the instructional designer are really partners in the development of the project. If I as a designer feel comfortable learning from the SME, returning to them with questions, and remaining open to their suggestions, I think the odds of the project being successful rise dramatically. Partners who have mutual respect for each other’s expertise build very cool things.” -- by Cim Kearns

Cim captures, for me, the essence of our approach to clients. We recognize the expertise you bring to the relationship. You know your business. You know your people. You’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. You understand what you know. And we meet you there, bringing to bear our expertise in teasing out the unknowns, asking questions, probing for ways to connect and partner on the solution that best addresses the business need.

Here’s an example of a recent project where our client brought their expertise and allowed us to fill in the gaps.

We worked with a client in the dental industry that was implementing a major new system change. Other than individually visiting the dentist when needed, our team didn’t know much about this business. However, we do know how to design training, especially when a complete system change is involved. We understand that training under these circumstances is about more than just showing someone how to do something, it is about preparing the groundwork for the change, respecting people’s need to see the benefits of the change and not fear it.

Our client got that part too, and had taken steps to begin the change process themselves. Instead of wasting time questioning their ability to handle this aspect, we respected what they’d learned from it, and avoided undermining it in what we designed. We asked our client to consult on the background of the system, and they trusted us to design a strategy and supporting content to assure learning retention and skill acquisition. We learned a lot about and with each other along the way. The result was not only a great success for the training, but a strong partnership and respect for each other.

So, in the end, I agree with Cim. When we partner with clients and respect their knowledge and expertise, meeting them at that point and along the way learning things we never would have known otherwise, magic can happen. Ultimately, then, I’m not undecided. I believe it doesn’t matter if we know about the subject we are designing. The question is—are we willing to learn, to partner with those that do, and to create great things together?

1 comments

My Favorite Mistake

from Cimberli Kearns, Instructional Designer

on January 02, 2013

About ten years ago, I worked as a training manager of a small company made up of several customer service teams. This was before tools such as Articulate and Captivate had made the development of eLearning affordable for 1-2 person training departments, which meant that most of our learning took place in the classroom. For two trainers who recognized the inefficiencies of our classroom-based training curriculum and wanted to dip our toes into eLearning, it was a frustrating experience. When we were told that our customer service representatives would need to be trained on a new version of Microsoft Office and we would need to develop more classroom training, we just looked at each other and sighed. More time in the classroom meant less time trying to develop more efficient solutions to our training needs.

Our disappointment did not last. In working through the materials we were preparing to teach, we discovered that something called SharePoint was included in the new version of MS Office. After listening to our IT team describe SharePoint’s features, it became clear that it would provide a platform from which we could realize our grand technology dreams. We saw a bright future for our customer service teams where the laminator could be laid to rest: Gone were the days when team members had to put their customers on hold and ask team leads for answers to tricky questions. No longer would it be necessary for team members to create their own job aids. Our little training department could build intranet sites for each of the customer service teams without any special development skills.

I immediately began sorting through all the different chunks of information each team needed. Finally, I could help people transform information into knowledge and “manage” it. When my especially creative colleague told me he had discovered a superhero generator online, I was ecstatic. Not only were the team portals going to be useful, they were going to be cool. We decided to assign a different superhero to each of the teams with the thought that the superhero would provide the fun factor that would draw team members to their portals.

Then my colleague and I really got down to business. We gathered information. We sorted it. We had it reviewed by team managers to make sure it was accurate. And we, the dynamic duo, packaged all that information in a super heroic package so that it became the usable, readily accessible knowledge that would dazzle the teams. Finally, we didn’t just announce the completion of the team’s SharePoint portals, we distributed superhero playing cards to each of the teams and cleverly informed them that using the portal would turn them into superheroes.

My guess is that you know where I’m going with this tale. We built each team portal and the team members did not come. Team members continued to yell over cubicle walls to find answers to questions with their customers on hold. Job aids continued to be made by individual team members and circulated among the teams. In spite of our efforts to persuade team members just how much easier it was to access information through the portal and how much more reliable that information was, our super heroes had failed. The SharePoint portals were ignored.

Other projects needed to be completed so we didn’t spend too much time wallowing in our disappointment. We comforted each other by insisting that team members were just afraid of change. They would eventually see the error in their ways. We just had to keep pushing them to the portals. And we were right. The teams did end up finding the portals to be very useful. But it had absolutely nothing to do with our super powers. The team members began to use the portals once they realized that they had the ability to load information onto it themselves. Once the teams themselves took ownership of their portals, they became the useful, fun intranet sites that we had imagined we were building. Team members would volunteer to personalize each portal and tap into wells of creativity they had no idea existed. Managers would hold contests encouraging members to use the portal. The portals became a great success.

I’ve devoted much of the past ten years to eLearning instructional design and I’ve never forgotten the lesson I learned while watching my super heroes crash and burn. When I neglect to involve my end user in a project during development, its chances for success diminish. When I don’t test a project at various stages with my end user, success becomes even less likely. And if I don’t evaluate a project and tweak it according to feedback, then there is a good chance that time and money will be wasted.

A couple of years ago, I used SharePoint to help team members understand the features of a brand new system. Keeping in mind that ordinary citizens can be so much more powerful than super heroic trainers, I made sure to take advantage of the discussion forum feature in which team members were able to ask and answer questions. The team members were brilliant and shared their knowledge as well as their ignorance freely.

Next time that you are asked to play the role of a super hero and save ordinary citizens from their ignorance, remember my favorite mistake. Don’t assume that you have all the answers for a learning solution. Listen to what your learners have to say about their plight as well as your proposed solution and you’ll tap into super powers you never knew you had.

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Can You Make People Love to Learn?

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on December 14, 2012

That might be the $50,000 question on the minds of instructional designers who create learning opportunities for people in corporate America. Seriously … we want people to love to learn, because the more they love it, the more enthusiastic they will be about learning. This attitude can only produce a win-win for any business entity we work with, and warm feelings of personal success for instructional designers.

Psychologists tell us that people are born with the desire to learn. Learning is how we make progress, reach our goals, challenge ourselves to new and exhilarating heights!

But wait … that’s not how many people experience learning. As I mentioned in my last post, the act of reading can be traumatic and the source of failure for people in the workplace. When people are afraid, their reptilian (the amygdala) brain is activated. The amygdala is important for visual learning and memory, but when we feel afraid or threatened the amygdala effectively shuts down the thinking brain and focuses instead on survival and safety. This is an instinctual response that can’t be easily overcome unless, of course, people feel safe.

This is not an overstatement of how it is for many people in the workforce. A friend of mine is teaching how to solder joints to a class of sixteen people who are being retrained for new jobs.Family Handyman says soldering joints is easy to do with a little practice. Soldering electronic components isn’t easy, though, and if it really was as easy to do as Family Handyman says it is, we wouldn’t experience as many leaky water pipes and failed computer parts! Sixty percent of the people in that class failed a simple test. Why? Because they had to pass the test in order to keep their jobs. They were afraid.

What can we do with this information?

Aarron Walter, the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, says that when a user’s basic needs are met, they can begin to experience the pleasure associated with a task such as learning. The basics are: An interface that’s functional, reliable, and usable. When basic usability needs are met AND when course content is designed to enable learning rather than hinder it, the user can start to love learning.

Walter quotes molecular biologist John Medina:

Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories. The prefrontal cortex … the part of the brain that governs “executive functions” such as problem-solving, maintaining attention, and inhibiting emotional impulses … assists other parts of the brain, especially the amygdala … When the brain detects an emotionally charged event, the amygdala releases dopamine into the system. Because dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing, you could say the brain gets a chemical Post-It note on a given piece of information. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.

Designing an interface and course content with positive emotional stimuli—a pleasurable experience—builds engagement with users. To engage an audience, we must let our personality show through our work; we must give people something to relate to.

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Intersect meeting recap – the importance of Content Strategy.

from Molly Emmings, Account Manager

on November 21, 2012

At the November 13 Intersect meeting, more than 60 of us (a record!) gathered to talk about website and intranet content strategy. There are many challenges and intricacies around getting a content strategy in place, but in the long run it sure can make the day-to-day work of IT and communications staff easier. Plus there is great benefit in the content creators throughout the organization knowing their freedoms and boundaries.

We had members from two organizations facilitate our discussion:

• Larry Timmerman and Yvonne Klinnert of Washington County – “Making a Better Website” presentation
• Jed Becher of MNDNR

Please note that the content of any presentation provided here is the property of its author(s) and may only be reused with permission.

More resources (thanks to Lucinda Plaisance at the Metropolitan Council):

• Content Strategy Meetup – based in Minneapolis. Meets the third Tuesday of every month.
• Content Strategy group on LinkedIn – “Professional networking group for content strategists and user experience design professionals specializing in the practice of content strategy, or those who are interested in learning more about content strategy or developing/honing content strategy expertise.”
• Content Wrangler Community on LinkedIn – “For those who value content as a business asset worthy of being effectively managed.”

Thanks again to Drew VanKrevelen and the Minnesota Lottery for hosting, to our facilitators, and to everyone who participated. It was an excellent meeting.

Mark your calendars for our next meeting on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 from 2:00-4:00pm. See you then.

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How To Speak French Without Knowing A Single Word

from Sarah Kesher, Project Manager

on November 13, 2012

Translation. It’s what everyone wants to talk about. When I was doing the conference circuit, about 25% of the questions I was asked were about translation. And that’s not the topic I was there to present! There are more and more companies popping up whose business model is solely based on translation and foreign language audio recording (all saying they specialize in preparing audio for eLearning). And, even today, I received an email from Articulate talking about the ease of translation in Storyline.

It’s easy to make translation look easy. And I agree with that after looking into Storyline’s translation ability; they have a nice system in place to help translation along. But after working on several translation projects to this point, I have learned, very clearly, that translation is a lot more than turning “yes” into “oui.” Especially where eLearning is concerned.

There are layers to translation projects. Not all projects need all of these layers, but as you begin it is important to consider them all in relation to your project objectives to avoid surprises later and make sure you’re getting the outcome you truly want. It’s also important to recognize and plan for how these layers impact each other and how you will sew them together in your final product.

