ID in the Wild: Instructional Video with Apple

Last modified on 2011-10-16 22:56:21 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In this ongoing series, I’m posting examples of instructional design and related processes from around the web (or beyond).

I am an instructional designer and I hate instructional video. Including screencasts. Well, I hate a lot of it. As a learner, I like to be able to jump right to what I want. Most instructional video makes it difficult to do that, and a lot of it is too long and just boring. (Whether it’s their intention or not, I think Screenr and Jing/Screencast.com are doing our industry a big favor by limiting their screencasts to 5 minutes, but many videos should be shorter.)

Enter Apple. Now, I know what you’re going to say. Apple is in the business of selling, not instructing. Apple’s products are so simple to use, they barely even require any instruction; your job is tougher. Both of those things are true.

To the first protest, I would counter that instruction should almost always have some aspect of motivation — of “selling” a process, procedure, policy, or belief. (That’s the reason I think Apple’s technique is worth mentioning, even though lauding Apple for design is slightly easier than shooting fish in a barrel.) To the second, I’d say that some things are beyond your control. If you’re not lucky enough to be demonstrating easy-to-use products, at least make the demonstration clear and as good-looking as you can. Don’t give your learners stumbling blocks from the starting line.

Here are a few other things I like about Apple’s instructional videos (for example, the Guided Tours for the iPad 2):

• They jump right into the action. I’ve already clicked a link called iMovie and there’s a title on the page or the opening frame; I don’t need to hear “Today we’re going to learn about iMovie” at the beginning. Once in, every second counts. Good editing means there’s no waiting and no chance to tune out.
• They have high production values. This isn’t always something we have the budget for, but it also isn’t always necessary. Great audio is much more worth the investment than great video.
• They have music. It’s a little shocking how much music affects the mood of a video. Consider buying some good music, even if just stock, even if just a few seconds for the opening and closing.
• If there’s no benefit to using video, they don’t use video, even though they clearly have plenty of resources to do so. Lots of screencasts and videos I’ve seen don’t really need to exist… Clear instructions, well illustrated with pictures or screen shots, would do just as well in less time using less bandwidth.

ID in the Wild: Instructional Video — and More — with Rouxbe

Last modified on 2011-10-16 22:56:01 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

In this ongoing series, I’m posting examples of instructional design and related processes from around the web (or beyond).

You may never have heard of the website Rouxbe(pronounced Ruby, but with the cooking pun)… Not being particularly interested in cooking, I hadn’t seen it until my husband brought it to my attention. It’s an online cooking school produced in partnership with the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver and it utilizes video to teach people the basics of cooking.

Here’s what I love about the videos:

• They’re short, focused, and extremely practical.
• When they explain something that can’t be easily seen, like the molecules in a metal pan moving around in response to increased heat, they find a clever way to demonstrate it (like putting peppercorns in the pan to show motion).
• The navigation makes it super-easy to jump around… yay for demanding learners like me!

ID in the Wild: Performance Support with Google

Last modified on 2011-10-16 22:55:44 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In this ongoing series, I’m posting examples of instructional design and related processes from around the web (or beyond).

Some time ago, I reconnected with an old friend via Facebook. Of all of the very smart, geeky, computer-loving people I went to school with, his mind was probably the most engineer-like. When he found out what I do for a living, he expressed some negative opinions about how most elearning is designed and built. He said elearning designers could take some lessons from how Google does instruction.

Google has a reputation for being an engineer’s engineering company, so it’s hardly a surprise that their design appeals to my friend. I find Google’s style very instructive for designing for engineers, but I also think it’s just a good all-around lesson in performance support. Here’s an example:

Over the last few years I’ve set up Google Apps for several organizations. Google takes new admins through a setup wizard, and while I’m not ordinarily a fan of “wizards”, they’re much more helpful than traditional elearning when you’re doing something you do rarely or will only do once.

Over time, the setup wizard has gotten prettier and has added niceties like instructional videos, but it has kept what I like in the basic documentation:

• Instructions are clear and to the point.
• When a link to another help file is appropriate, it’s there.
• It’s interactive, but not so that you stay “engaged”. The interactivity is designed to give you only the information you need, only when you need it.

I’ve taken a few screen shots to illustrate this last point. Click any image to see it full-sized.

Progress through the wizard is clearly marked; it even remembers your place if you close your browser and come back later. If you skip an essential step, it gives you a clear warning.

When there are multiple options in the process, it lets you decide which set of instructions to see rather than presenting them all. This makes the process feel simpler and faster.