Here are the five layers I’ve defined so far. As I continue to work in this field, I have no doubt that I will continue to define and refine this list:

• Language—literal translation of text or voice over
• Content—changing phrases, names, measurements, differences of instructions, etc. for accuracy and understanding.
• Design—changing images, graphics, etc. to match content or for better localization.
• Technical—the plan for how translation will be put back into the course and QA testing, as well as thinking about any other objectives for the course use.
• Foundational/Organizational—turning a storyboard and/or other supporting documents into a roadmap for translation. The roadmap prepares the language for translation in a way that insures the developers can trace it back to exactly where it needs to go.

It’s easy to get stuck thinking of translation as just the Language Layer. But, I think, after looking at the layers above, you can start to see the importance of each and how they fit together.

In the end, my one and only message is simply, translation projects are not always complicated, but they certainly require a lot more than just sending things to a translator. And with more and more translation needs arising, it’s important to educate ourselves and our clients (internal and/or external) about the entire scope of translation so that our projects can be smooth, accurate, and, ultimately, a resounding success.

0 comments

Telling Stories to Strengthen Partnerships

from Cimberli Kearns, Instructional Designer

on November 07, 2012

As an instructional designer, I spend a good deal of time thinking about stories when working on a learning project. My primary goal during my early meetings with a client is to determine the overarching story that will structure the learning event. Then I gather as many anecdotes as possible from subject matter experts so that I can provide context for concepts, illustrate technical points and generally keep the learner engaged.

Listening to subject matter experts tell their stories has always been one of my favorite moments in the design process, not only because the tales from the front enrich and enliven a learning event, but also because the stories interest me and sometimes move me in unexpected ways. I’ve laughed out loud learning the creative ways employees have misinterpreted a policy and been moved to tears while listening to a nurse explain how she saved the life of a teenage girl through an impromptu training session in the middle of a night. But it was only recently that I realized how important the act of storytelling itself was to a project’s ultimate success. In telling their stories, the subject matter experts weren’t just providing me with useful material, they were bringing me into their world, showing me who they were and thereby establishing connections.

In reflecting on the power of the subject matter experts’ stories, I came to realize that I didn’t just use stories to demonstrate a successful learning strategy or illustrate my expertise with a certain tool. Telling stories helped me establish connections as well. Because I don’t work directly with subject matter experts, I can’t draw from shared experiences to inspire trust. What I can do, however, is share stories to help my partners understand who I am and how I work. A story may not be worth 1000 hours spent in meetings, conference calls and side-by-sides, but it can help strengthen a working relationship.

My newfound recognition of a story’s power to build partnerships led me to think about the stories I’ve shared in the past with subject matter experts. Which stories seemed to break through barriers? And which ones created them? What I discovered was that the more honest a story, the more effective it was, even if meant exposing mistakes or weaknesses. In fact, I realized that, more often than not, it was my willingness to show my vulnerability, rather than a demonstration of my strength, which enabled a connection with my partners. When I explained the reason for an instructional design choice by describing a mistake I made, the client didn’t run away. Instead, they listened more closely to what I had to say and ended up opening up to me as well.

Even though I acknowledge that the power of honest stories can expose vulnerability and strengthen relationships, I don’t think I am brave enough to share my mistakes and flaws with clients on a regular basis. And I certainly don’t recommend exposing weaknesses as a business strategy. However, I believe that a willingness to share such stories when relevant and appropriate can and does strengthen partnerships. Since I know that strong partnerships result in successful learning solutions, I think exposing my own vulnerabilities can be worth the risk.

1 comments

Making a Case for Easy Reading in eLearning Courses

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on November 02, 2012

I love to read. My mom liked to tell the story that her dad taught me to read from Zane Grey novels before I started kindergarten. Even if she stretched the truth a bit, it’s a good story. Because reading has been important to me for so long, I was surprised to learn that reading is not something people do naturally.

It’s true that people are wired for language. Language is a normal, natural thing for humans to learn, and children can speak whatever language they’re exposed to with no special training. But we’re not wired to read or to write. Reading and writing require a huge mental effort over a long period of time. We received lots of instruction and practice in elementary school.

With good training, many of us now read with ease and for pleasure. We’ve forgotten the struggles we had while learning to read, unless we’re around children who can remind us. But for people who didn’t acquire good reading skills, and for those who are learning English as a second language, reading poses substantial challenges. The struggle to read can be so overwhelming and taxing, in fact, that the brain’s capacity to comprehend is limited. This can have serious consequences for workplace performance and in people’s lives.

How Do People Learn to Read Efficiently?

Educational researchers seeking the answer to that question in the 1970s studied two possible options. Some researchers thought “context” —recognition of whole words and phrases— was the most efficient way to read. Speed-reading methods developed during the 1970s and 80s and used to train people to read whole words and groups of words fast may be based on this method. Others believed good readers recognized “features”— lines and contours—used to form letters.

It turns out that we read more efficiently, and more importantly, that we remember more of what we read when we use “feature-driven” reading. When readers learn to recognize letter shapes and the rules for writing words, and commit these things to memory, reading does become automatic.

eLearning and Reading

The majority of eLearning courses have words—sometimes, a lot of words. Instructional designers can minimize barriers and assist all readers, and especially readers who have low-reading skills, by following some usability guidelines.

• Know the current skill level of learners. We should know how steep the learning curve will be.
• Use “plain language” or “simplified language.” Careless writing can reduce someone’s ability to read and comprehend. Using a consistent, common, recognizable vocabulary improves reading comprehension.
• Format text for easy reading. Poor text presentation can block reading and comprehension altogether for unskilled readers. The font style, size, and color can disrupt reading. And the spacing between letters in a word, or between words in a sentence, can interfere with efficient reading and with comprehension. Low contrast between text and the background interferes with vision and slows reading speed.
• Use highly-readable fonts and visually emphasized words that help rather than hinder readers. Our human visual system is optimized to see structure and when structure is not there, we struggle to understand what we see.
• Use a visual hierarchy of font sizes, headings, and lists. The more structured and brief the presentation of information, the easier it is to scan and comprehend. Allow people to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.
• Edit for clarity and brevity. Avoid repetitive, wordy text that buries the important information in the middle of clutter
.
• Use flush left text whenever possible. Using centered text makes reading more difficult because the eye has to travel to a different place in the line, hindering automatic eye movement.

Following usability guidelines can help to ensure that when people read text, their reading and learning experience is improved.

Resources

Dirkson, Julie. 2012. Design for How People Learn. Berkley: CA. New Riders. Johnson, Jeff. 2010. Designing with the Mind in Mind. New York: NY. Morgan Kaufman Publishers.

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Learning 2012 –Reflections and Trends

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on October 31, 2012

As a learning professional, it is incredibly refreshing to take a step back from “doing” learning and instead be a participant in the process. Taking the time to be in the same place as others who have similar ideas, wants, needs and desires really enhances the learning experience. As I’ve been reflecting, processing and synthesizing the information overload from the Masie Learning 2012 Conference last week, I’ve started to draw some parallels and conclusions about trends in the learning profession. This post shares some of those ideas.

The first concept that I’ve synthesized from a variety of conversations centers around the idea of what it means to be a life-long learner. It was very interesting to note that General Colin Powell, Marshall Goldsmith and even Elliott Masie think about learning as something well beyond the boundaries of the “corporation” and as something that continues to drive and influence them at all stages of life. I think that as part of the work we do in our profession, we sometimes get wrapped up in how the organization we work for can drive our perception of both what and how we need to teach people. However, if we create a culture of learning, then the expectation that learning is part of who we are seems to have a greater chance of success, no matter the path in life we choose.

Another synthesized concept for me was the idea that “mobile” and “social” are just technologies that allow us to deliver personalization, presence and collaboration. To some extent, technology is just giving us more and varied ways to approach the age-old business problem of where and how we do training and how we get teams to better perform and communicate.

While this theme pervaded the Learning 2012 conference, it was driven home to me again just today as I saw Chris Laping, SVP of Business Transformation and CIO at Red Robin talking at YamJam12 about the fact that we are still facing the same problems today that we were 40 years ago. His thesis was that we don’t work to solve problems; we just work to make problems go away. In other words, we don’t take the time to get to the root cause and address it, rather we slap a Band-Aid on it so it stops bleeding, and declare it fixed.

So the question becomes, in the rush to incorporate technology into the picture, are mobile and social just more Band-Aids that we are trying to apply, or can we be deliberate in a way that allows us to appropriately use the tools to address the root cause of the business issue we are trying to solve?

A third concept that struck home was the idea that there is no one solution for mobile, and that if you think you have the answer, just wait a day. Something else will happen to cause you to question your solution or make you redo already done work. There were overwhelming nods of agreement from most presenters and participants at the conference regarding this point. A trend to support mobile in the workplace is to take a step back, define the strategy and standards, and then decide how to move forward.

This approach to the mobile question became more solidified for me upon my return home. As part of a focus group discussion with one of our clients, the demand for a mobile answer was strong, but the ability of the team to speak to the strategy and the standards for adoption are still missing. Without those answers, moving forward to mobile at this time doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, throughout the general session presentations, I found myself most drawn to the stories presenters told, which truly made my learning an immersive experience, not just an event. Jenny Zhu spoke about the experience of teaching English in China and opened my eyes to the blindness of our cultural biases.

Ken Davenport gave me a nugget of insight to watch for the physical reaction of the audience in order to figure out what to pay attention to when creating learning, so that you can enhance the chances of making learning stick. And John Ryan touched my heart and reinforced a core belief of mine that every person offers us value when we take the time to really get to know and understand who they are.

This theme of making learning an experience, not just an event, really speaks to a trend I’ve been observing among our clients. Creating stand-alone learning solutions is often no longer the only answer. Clients are taking a step back, and really looking at ways to wrap learning, thinking through all the elements to be delivered, so that learning has a greater chance of success. We see a trend toward solutions that address communication, learning, change management and performance support all together with an eye to greater impact and chance for success. And it’s a trend I applaud, as it gives our profession way to offer value to learners that lasts well beyond the event, and maybe even beyond the “corporation”, putting us on that path to life-long learning.

If you attended the conference, I invite your comments and questions. If you didn’t attend, but this post sparks thoughts, ideas or questions, I welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation.

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Problem Solving versus Creative Design

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on October 11, 2012

Designers are often asked to “solve a problem” that exists. These problems need to be fixed because people are unhappy about something that’s either happening or not happening—there’s a perceived need. It’s commonly understood in the business environment that “design” is a solution to a problem. That other kind of design activity—creating—is reserved for interior decorators and artists and is more easily recognized in reception areas than in the cubicles and offices where people do their work.

What does a problem look like?

Company X has a problem. Upset customers have lodged dozens of complaints about rude and unhelpful customer service representatives. The manager of this group of employees is convinced the problem can be solved by better training. She convinces her supervisor that the CSRs need training designed to solve their problem. The supervisor agrees to find a solution.

What does a solution look like?

Company X CSRs are put through a 2-day training program. They’re told that customer surveys will be used for 30 days following their training to collect data that will verify the effect of training.

What is the outcome?

Customer surveys do indicate that the problem—irate customers—is less intense. Complaints against the CSRs drop by 50 percent and the supervisor’s successful handling of the problem is recognized during a meeting the following month.

Then, within a matter of four months, the 50 percent drop in complaints disappears. What happened?

According to Robert Fritz, who worked with Peter Senge and then went on to found DMA and develop the Technologies for Creating curriculum, the following happened: "The problem led to action to solve the problem. The action lessened the problem. Less action was needed to solve the problem. Less attention was given to the problem, and the problem resurfaced. Problem solving," Fritz explains, "provides a way to organize our focus, actions, time, and thought process. Designing solutions to problems gives the sense that something important is being done."

He adds, “…it’s an illusion.”

What’s the alternative if designing solutions to problems doesn’t work?

Creating.

Creating and problem solving involve very different states of mind. Creativity activates positive thoughts while problem solving is focused on what is negative. Creating is forward focused; it’s building toward the future. Problem solving is focused on the past; it’s resisting what has been.

What does creating look like?

Fritz has identified five steps in the creative process, which are types of action (not a formula). These steps are:

1. Conceive of the result you want to create. Creators start at the end by knowing what they want to create.
2. Know what currently exists. If you don’t know what has already been created, it’s impossible to know what to do next.
3. Take action. When you know what you want and what you currently have, take action. Creating is a learning process, so every action may not work. When actions don’t work, readjust.
4. Learn the rhythms of the creative process. There are three phases: germination, assimilation, and completion.
5. Create momentum. Professional creators create momentum. The seeds of their next action are planted and germinate in their present actions.

Notice that the word “problem” is not present in these five steps. The tone is positive and growth oriented.

What do you think could happen at Company X if customer complaints were approached from a creative rather than a problem-solving mindset?

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HTML5 eLearning Test Drive – Comparing Articulate Storyline to Adobe Captivate Converter

from Tony Tao, Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer

on September 13, 2012

Since its release in 2010, the Apple iPad has demonstrated its strength by dominating over 70% of the tablet computer market. During the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, Apple sold 15.4 million iPads.Most consumers use the iPad mainly for a combination of web surfing and online entertainment. In the business and commercial environment, the iPad is a partial replacement for a laptop, offering portability and ease of use. Of course, for those of us in the learning business, the iPad also offers a brand new and exciting delivery platform for eLearning.

I have received more and more requests from Fredrickson’s clients who are interested in delivering eLearning modules on the iPad. And we quickly have to come to terms with the major issue with the iPad as it relates to eLearning…you cannot run your shiny Flash-based courses on iPad. See my previous blog entries for more on this.

Apple’s decision not to support Flash player leaves us with only a couple of solutions, both of which have many pros and cons.

The first option is to develop the courses as “apps” that are native to iPad, and then push them to the learner’s iPad through the App Store. This process is usually expensive, time consuming, and it may bring up security, content rights, and confidentiality issues.

The second option is to develop the courses using HTML5 and CSS, and then deliver the courses online, either through a secure URL or an LMS. Fortunately, there are some rapid development tools on the market that offer the capability of converting the existing Flash courses to HTML5 format. The best examples are the just-released Articulate Storyline and Adobe Converter, also known as HTML5 Converter for Adobe Captivate 5.5.

The HTML5 Test Drive

So how well do these rapid development tools work when it comes to producing HTML5 content? I conducted a brief test run on both tools, focusing on the HTML conversion, web delivery, and LMS compatibility. For this testing, I developed two short eLearning courses with Storyline and Captivate 5.5. Both courses contained the same number of slides, visual assets, and interactions. Here are my findings:

1. Process

I’ll start with an interesting observation. Apparently, both conversion tools only work in Windows. Even though the Mac user can run them on a virtual machine, it is a complicated process. I hope that a Mac version will available in the near future!

Overall, I would say it is slightly easier to convert the course using Storyline. I can publish the project as an HTML5 package right in the “Publish Settings” window.

Unlike Storyline, Adobe Converter is a standalone application. First I needed to publish my Captivate project in Web/Flash format. Then I had to import the published SWF files into Adobe Converter. Not a terribly arduous process, but it does take a little time.

2. Conversion

Storyline did a great job in converting the whole course. Everything that I put in the course translated well to HTML5. There are no misalignments or cut-offs, and the buttons and interactions function very well. Storyline maintains the same playback bar in the HTML5 package, which provides the same user experience for the learners.

Adobe Converter takes a different approach by wrapping the converted course with a pre-defined framework. Its interface is very different from the Flash output. Given the complexity of Captivate 5.5, it is reasonable that not everything can be converted to HTML5. For example, the matching and hotspot interaction types in my test course did not convert at all. And there were some ActionScript errors showing up right after I launched the converter. Given that Adobe Converter is still in Beta evaluation, I believe these issues will be addressed in the final release, but anyone using Converter will need to carefully test their content to make sure.

3. Loading Speed and Web Delivery

The Storyline course loads faster, due to the small size of converted files. The package is also structured well. Basically, I can use the same package for all types of delivery, including Web/Flash-based platform, iPad, and LMS, by selecting different launch files in the package.

Storyline also introduces a specific tool to launch the course on the iPad. You need to download the “Articulate Player” app from Apple’s App Store. When launching the course, the player will remove all the web interfaces. It also offers the option to “Download the course to my iPad,” a feature which allows users to access the course even when they don’t have an active data connection. This is a brilliant idea because not all iPad users subscribe to a wireless provider’s data package.

In comparison with the package produced by Storyline, the Adobe Converter package loads much slower. I believe this may be due to the complicated file structure and considerably larger file size. The converted package can also only be used for mobile delivery.

4. LMS Compatibility

Storyline supports all major LMS protocols, including SCORM 1.2, 2004 and AICC. I tested it with SCORM1.2 on Moodle, an open source LMS. It worked great with this LMS, and reported my learning status successfully.

Adobe Converter only supports SCORM 1.2 at this point. It worked well with Moodle. All communication and status reporting happened as expected. The loading speed, however, was still a huge concern. The course loaded even slower using the LMS. This could be a huge issue for the users who have slow Internet connections.

Overall, Storyline did a much better job in converting the course to HTML5 package than Adobe Converter. However, I have to address the fact that Adobe Converter is still in beta evaluation, while Storyline is officially released as a commercial product. There still could be changes to Adobe Converter that will improve some aspects of the product.

With the advanced features in Captivate, such as customized variable control, ActionScript functions and Widgets, it will take time to develop a mechanism for converting them to HTML5. Also, please note that Storyline costs $1,400 for a license, while Adobe Captivate costs only about half of that. Adobe Converter is free right now in its beta form.

Adobe released the CS6 series of many of its products, like Dreamweaver, back in May, and these new releases include many features to enhance mobile compatibility. For example, Dreamweaver CS6 has added templates for developing native apps for iPad/iPhone. Captivate, however, was an exception for this CS6 upgrade. The latest version of Captivate is still CS5.5. There are some discussions online about the possible new features that could be included when Captivate CS6 is released. Given the success of Storyline, I hope Adobe will add similar features in this next version of Captivate. Watch the Fredcomm blog for more information.

5. Interface Design

Each product and publishing format, of course, has its own interface design. Just for the sake of comparison, here are screen shots of the same course content from each of the tools in different published formats:

Captivate Flash output

Adobe Captivate HTML5 Converter on iPad

Stroyline Player on iPad

HTML5 Output Storyline on iPad

3 comments

From Usability to User Experience to Service Design (Part 3)

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on August 28, 2012

This is the third and last installment in a series of blog entries about the significance of changing terminology in the field of [insert your preferred term here] human-computer interaction, usability engineering, user-centered design (UCD), and user experience (UX).

This summer the organization formerly known as the Usability Professionals’ Association officially changed its name from the UPA to the UXPA: the User Experience Professionals’ Association. This seemed to be the definitive statement that user experience is now the term being privileged over usability.

Why UX?

The publication of Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, which I mentioned in an earlier post, was a key point in UX becoming the new popular term and marked another step in the continued broadening of focus in the field of human-computer interaction (which itself seems an inadequate label now). The key term is of course experience. It suggests a concern not only with whether a user can easily learn and remember how to interact with an interface, and do so without making errors – the basics of usability – but also with a user feeling satisfied, even delighted, with their interaction. After meeting the goal of basic usability, the emotional elements of interaction – is an interface trustworthy and persuasive, even fun? – become more important.

So the shift from usability to user experience is not a defeat or death of the former term, as some have suggested. It’s more accurate to see it as a validation. We’ve accepted the value of making products, specifically digital interfaces, easy to use and now we’re pushing further toward trying to figure out what really delights users, what moves them. A key text marking this evolution is Susan Weinschenk’s Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? (2009).

So what comes after UX? Will Service Design catch on?

An issue with the term user experience – as is the case with user-centered design – is that it’s somewhat open ended and can mean different things to different people. For example, a concern I have is its use in job titles and descriptions. I don’t always know what a User Experience Designer does, because it’s a role that could involve so many activities and skill sets: user research, design evaluation, information architecture, visual design, programming, and so on. I understand that companies want one person to be able to do all of this, but to be a specialist in all of these activities is challenging. Someone may be called a UX Designer and do visual design, but they don’t know which research methods are available to them, which ones to use when, how to properly gather input, or how to interpret the results.

The ongoing struggle with definitions, combined with technology changes and the continued broadening of focus in the fields of HCI and human factors, will mean that almost certainly we’ll see new labels to describe what practitioners do. For example, technology will likely force further specialization in narrower areas, such as mobile UX design. At the same time, there will be an interest in applying UCD principles in the design of an ever-wider variety of customer experiences as well as the processes that underlie those experiences. For this reason, I’m particularly interested in the concept of service design, which I believe has tremendous value in an economy dominated by the service sector, where in order to thrive companies must differentiate by providing superior customer experiences.

What’s Service Design?

In contrast with user experience design, which usually focuses on the look and feel, structure, and content of a specific digital interface, service design focuses on the entire service interface. It is more holistic, including all of the customer touchpoints with an organization, such as offices or stores and the people who staff them, physical products, call centers, interactive voice response systems, correspondence, invoices, user assistance materials, as well as websites and applications.

Beyond these touchpoints, service design also seeks to assess and improve organizational processes and strategies that create the foundation for the service interface, because what usually leads to sub-optimal services are inadequate processes, and inadequate processes are usually a result of flaws in organizational structure and strategy. Conversely, superior services come from organizations that have been consciously designed to provide them.

The emergence of service design is indicative of a growing recognition that design is about much more than styling and cosmetics. The scope of design has broadened continually over the last several decades, from physical products to virtual interactions and experiences, and now to services. There has been a recognition that “design thinking” and the techniques that lead to good design are more widely applicable than was previously understood.

Whether the term service design really takes off in the US (it’s been more widely used in Europe so far), remains to be seen. However, I’m seeing more books and conferences with a focus on “customer experience” that take concepts and methods directly from the literature on service design.

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives…

Despite this exciting evolution, it’s apparent that many systems and products still need to pass the bar of basic usability. It’s also apparent that many product managers still think design is primarily about cosmetics, and that users – if they are asked at all – should be consulted only for validation just before a product is released. Whatever it is we call what we do in this still-young field, there are still many basic challenges that need to be met.

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The social media discussion continues…with gusto!

from Molly Emmings, Account Manager

on August 24, 2012

At the August 14 Intersect meeting about 50 of us got together to continue the discussion about using social media on public-sector websites. It can be a challenge to set up and maintain, but in many ways is definitely worth the effort.

We had three members facilitate our discussion, each from a slightly different perspective:

• Bob Filipczak of MNDOT – “Social Media Strategy = Just Do It”
• Stefanie Otterson of MNDNR – “No Reservations” – how Facebook helped navigate the recovery from the Great Reservations System Meltdown of 2012.
• Allen Sommerfeld of METC – “Dealing With Detractors”

Please note that the content of all presentations is the property of their authors and may only be reused with their permission.

Thanks again to Lucinda Plaisance and the Metropolitan Council for hosting, to our facilitators, and to everyone who participated. It was an excellent meeting.

Mark your calendars for our next meeting on Tuesday, November 13, 2:00-4:00pm. See you then.

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From Usability to User Experience to Service Design (Part 2)

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on August 02, 2012

In a previous post, I discussed the rising popularity of the term user experience in contrast with the term usability and what this might mean. This got me thinking about other terms in human-computer interaction (HCI) that have gone in and out of fashion and why.

What happened to usability engineering?

When I first became a practitioner of usability evaluation methods about 12 years ago, it was common for people in the field to be called usability engineers. Jakob Nielsen’s book Usability Engineering (1993) was a key reference for many of us. By describing ourselves as engineers, we wanted to suggest a methodology and toolset driven by data. The label was an assertion of legitimacy: as engineers, we had something valuable to contribute to design.

Use of the term usability engineering was in part a reaction to human factors, which suggested a concern with a narrower range of specialist environments and applications (e.g., power plant control rooms, airplane cockpits, medical devices). In contrast, usability engineering was focused on technology intended for a much wider audience of non-specialist users (e.g., desktop software and websites). The popularity of usability engineering was indicative of a gradual broadening of focus in HCI to include the needs and wants of more and different audiences as they interacted with new information technologies available to them beginning in the 1980s.

So what happened to usability engineering? The practices associated with that term are more widely used now than ever, so in a sense usability engineering is thriving, but hardly anyone calls it that anymore. Why?

Rather than engineers, people in usability roles thought of themselves more as adjunct designers. The process of designing interfaces, and who should be involved in that process, became a central concern in HCI. Vredenburg, Isensee, and Righi helped to explain and popularize the concept of “User-Centered Design” in their book of that title in 2002, and Jesse James Garrett published a key text called Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web in 2003.

As those titles suggest, user-centered design (UCD) became the new it term.

What happened to user-centered design?

When the Karats published their paper on “The evolution of user-centered focus in the human-computer interaction field” nearly 10 years ago, user-centered design was the hot concept of the day. They wrote: “We suggest that UCD is a good label under which to continue to gather knowledge of how to develop usable systems. It captures a commitment that the usability community supports – that users must be involved in system design – while leaving how this is accomplished fairly open.”

That commitment to involving users in system design hasn’t changed, yet the popularity of UCD faded, though it certainly hasn’t disappeared. One reason for this, I believe, is that UCD is not a step-by-step design and development methodology. Instead, it’s a set of principles at the core of which is the importance of gathering representative user input at key points during design and development. Principles are important, but I think many people wanted UCD to be more than a loose philosophy.

Another reason why UCD became a less popular term is that it was sometimes misunderstood to mean that users would dictate design and that the business objectives of the product or system were secondary to whatever users said they wanted. In fact, the importance of first defining business objectives is a key principle of UCD, but because the name puts users at the center, this point could be overlooked.

In the third and last entry, I'll look at why UX has become the new it term, and whether service design will catch on.

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Fostering a Learning Mindset

from Mark Kizilos, Ph.D,

on July 30, 2012

Editor's Note:This entry is part of the Fredrickson Thought Leaders in Learning series. For this guest blogging series, we've invited well-known experts in a variety of fields to address leadership-level learning and development professionals with their thoughts on topics of their choosing. Our hope is to prompt discussion around an expansive range of ideas and concepts.

I wanted to start this guest blog with a special thank you to Lola and her team at Fredrickson Communications for bringing together the learning community recently in a fabulous Learning Leader Summit. I am always impressed by the caliber of talent that we have in the Minneapolis area, and I enjoyed having the chance to connect with colleagues doing great work in their organizations.

Over the last 20 years my work as a professor, consultant, and executive has focused on leadership development and talent management. As such, I have done a lot of thinking and research into the increasingly critical question, “How do we accelerate the development of leaders?”

Since this is a short blog, I will fast forward to the punch line: I believe that you accelerate development by harnessing the developmental potential of on-the-job work experience. Now, if you are an adherent to the 70-20-10 concept, you may be tempted to stop reading here, because you already know that. After all, 70% of what leaders need to know to be effective they learn on the job, 20% they learn from relationships with others, and 10% they learn from formal sources. So what’s new?

Well, 70-20-10 is a great concept, but it’s not a great practice. The concept has made an important contribution by highlighting the fact that people learn a lot from experience, but it doesn’t provide any concrete guidance for practice. Namely, how exactly do you harness experience to accelerate a leader’s development?

The key to experience-based development is to foster a Learning Mindset

My work over the years has convinced me that while the best leaders have exceptional natural talents, they become great leaders because they approach their work experience with a Learning Mindset. The best leaders routinely:

1. Seek great experiences
2. Learn useful lessons from their experiences
3. Apply the lessons they learn to tackle ever larger challenges

While people can’t change their natural talents, they can get onto an accelerated path to success by learning how to practice the Learning Mindset of an effective leader. To do so, they need a language and mental model that enables them to think differently about work experiences—to approach them not just with a Performance Mindset, but also with a Learning Mindset.

FrameBreakingTM Leadership Development: a new way of thinking about work experiences

The FrameBreaking Model, developed from research on the careers of 101 successful leaders, is a simple, but powerful, tool for jumpstarting the adoption of a Learning Mindset. It provides individuals and managers a simple structure for thinking about work experiences along two distinct dimensions: Intensity and Stretch.

• Intensity: The extent to which work demands the most of you. When you are put into an assignment that pushes you to develop higher-level skills, you need to be fully engaged and in a high learning mode in order to succeed.
• Stretch: The extent to which an experience pushes you outside your area of expertise, background, or preparation. When you are put into an assignment for which you have little prior experience or background, you need to learn different skills and perspectives.

Intensity and Stretch are two powerful development dimensions that are often mixed together in our thinking about experiences. Yet, these dimensions are actually distinct—one can have experiences that are high in Stretch without being high in Intensity, and vice versa—and they drive very different development outcomes.

Combining the two dimensions creates the FrameBreaking model with four types of experience: Delivering, Mastering, Broadening, and FrameBreaking. The most transformational experiences are referred to as “FrameBreaking” experiences; because they are high on both dimensions, the individual must question their assumptions about how to achieve success and undergo a degree of personal transformation. Yet, FrameBreaking experiences involve a higher degree of risk than other types of experience.

The real challenge for leadership development professionals is not to find FrameBreaking experiences for all leaders, but to make better decisions about the kinds of experiences that leaders need, given their prior experience and personal aspirations. The model provides a new lens that can spark insight for individuals and help organizational decision-makers to ensure that people are getting the experiences (and learning) they need to be ready for the future.

About the author of this Thought Leaders in Learning entry: Mark Kizilos is the Assistant Dean for Executive Education at Carlson School of Management. For more information about the FrameBreaking Leadership Development approach, visit the FrameBreaking Leadership website. His new book, “FrameBreaking Leadership Development: Think differently about work expriences to achieve more, faster., is available from Amazon.com.

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Learning Leadership Summit 2012 Follow-up – Are you executing your plan?

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on July 20, 2012

Our speaker, Kevin Wilde, did us all a great favor as he concluded this year’s Learning Leadership Summit. He built in time for us to reflect on our thinking from the day and make an action plan for executing once we got back to our normal routines. But ask yourself, are you being true to your intent and to your personal development in making that execution happen? Or did you just write it down and now have forgotten it?

Here is your gentle reminder to consider the follow-through. Executing on a half-day development program may be the hardest thing to do – especially for leaders who have to-do lists that are miles long and a seemingly never-ending list of “when I have time” ideas. So, take a minute. If you are reading this, take that minute now. What is the goal you wrote down for improvement? How will you practice this new skill?

I’ll share a personal story. My goal is to communicate powerfully and prolifically. One of my ideas for practice is to blog more – communicating about the things that are relevant and happening in our industry, publicizing what we at Fredrickson think and are passionate about, and fostering community interaction. This blog entry is a way for me to start my practice. I’m interested in the support of this community – through sharing and commenting on this and other blog entries of interest that you may find here.

That’s my personal story from the Learning Leadership Summit. So I’ll end with a call to action for you. I urge you to capitalize on the time you took for yourself to make sure you are following through on what you said you wanted to do. We’d love to hear and learn from you as well.

2 comments

Shiny New Thing

from Sarah Kesher, Project Manager

on July 19, 2012

I have three kids and a husband. Without exception, they are easily and quickly drawn to the shiny new thing off in the corner. I can lose my husband for hours in a bookstore as he picks out books one by one and says, “Oh, cool!” My kids do the same in the toy aisle at Target. At some point in both of these occasions, the question becomes, “Can we have this?” And, as the person who often has to answer in the negative, the question in my head is: “Do we NEED it?”

As someone working in an ever changing and advancing field, there’s always the new shiny thing that’s set down right in front of us. And then there’s the shiny new thing that’s coming soon after that. We get excited—Mobile, HTML5, Storyline, and more that I can’t even begin to imagine. Even in instructional design there are new methods, techniques, ideas and so on. And we, being passionate about our field, want to use every one of them—NOW!

Long ago, I worked with a web developer to build a service website. About half way through telling him about our need, he was no longer listening. He was off in his world of possibilities. When it was his turn to speak, this simple website had become, in his mind, a universal portal available to everyone in the world with this and that and all these really “cool” things. I didn’t realize it until after, but this was a valuable life lesson—just because something is possible doesn’t mean you should do it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about possibilities. But those possibilities have to serve a purpose. Cool for the sake of cool does nothing but increase your stress and budget. Because of this, I weigh every possibility on the following questions:

1. Am I clear on the objectives of this project?
2. Would the possibility in question serve those objectives in any way?
3. Would the possibility fit within the budget and timeline of the project?
4. Am I clear on the audience for this project?
5. Would this possibility appeal to and benefit the audience?

If the answers to any of these are “no,” I know to back away slowly from the shiny thing in front of me. It still is cool, but I can guarantee you, if it’s truly that cool, it will come up again. Just put the shiny new thing on a shelf and look for an opportunity to pull it down, dust it off, and use it on the right project.

1 comments

Using OD to Support & Enhance Talent Management

from David Jamieson, Ph.D,

on July 13, 2012

Editor's Note:This entry is part of the Fredrickson Thought Leaders in Learning series. For this guest blogging series, we've invited well-known experts in a variety of fields to address leadership-level learning and development professionals with their thoughts on topics of their choosing. Our hope is to prompt discussion around an expansive range of ideas and concepts.

OD deals with developing effective organization systems, productive human interaction patterns and change processes that work. Talent management deals with the strategic use of talent involving effectively designing the organization and identifying, acquiring, integrating, developing, performing and retaining what’s needed. Like most things in organizations it all needs to start from strategy developed to align with anticipated changes in the environment and an organization designed to enable strategic execution.

With that basis, let’s look at how OD can support the work needed in talent management.

Identification: Given any mission, environment and strategy, what talent is needed to execute successfully? This can be viewed through competencies, experience, capabilities or characteristics. OD has special focus on design of processes for conducting work or facilitating diverse groups in developing consensus or making decisions.

Acquisition: Given the strategic needs, it is necessary to identify candidate sources, attraction strategies, diversity needs and recruiting and selection processes. Creating the inclusion of necessary perspectives and internal resources, designing needed systems and selection processes and ascertaining cultural fit can all be helpfully managed with OD support.

Integration: All talent needs to be brought onboard, integrated with other resources and participate in managed transitions among teams and with cultural adaptation. OD can provide expertise for systems design, transition processes, team development and culture assimilation.

Development: All talent will involve developing technical, relational and managerial competencies for current performance and emerging needs. Continuous changes create cyclical needs for new learning, new skills and new relationships. OD works with interpersonal, group, inter-group and social system roles, relationships and interaction patterns. OD can also assist in designing learning systems and development processes.

Performance: Managing performance is an age-old dilemma, but one aspect that is important is the relationship between the context and an individual’s performance. Besides knowledge and skills the work system, technology, social relations, management and feedback cycles can all affect one’s performance. How these get designed can make a difference and how the performance management system is designed can also be better or worse. OD provides useful skills for working on both of these needs.

Retention: When we have the talent we need, retention enters the picture. The problem-solving, monitoring and communications needed for retention can all be assisted with OD principles and practices. Meeting welfare, motivation, engagement and commitment preferences of desired talent gets into culture, policy, management and design arenas.

It’s easy to understand why talent management has become so central and critical. More and more organizations can only compete with their human capital, organization capabilities and execution, all of which are dependent on who you have and how well they can behave for your strategy.

All of these aspects need to work in alignment as an integrated system. Without OD in support, many of these functions can be under-optimized, fragmented, poorly designed or ineffective with the human resource base in the organization. We are entering an era when it’s becoming important to integrate the HR and OD mindsets and skill sets necessary for complete talent management.

About the author of this Thought Leaders in Learning entry: Dr. David Jamieson is Associate Professor & Department Chair, Organization Learning & Development, College of Education, Leadership & Counseling at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also President of the Jamieson Consulting Group, Inc., Practicum Director in the M.S. in Organization Development Program at American University and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in other OD programs. He has 40 years of experience consulting to organizations on leadership, change, strategy, design and human resource issues. He is a Past National President of the American Society for Training and Development (1984) and Past Chair of the Management Consultation Division and Practice Theme Committee of the Academy of Management.

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From Usability to User Experience to Service Design (Part 1)

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on July 13, 2012

A few months ago, I came across a blog post by Craig Tomlin that claimed “usability is dead,” and that it had been “killed” by user experience (UX). The evidence he presents comes primarily from Google Insights, Google indexed pages, and job postings on Monster, all of which show that the term user experience has been for the last several years a more popular term than usability.

This is true, but instead of saying that usability is dead – which is overstating it – it’s more accurate to say UX has subsumed usability. The practices associated with usability evaluation and usable design live on but increasingly under the rubric of UX. The interesting question that Mr. Tomlin doesn’t address directly is why this has happened.

I’d suggest that user experience has become the more popular term because it implies a broader, more aspirational goal than usability, even if the methods used to reach that goal are not new. UX represents another stage in the continued broadening of focus in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), from ensuring basic ease of use to ensuring a superior experience across a growing range of products and systems.

In their 2003 article on “The evolution of user-centered focus in the human-computer interaction field,” John and Clare-Marie Karat make a crucial point about the type of name change in question (the bold emphasis is mine):

[E]ven though name changes may reflect very little in the way of real content changes for the underlying activities involved in developing usable systems, names can be valuable in communicating what one considers important. Within the general field of human computer interaction, we have many attitudes and approaches (e.g., participatory design, contextual inquiry, UCD). Though these names are all loosely united by a commitment to developing more usable human-computer systems, the focus of activity is reflected in the title.

The terminology shift from usability to user experience isn’t the first in the field of HCI and it won’t be the last. Other terms have risen in popularity and then faded and the same might happen to UX. In the next posts, I’m going to look at a couple of examples of terms that were once hot and then were not, and try to figure out what happened. I’ll also speculate about whether another term, service design, might catch on.

I’d love to hear your input along the way.

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I Don’t Know

from Sarah Kesher, Project Manager

on July 06, 2012

“I don’t know.” Not a very reassuring thing to hear from a consultant. After all, aren’t you paying a consultant to give you an answer? But in fact, that phrase is one of the “8 Great Things Consultants Say,” in a recent article by Jeff Haden for Inc. The reason he gave for including it is because a consultant willing to say, “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out.” is also more likely to have a collaborative approach.

For my part, I’ll add two more reasons; a) it’s honest and I like working with people who are honest about their work, and b) a consultant’s job isn’t to know everything—it’s our job to learn. We study and observe. Then we take that information, add in some of what we do know, and make recommendations that will meet your specific needs. If we knew everything, there would be a simple formula for every problem and you could buy a book of formulas and viola! You’re problems are solved! But, chances are if you’re hiring a consultant in the first place, you’ve read a few books, tried a few things, and nothing worked.

Long ago, I learned a model for discussion called the “Know/Don’t Know” circle. The idea is simple enough. Draw a circle and ask: “If this circle represents everything there is to know in the entire world, how much of it do you think you know?” Fairly quickly your group will say a very small percent, which is then drawn on the circle. The next questions are how much do you know you don’t know, and how much do you think you know. The latter is usually followed by a chuckle at the truth of the question. At this point, a little less than half the circle is accounted for. Then comes the big question: “What does the remaining part of the circle represent?” The answer is that it represents the things in this world that we don’t even know we don’t know.

I go back to this often. Especially the concept of just how many things there are in this world that I don’t even know that I don’t know them. I don’t even have a frame of reference in order to be able to identify that I don’t know them. For me personally, I keep this in mind when I’m creating something. I often stop myself before I get to a completion point and ask someone else for his or her perspective. Maybe they know something I don’t. And, maybe by learning it from them, my project will be even stronger than it would have been if I’d kept going myself.

This is exactly why I love working with clients who engage with us for a Discovery Phase of their project. To me, the Discovery process is a meeting of the “don’t know you don’t know” part of our circles. You know your subject, I don’t. I know Learning Strategy, you don’t. You help me understand your content, and I’ll help you achieve your learning (and ultimately your business) goals. It allows us to join our two sets of knowledge at a place that is full of possibilities.

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Online Forms Extreme Makeover - Webinar video and slide deck.

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on June 28, 2012

A big thank you to all those who attended our Online Forms Extreme Makeover webinar on June 20. Rebecca and I both hope this webinar helps you to improve your users' experience with online forms.

If you need help making over a tough online form, or any other aspect of improving your agency's user experience, we can help. .

If you'd like to take another look at the form makeovers and the other information in the slide deck, here it is.

And if you would like to watch the whole webinar again or share it with colleagues, here's the recorded version.

Stay tuned for more information about upcoming webinars in the Fredrickson Communications public-sector webinar series.

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Storyline Can Be Intoxicating

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on June 19, 2012

Fredrickson affiliate Gerry Wasiluk described the eLearning field as “being in a crazy time between old and new technology” at the June 12 FRLL Storyline SIG meeting. Gerry was at the meeting to inform Twin Cities Learning Leaders about Storyline, the new “rapid” development authoring tool from Articulate. He illustrated his theory regarding the state of eLearning with overlapping circles. The “crazy time,” he said, was at the center.

After hearing Gerry talk about the features and capabilities of Storyline, and after using the software program, I’m anxious to use it to create an eLearning project. I’m excited about the tool’s potential, because it pushes beyond the limits of other eLearning authoring tools.

Gerry, who also was involved with beta testing the software, called Storyline “intoxicating.” Then he cautioned SIG attendees when he said: “Stick to your [eLearning] designs.”

Gerry’s right. Storyline is just a tool (albeit, a very nice tool!).

Generally, eLearning designers agree with Gerry’s assessment regarding the impact of ongoing and rapid changes in technology on our work: this IS a crazy time in the eLearning field. It’s also an exciting time. I see Storyline as a tool that instructional designers and developers will use to move from where we’ve been to where we want to go with eLearning development—toward more engaging and interactive eLearning.

Storyline will make the trip easier!

Note: The little scenario you see here was created in Storyline for this post.

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Introducing Articulate Storyline - The Powerpoint Show you’ve been waiting for.

from J Hruby, Director of Marketing

on June 12, 2012

Update: Links in the PowerPoint show below are now fixed. Download away.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Introducing Articulate Storyline SIG this morning. We also want to thank our SIG host, Allianz, and our discussion leader Gerry Wasiluk.

And now what you've all been waiting for: The link to Gerry's Storyline PowerPoint show.

If, by chance, you just want to head straight to The Green Monster demo, here's a shortcut.

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My Top 5 Favorite Features in Articulate Storyline

from Tony Tao, Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer

on June 11, 2012

Articulate released the highly-anticipated Storyline product about a month ago. In doing so, the learning community now has a stunning new tool for extending the concept of rapid eLearning development into a professional development suite. I was invited to be a beta product tester for Storyline and based on that experience, here are my top 5 favorite new features in Storyline:

1. HTML5 package for iPad. With more and more clients asking for the ability to deliver learning on the iPad, Storyline is an ideal authoring tool. I conducted tests of this new feature, and my results will publish to this blog shortly.
2. Branching. Even though Articulate Studio 09 offers some limited options for branching, many of the Articulate courses we’ve seen our clients develop continue be of a page turning nature. This may be for a variety of reasons, but the rapid development nature of that tool does best lend itself to making these types of courses. However, Storyline, by way of using the triggers feature, makes it easier to create very dynamic interactions and branched scenarios, thus opening up the tool for greater creative possibilities.
3. Timeline. The professional development concept of a timeline made its first appearance in the Articulate QuizMaker tool. However, a limited number of Articulate users have taken advantage of what that concept offered. In Storyline, the use of a timeline saves developers time in synchronizing audio with objects. To explore this concept further, you can consult one of my earlier blogs comparing Articulate and Captivate.
4. Screen Recording. This new feature brings Storyline up to a new level for competing with Captivate. With Storyline, you can now save your screen capture as one video clip and embed that in the slide. You can save your screen recording as either a step-by-step demonstration or as a simulation.
5. Character. I know a lot of users are going crazy about this new feature. The character feature allows you to choose between cartoon or real-person photographs, and those characters offer hundreds of facial expressions and body poses – imagine the possibilities for use! But, I’ve chosen to put this feature as the last one in my top five list for two reasons. First, I know a lot of my clients oppose the use of cartoons in eLearning courses. Second, although it is great that the Atsumi photograph album comes with Storyline for free, purchasing an additional character costs $299.

Overall, I am excited that Storyline is finally available to all eLearning developers. If you would like to know more about this new tool, you are welcome to join the Fredrickson SIG featuring Articulate Storyline, presented by Gerry Wasiluk, Fredrickson Affiliate and Articulate MVP, on June 12th.

1 comments

Games and Why We should Play More

from Sharon Leah, Instructional Designer

on June 08, 2012

Man is a game playing animal. He must always be trying to get the best of something or other. ~Charles Lamb in “Essays to Ella” (1775-1834)

We grow up playing games. We play ball games at school and board games and card games at the kitchen table. Many of us played games in the neighborhood after school or the evening meal, too. Today’s virtual reality games give us even more game-playing options. We like to play games because they challenge us—and because we have more fun when we acquire new skills. One important element of many games is strategy. Unfortunately, strategy is often the last thing we learn about when playing games. Having fun and winning are more immediate and often seem more important than learning strategy.

My interest in the strategic aspect of games was sparked a couple years ago, when I noticed how often people who win in their personal and work lives also played sports in school. I was intrigued and wondered what advantage, if any, children who play school sports have that other children don’t. I concluded that coaching is the advantage sports offer. Coaches teach strategies that help players win. When winners transfer their skills and attitudes to their day-to-day activities upon entering adulthood and the workplace, they continue to win.

Unfortunately, games are something most of us think of as entertainment. We pay to watch other people win. We begin to acquire this attitude toward play in school, because education and play are, in the minds of many educators, like oil and water. They don’t mix together well. Play is frivolous. Learning is important.

This attitude sticks with us like glue when we leave school and enter the workplace, where we’re supposed to be responsible adults. It’s no secret that responsible adults don’t play, they work.

In fact, the only way a game has a chance of making it in to the workplace is if it’s a “serious game.” What is a serious game? It’s an interactive computer application that has a challenging goal, is fun to play, incorporates scoring, and imparts to the player a skill, knowledge, or attitude that can be used in the world. Serious games were first developed and used for military training, and simulations are in wide use today. But to produce a simulation game, the developer must have knowledge of programing and learning principles, as well as specialized software. Games must be based on sound learning principles. Otherwise, they’re only entertainment.

I don’t have programing skills or the right software, so I won’t be creating simulations. But the evidence that games can teach people how to be strategic decision makers is too compelling to ignore. So I found myself wondering about what else is possible? I’ve found some answers. Scenario-based learning and case studies can be used to teach decision-making skills. I’ll be exploring each of those and writing about what I learn in the weeks to come.

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Formal or informal blogging?  The answer is “Yes!”

from Robin Lucas, Vice President Fredrickson Learning

on June 07, 2012

We’ve been doing a bit of discussion lately at Fredrickson about what the purpose of a blog is for us. Is it the format where we want to post complete articles? Or is it a way in which we want to share our ideas, thoughts and curiosity about our profession in all of its facets? Do we want to only publish when we have complete thoughts and answers to questions, or do we want to cultivate the discussion about topics that attract our, and others in our communities, attention?

I believe the answer is yes to all of these questions. But what sometimes holds us back is that we feel it is a YES to the idea of sharing complete thoughts and articles, but we’re not convinced that we would give as resounding a YES to the other questions. I know that we want to show vibrancy in our processes and thoughts about our profession. We want to spark conversation and discussion. We want to connect with others and share our collective wisdom – and learn from your thoughts and comments.

So expect to see changes here to our blog. You’ll start to see more posts, more often, from more members of our team. And we hope to inspire you to respond – to continue the conversation, to let us know where you think we should modify our thinking, and to hear where our thoughts further inspire you.

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Help them Grow or Watch Them Go: The Career Development Imperative

from Beverly Kaye,

on May 25, 2012

Editor's Note:This entry is part of the Fredrickson Thought Leaders in Learning series. For this guest blogging series, we've invited well-known experts in a variety of fields to address leadership-level learning and development professionals with their thoughts on topics of their choosing. Our hope is to prompt discussion around an expansive range of ideas and concepts.

Despite economic conditions, unemployment levels, or any other business factor imaginable, your best employees – the ones you need most – want one thing from you, plain and simple: to support their growth and development. Study after study confirms that development is the single most powerful tool managers have for driving engagement, retention, productivity, and results. Yet, learning leaders know that career development is frequently the thing that gets sidelined unless or until the organization demands that some form be submitted during regular review cycles.

My new book (with co-author Julie Winkle Giulioni) sheds a much needed light on specifically what managers can do – within the time-starved, priority-rich, pressure-cooker environment in which they operate – to support employees’ careers. And it comes down to this: engage in short, ongoing conversations with employees about their career options, needs, and passions.

It’s really that simple... and that complex.

How do you, as a leader, start engaging your employees in career conversations? Here's a preview of the first two chapters of my soon-to-be-released book to get you started.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go Preview

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Kudos to Two Public Sector Clients

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on May 15, 2012

Our congratulations to the City of Woodbury and its Communications Coordinator, Jason Egerstrom, for winning an Award of Excellence in the websites category in the Minnesota Association of Government Communicators (MAGC) annual Northern Lights Awards competition. The City’s website was also nominated in the Best of Show category. We were happy to have played a role in providing user experience testing and consulting to the City as the new site was being designed and developed. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for that Best of Show award, Jason!

And we congratulate the Minnesota Department of Revenue (MDOR) on recently launching its new website and the positive coverage in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We worked with the Department’s web team and the developers to conduct user research, user experience testing, and consulting. Back in 2009 I blogged about our findings from audience research that users preferred a stronger audience-based navigation format for the MDOR site. Audience-based navigation is often not the best approach, but it works well for many government agencies because of the diverse audiences those agencies serve, each of which often has very different concerns.

Redesigning and developing a new website for any large organization is a huge endeavor – bigger than is often realized by teams doing it for the first time. And for public sector organizations, the scrutiny can be all the greater for obvious reasons. But given the benefits of providing excellent online self-service options, the effort and occasional headaches are well worthwhile.

Congrats again to Woodbury and MDOR on a great job!

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Responding to the Rise of Mobile: What’s Government in Minnesota Doing?

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on May 11, 2012

First, some quick stats:

• As of February 2012, 104 million people in the US owned an iPhone. (comScore Datamine)
• On a typical day, 68% of all smartphone owners go online using their phone. (Pew Research Center)
• IDC predicts that 106 million tablet computers will be sold this year.
• IDC also predicts that by 2015, more internet users in the USA will access the internet through mobile devices than through PCs.

In addition to the growing numbers, it’s important for web managers to be aware that, as Josh Clark says, “Anything that a user can do on mobile, they will do on mobile.” The first of Clark’s Seven Deadly Mobile Myths is that there is no stereotypical use case for mobile.

Are government organizations behind in adapting?

Given that millions of us are already using smartphones and tablets, and many more of us will be using them over the next few years, what are government organizations in Minnesota doing with their sites and applications to respond? That was the core question at our last Intersect meeting. It’s worth pointing out that with respect to web matters, government agencies in Minnesota are generally leaders, not laggards.

The results of a survey on mobile that we distributed to our Intersect membership a few weeks prior to the meeting show that most government organizations in the state are still in the early planning stages.

• About 80% have not optimized their public site for viewing on a mobile device, and have not developed any mobile applications for staff or other audiences.
• A third have not started planning a mobile web strategy; half said they were in early-stage planning. Only 14% had implemented a mobile strategy.
• Nearly half have seen a large to moderate increase in traffic to their sites from mobile devices.

Responses to an open-ended question about key challenges in adopting to a more dynamic and mobile web environment indicated a lot of uncertainty about where organizations would find the time, budget, and resources (either internally or via contractors) to handle new design and development work. There were also concerns from several organizations about whether a mobile audience truly exists for their content.

We were fortunate to hear from three early adopter organizations about what they have developed and what they have planned.

Metro Transit

John Siqveland, Public Relations Manager for Metro Transit, demonstrated Metro Transit’s mobile website, showing how customers with smartphones can have fast access to tools like NexTrip, to get real-time bus departures, and Trip Planner. John explained that Metro Transit so far has not developed apps for particular devices but has instead made data publicly available for app developers at datafinder.org. Check out the range of metro transit apps that have been developed so far.

John suggested that it may not be long before riders can use their phones to interact with a chip or image (or whatever ends up replacing QR codes) at transit stops to get real-time information.

MN Department of Natural Resources

Jed Becher talked about the DNR’s Android app, LakeFinder, their cross-platform app, MN Water Access, which locates public water access points, and a Fall Colors mobile site. All are available from the DNR's mobile apps page.

LakeFinder was developed as a proof of concept for the department, showing how mobile development could be done. As of April 2012 they have had nearly 17,000 active device installs. Jed said that the DNR is currently working on an HTML-based replacement for LakeFinder. They are also adding an HTML-based “Where am I?” mobile web version of the Recreation Compass to assist citizens in determining if they are on public land or where the nearest public land is located. The Department is also making high-use pages on the site more mobile friendly.

J. Hruby, Fredrickson’s VP of Sales and Marketing (and our most avid outdoorsman), congratulated the DNR for its work on LakeFinder. J. made an excellent point about how effectively the DNR has won fans in the public because of tools like LakeFinder, to the point where they are happy to pay higher fees to continue getting such great service.

City of Minnetonka

We ended the session with Marc Drummond, Web Technologies Coordinator for the City of Minnetonka. Marc was the person who introduced me to Ethan Marcotte’s concept of responsive web design over a year ago, and he is now redesigning Minnetonka’s website using responsive design techniques. Marc shared a beta version of the new site during his session.

Marc began his talk by referring to Stephen Hay’s famous tweet from January 2011: “There is no mobile web. There is only the web, which we view in different ways. There is also no desktop web. Or tablet web. Thank you.”

What designers like Ethan Marcotte, Stephen Hay, Josh Clark, and Marc Drummond suggest is that we “shouldn’t be developing completely separate mobile websites, or iPhone websites, or iPad websites, where well defined universal websites would suffice” (Josh Clark). Instead, there should be one web. As Marcotte wrote in his pioneering article on responsive web design: “Can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But how can we—and our designs—adapt?”

The three technical ingredients of responsive design that Marcotte describes, and that Marc explained in his talk, are fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. It also requires a new way of thinking. “Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things” (Marcotte).

Resources to learn more about mobile

We'll be revisiting the subject of mobile user experience many more times. For now, check out Jeff Zeldman's excellent list of mobile web resources and best practices. This is a great place to start digging in to learn more.

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A Word About the Wise

from Lola Fredrickson, CEO, Fredrickson Communications

on May 01, 2012

Coauthored by Al Watts, founder of inTEgro, Inc.

Editor's Note: This entry is part of the Fredrickson Thought Leaders in Learning series. For this guest blogging series, we've invited well-known experts in a variety of fields to address leadership-level learning and development professionals with their thoughts on topics of their choosing. Our hope is to prompt discussion around an expansive range of ideas and concepts.

Who’s the wisest person that you know? Why does that person come to mind, and what are some characteristics of other wise people you know?

Competency, skills and expertise are desirable, but cannot take the place of wisdom. There are competent, highly skilled and even expert sailors, for example, who may not be wise. There is a saying among Lake Superior sailors that comes to mind: “The Superior sailor uses superior judgment to avoid situations that require superior skills.” For an example closer to home, if some organizations in the news lately had exercised more wisdom, they likely would have saved a bundle on legal fees.

As we think of truly wise professionals that we know, here’s what comes to mind:

• It’s not about them; they are relatively ego-less. Whatever the profession, it’s not about proving knowledge, displaying expertise or being right; there is a genuine focus on whomever they are helping and on arriving at the best solutions.
• They do more asking than telling, and ask great questions. They are great listeners. They ask questions that cause us to think, reflect on our goals, diagnose a situation properly and often arrive at the best solutions ourselves.
• They’ve “been there and done that,” usually multiple times under many different conditions and circumstances. We saw an article not long ago describing the false confidence that golfers can acquire after a successful afternoon on the driving range or consecutive great rounds at their favorite course. Golf pros, on the other hand, develop a kind of wisdom that comes from hitting many more shots on many different courses, in all weather conditions and circumstances. Wisdom does not come from one year of the same experience ten years in a row.
• They display exceptional discernment and judgment. Discernment precedes good judgment; it is the capacity for keen observation, sensing subtleties, distinguishing true from false, questioning assumptions and evaluating alternatives.
• They see the bigger picture. Amateur chess players typically react to threats or opportunities on a section or two of the game board at a time, and think one or two moves ahead. The wise, like great chess players, can take in a whole picture and its implications all at once. Wise professionals and leaders consider the 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order and beyond likely consequences of decisions and actions. They consider an immediate task or object as well as its context.
• They see the “smaller picture” too. They see not only the bigger picture; they focus on details when appropriate, and distinguish important from unimportant details.
• They don’t always “go by the book.” Perhaps because of the above, they are as or more attuned to the value of exceptions than they are to rules. To paraphrase the jazz great Miles Davis, they “don’t play what’s there; they play what’s not there.” Wisdom comes into play when there isn’t a rule book, manual or “standard operating procedures” to go by.
• They are still learners. Have you noticed how the smartest (at least wisest) people don’t act that way? There’s a kind of humbleness that comes from a mindset of suspecting there is always another answer or way, and perhaps a better one. They have curious, questioning minds – a large part of why they are usually the wisest in a group.

What’s the big deal with wisdom, and why be concerned about it? For one thing, many of our wise human resources are heading out the door from attrition or retirement. “Knowledge management” was a hot topic a while back, and now “talent management” carries the day. What about “wisdom management?” What are we doing to acquire, cultivate and retain wisdom in our organizations?

Whether in-house or contracted, wise resources contribute value that is distinct from merely competent or even expert talent. Their depth of experience and personal characteristics bring a different dimension to problem solving. Instead of merely helping solve problems, they help us discern which problems are worth solving or how to avoid them in the first place. Competent, skilled or expert resources can answer our questions; wisdom helps us make sure that we are asking the right questions.

When facing a challenge in your organization, make sure there’s wisdom on your team. Sometimes an outside view helps – fresh eyes that have seen a lot and bring new perspectives, making sure that we’re asking the right questions and solving the right problems. We need to give more thought to the role of wisdom in our work and organizations – when we need it, how to get and grow it, how to leverage it and how to retain it.

Would others describe you as “wise?” What can you do to cultivate your own wisdom?

How can you cultivate, retain and leverage wisdom in your organization?

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions0". -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

About the authors of this Thought Leaders in Learning entry:

Al Watts is a veteran consultant and author of the book Navigating Integrity – Transforming Business As Usual Into Business At Its Best (Brio Books, 2010.) Al is the founder of inTEgro, Inc.

Lola Fredrickson is Chief Executive Officer of Fredrickson Communications.

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LMS User Experience Testing at the Roundtable for Learning Leaders

from Josh Welsh, Usability Analyst

on April 24, 2012

We discussed the usability of Learning Management Systems (LMS) at the April meeting of the Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders. As part of the discussion, I led a live demonstration of our usability testing process and reported on the results from sessions with two other testers that took place earlier.

The LMS we tested was a popular large-scale LMS and the member company that volunteered their LMS for testing has had this system implemented for a number of years. I don’t think specifically naming the LMS is of any benefit because the issues that we uncovered are certainly not unique to this LMS. What we found were some common usability issues that occur in a wide variety of systems.

This (admittedly brief) round of testing uncovered three issues where the LMS featured in our usability test could be improved:

• Search time - The time it took for the search to process was...extreme. Every tester who searched for a course experienced a wait of at least 45 to 60 seconds while the search was processed. Interestingly, as an outsider, I initially thought that the search had gone awry, but even the most novice tester had already learned to accept this pain point. Nevertheless, it was clear from the audience discussion at the Roundtable that speeding up the search would help tremendously with LMS usability in general.
• Extra clicks - We know that people do not like clicking any more than they have to. But as our usability lead, John Wooden, often points out, as long as someone has the “scent of information” (that is, they feel they are moving in the right direction), they don’t seem to mind clicking to get there.

  However, for the LMS that we tested, the process for launching the course required the user to click a button labeled “launch,” and then to click a link labeled, you guessed it, “launch”. All three testers remarked on this redundancy. As one tester put it, “If you ask me to launch again, I might say no!” This kind of extra click frustrates users because it feels like an inefficient use of time. We recommended linking the first launch directly to the course.

• Returning to a course after launching - In the LMS we tested, if a user stops in the middle of a course, closes the browser, and returns later, they need to find the course on a separate page of ongoing and recently-taken courses. Interestingly, the users who were more experienced with the LMS found this task more difficult than inexperienced users.

  Why? The experienced users were familiar with scrolling through the general list of courses, where they could launch a course they had enrolled in, but not yet started, by clicking the Launch button. They therefore expected to scroll through this same list to find a course they had started but not yet finished, by clicking a button labeled “Re-launch.” They did not realize they had to go to a separate page to find the course they had started and then click a link to resume the course.

  The lack of consistency in handling a course relaunch made this task especially difficult for them. We recommended adding a Re-launch or Resume button for courses that are in progress.

Although this was a small demonstration usability test with only three participants, we were able to uncover three significant issues needing improvement in the LMS in focus. The facilitated discussion that followed the demo test made it clear that usability is an issue with most learning management systems.

Even though an LMS is often purchased from a vendor, and therefore the purchasing company does not have direct control over all aspects of the LMS interface, usability tests can be well worthwhile. The results can be used to negotiate when renewing an LMS contract or, even better, to help evaluate an LMS before purchase. If changes can’t be made, identifying potential difficulties ahead of time can help shape documentation and rollout messages related to LMS deployment.

For more on the topic of LMS usability, see John Wooden’s article How Do We Improve the Learner Experience of LMS’s?

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Integrity and HRD:  Why HRD professionals should make it a priority

from Al Watts,

on March 13, 2012

Editor's Note:This entry is part of the Fredrickson Thought Leaders in Learning series. For this guest blogging series, we've invited well-known experts in a variety of fields to address leadership-level learning and development professionals with their thoughts on topics of their choosing. Our hope is to prompt discussion around an expansive range of ideas and concepts.

Most human resource development professionals associate integrity with ethics, define it as some variation of “just doing the right thing,” and believe that you can’t really train people to have integrity anyway. Besides, how does integrity really impact the bottom line?

Integrity in the context of ethics or morality is really only one of a standard dictionary’s definitions, though, and not even the first. Its first and second definitions are about being “complete,” “whole,” “unbroken” and “perfect” – concepts that have more to do with effectiveness than just ethics. Think of “product integrity,” “design integrity” or “supply chain integrity,” and the whole picture – including HRD’s role – becomes clearer.

What do product and design integrity look like for training professionals? “Form follows function,” so a first consideration is clarity of purpose.

We can translate purpose here to include the mission of our function or role, as well as things like the goal of an intervention or the learning objectives of a training program. We model integrity when our actions, products and services fit the intended purpose. Training modules display integrity of design when they fit together and as a whole accomplish learning objectives within whatever budget and other parameters we have. Integrity for trainers includes accountability for results; we know that implies more than just “smile sheet” evaluations.

The greater our experience and responsibility in HRD, organization development and broader HR roles, the broader or more “whole” our perspective on integrity needs to be. Big picture-wise, HR and HRD’s overall purpose is aligning, or integrating, the people domain with the business or purpose of their organization.

Integrity, or “form following function,” in that regard means that talent acquisition, organization design, performance management, development and other HR practices need to fit, or be aligned with the organization’s mission, values and strategy. From my experience both inside organizations and as a consultant for nearly thirty years, I know of fewer ways to stifle effectiveness and engagement more than disconnects between stated purpose or values and actual organization or leader practices. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying!”

Even though it’s only one aspect of integrity, HRD and HR professionals cannot overlook its ethics and morality dimensions. We certainly have enough examples of how illegal, immoral and unethical practices have derailed organizations and leaders – Penn State, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and Goldman Sachs to name just a few of the latest. We cannot sit by and assume that a combination of laws, regulations, risk management specialists and legal advisors will take care of all that.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed shortly after the Enron debacle, and was an attempt to legislate ethical corporate practices. Then came the 2008 economic meltdown, fanned by “creative accounting,” lack of transparency, blatant conflicts of interest and plain old greed. “Inside-out” approaches to creating ethical cultures are always more sustainable than attempts to legislate ethical behavior.

HR and HRD professionals can play a pivotal role crafting ethical cultures from the inside out by helping their organization navigate these dimensions:

• Identity – HR and HRD’s roles here can include facilitating formulation of organizations’ strategic direction and values, and driving understanding of organizational direction and values throughout the organization.

• Authenticity – HR and HRD play critical roles by helping assure that leadership and organizational practices are true to their organizations’ mission, values and strategy, and by helping create “truth-telling,” transparent cultures.

• Alignment – We play central roles here by assuring that hiring, performance management, pay, succession and human resource development practices align with our organizations’ mission, vision, values and strategies. We can also help our organization and its leaders develop adaptive, change management and innovation capabilities in order to stay aligned with evolving market requirements.

• Accountability – As a rule, what gets measured gets done. HR and HRD professionals can help assure that sufficient attention is paid to variables that significantly impact organizational effectiveness, worker engagement and risk management.

Perhaps the multiple ways that integrity impacts ethics, engagement and effectiveness account for Noel Tichy’s perspective is that “Integrity is the cornerstone of free enterprise, and every leader needs a clear teachable point of view on it.” Human resource and human resource development professionals will benefit by adopting that perspective and positioning integrity centrally in their own strategies.

About the author of this Thought Leaders in Learning entry: Al Watts is a veteran consultant and author of the book Navigating Integrity – Transforming Business As Usual Into Business At Its Best (Brio Books, 2010.) Al is the founder of inTEgro, Inc.

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Skip the Automated Readability Test – Do a Usability Test

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on February 27, 2012

Back in January it was reported that President Obama’s State of the Union address was written at an 8th grade reading level. In fact, a Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 found “the text of Obama's 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level. Obama also delivered the second lowest scoring address in 2011 (at an 8.1 grade level), and the sixth lowest in 2010 (at an 8.8 grade level).”

It makes sense for President Obama to focus on readability. He signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010, which requires the federal government “to write new publications, forms, and publicly distributed documents in a clear, concise and well organized manner that follows the best practices of plain writing.” I’m all for plain language and I applaud organizations that embrace it. (Kudos to Hennepin County in Minnesota for following the Plain Language law even though they don’t have to.) But I question the value of using automated tests to assess readability and I doubt the meaningfulness of the reading grade levels these tools spit out.

What automated tests don’t tell you

The Flesch-Kincaid test is a tool that many of us have used to calculate the reading grade level of text we’ve written or edited. But what do automated readability tests really tell us? What’s it mean when they say some piece of text is written at an 8th grade level? In truth, not much.

Automated readability tests are based on formulas and the formulas are based on elements that can be counted. The Gunning-Fog index, the SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) test, and the Flesch reading ease scale are all based on counting words per sentence and syllables per word. In addition, as Janice (Ginny) Redish has pointed out*, the assumption underlying readability formulas – “that any text for any reader for any purpose can be measured with the same formula” – is simply invalid. Redish notes that automated readability tests leave a lot of questions unanswered:

• Is the content a good match for the audience?
• Is the audience familiar with the words used?
• Is the document organized so that users can find what they are looking for?
• Does the document include headings? Are the headings useful and meaningful to the audience?
• Does the page layout help users find what they need?
• Are the sentences grammatical?
• Are the style and tone appropriate?

Needless to say, these questions are all very pertinent in assessing readability, but they don’t lend themselves to simple counts. And there are other substantial weaknesses, too:

• Automated readability tests don’t work well on web pages that are written to be scanned. These tests count sentence length from period to period. So if you have text on a web page that uses lots of bullet points that do not all end with periods (which is just fine in my book), this will be a problem for an automated test. For the same reason, text presented in a table causes a problem, too.
• Readability tests don’t tell you how to make your text more readable. And in the act of trying to get a better readability score or lower reading grade level, according to the formula, you could end up creating new problems that render your text less readable. (I could eliminate the five-syllable word “readability” from this text and get a lower reading grade, but that wouldn’t be helpful.)

Why usability testing is better

The simple answer is that it provides a much more comprehensive and accurate gauge of how your users/readers perceive your text. I’ll give you an example.

A while back, I subjected some text that is sent to applicants for Minnesota unemployment benefits to the Flesch-Kincaid test to find out the reading grade level. It was high, too high. One of the reasons for this was the common use of such four-syllable words as “Minnesota” and “unemployment,” and the three-syllable word “applicant.” But would typical applicants struggle with these words? No. How do we know this? Because we did usability testing with actual applicants. A two-syllable word, “appeal,” caused more difficulty than the longer words that would be flagged in an automated test. But what testers struggled with more than any particular word was the order of ideas. The correspondence followed a general-to-specific structure, beginning with background and reference to a Minnesota statute, before going on to explain the specific determination of the applicant’s eligibility for unemployment benefits. What our testers told us was that they wanted to see this order reversed: start with what’s specific to the recipient – their eligibility – and then go on to the general and background information. We suspected this would be the case going into the tests, but it was good to have it confirmed by actual applicants. In any case, no automated readability test could have helped either identify or solve this problem.

Similarly, the biggest issue with another piece of correspondence was tone. Automated readability tests will not tell you anything about that either.

A usability test with a special focus on readability will tell you much, much more about how actual readers perceive your text than the narrow focus on syllables and word count in an automated test. They are quick, easy, and free, and they have the allure of quantitative data. But you get what you pay for.

What about that 8th grade reading level?

It’s interesting that President Kennedy had the highest average reading grade level in his State of the Union addresses: 13.2. But JFK understood the power of rhetoric pretty well, and I’ll bet that despite the high reading grade level, some of his words stick with you.

*"Readability Formulas Have Even More Limitations Than Klare Discusses," ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, August 2000/ Vol. 24, No.3.

6 comments

Articulate vs. Captivate Part 4:  And the winner is. . .

from Tony Tao, Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer

on February 03, 2012

Author’s Note: This blog entry is part of a series I started to explore two of today’s most popular eLearning rapid development tools: Articulate Studio and Adobe Captivate. Here is a link to an article that contains the whole Articulate vs. Captivate series.

In the previous blog entries, we have explored the major features of Articulate and Captivate, and discussed the strengths and limitations of each tool. Of course, there really isn't a winner. As I wrote at the beginning of this series, the only answer to the question “Which is better?” is “It depends.” The tools have different strengths and the best fit depends on your needs.

And for larger organizations or those with more complex or varied learning needs, the answer to the question “Which should I buy?” is often “Both.”

I've created a summary chart that I think clearly highlights the strengths of the two tools. Of course, some of these items can’t be reduced to a simple yes-or-no answer, so in some cases this chart simply reflects my opinion.

In 2012, we will see new players joining the rapid eLearning tool game. For example, Articulate Storyline and ZebraZapps are already attracting a lot of attention. There is also the possibility of new releases of Articulate Studio, Adobe Captivate, and SmartBuilder.

One of the interesting trends that we have noticed is the rise of mobile learning, and how the rapid eLearning tools are quickly incorporating functionality that gives them the potential to create mLearning content. For example, most of the new tools can publish your project as HTML 5 or in the mp4 video format. This gives eLearning developers an easier path to get a course running on Apple mobile devices such as the iPad.

I expect to see more projects developed with these new tools in 2012 and I will be using them myself for Fredrickson's Learning business. As always, I'm glad to share my thoughts and findings with you and I appreciate your comments on these blog entries.