When there is more than one way to complete a process, the alternate instructions are hidden, but clearly accessible.

What do you think about Google Apps’ performance support? Who else does this well?

ID in the Wild: Community Management with Articulate

Last modified on 2011-10-16 22:55:17 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

In this ongoing series, I’m posting examples of instructional design and related processes from around the web (or beyond).

As organizations start focusing more on social learning, I see more instructional designer roles that include community management. So I thought I’d highlight a few things about a very active and successful community in our field: the community of Articulate users.

First, no one can deny that they have rock star community managers; Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid E-Learning Blog has over 80,000 subscribers and his and Dave Anderson’s demos at conferences pack the aisles. But the community — online and offline — is much more.

I think Articulate has embraced that people are good and that they want to help others, and building on that, they’ve created an easy-to-use place for people to share their issues and help each other… including sharing files (something that other communities have typically shied away from). They’re encouraging expansion of their tools through the developer’s forums. They have several staff members who actively engage with the community — including executives from time to time. Even the design of the community landing page reflects their focus on authenticity and engagement with community members:

And the result is that they have a small army of designers and developers helping each other troubleshoot, learn, and improve each other’s elearning… not to mention talking up new products. Nancy Duarte writes in Resonate that your audience members are the heroes of your story, because they will become the champions of your idea. Articulate has applied that same concept to community management.

What do you think? What do you like or dislike? Who else’s community management skills do you admire?

ID in the Wild: Community Building with Kelly Meeker of OpenSesame

Last modified on 2011-10-17 19:03:29 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

In this ongoing series, I’m posting examples of instructional design and related processes from around the web (or beyond).

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Kelly Meeker, OpenSesame’s community manager, about her job. If you’re not familiar with OpenSesame, it’s a marketplace for elearning. Kind of like the Apple app store. Except for elearning.

~

OpenSesame lauched at DevLearn 2010 and when I heard about it, my first thought was, “That’s a business model that depends on huge community awareness and involvement; you can’t get the purchasers without the providers and you can’t get the providers without the purchasers.” Is that a challenge, and if so, how has it influenced your approach to community management?

You have correctly nailed the big challenge for us, which is that we have two major audiences and we have to develop both at the same time… we need a strong and lively community of sellers who are adding awesome elearning courses to the marketplace in order to have customers who are interested in talking to us, and obviously we need to have some customers in order for content developers to add their content to the site. So that is a big challenge and something we’ve been aware of from the beginning.

We started out in terms of our community building approach by thinking about where people are hanging out and how we could take part in that community in an authentic and helpful way. It’s always been our objective in all of our community building to be helpful and useful and honest and never behave in a salesman-like way. That’s our #1 objective: to be a member of the community.

That’s our wide approach, and on a more tactical level, we’ve done a lot of research on where people are in the physical world and where they’re hanging out in terms of conferences people are engaged in and what we can do to be fun and take part in those conversations. And then where people are hanging out in the virtual world, social media conversations are a great place for us to engage, and we’ve made a lot of great connections in both the buyer and seller communities, both online and off.

It’s really funny that you mentioned that authentic interaction, because one of the first exchanges I ever had with you on Twitter, you said to me, “HAVE YOU NO SOUL?” I thought it was really funny that someone would say that who was a marketer and didn’t know me, because you were interacting in such a down-to-earth way. Has that ever been a bad thing; has it ever come back to bite you?

I honestly don’t think it’s ever bitten us back… I think people appreciate being treated as humans beings and having a conversation from one actual person to another. I think most people who I talk to on Twitter on a regular basis know that I’m Kelly – that the person who’s tweeting from @OpenSesameNow is Kelly and she writes a blog and you might have met her at a conference or a meetup. And that’s how I want to interact on a personal level on Twitter… I don’t want to be just the voice of a brand; that doesn’t appeal to me and most people don’t want to talk to an anonymous company name; they want to talk to someone who has something to say of interest.

I think you caught me at my very sassiest, though; because it’s hard to read tone, I normally try to stay away from anything that might be even marginally offensive. I’m normally pretty sarcasm-free. You see conversations that go wrong in social media all the time just because someone doesn’t understand that somebody else is joking. So normally my rules are: No politics, no sports teams, no religion, and try to keep sarcasm at a minimum.

Well, I think at the time, Brian [Dusablon] and I were already having a pretty playful Twitter conversation, so it was probably a safe bet, but those are probably smart rules anyway! So you mentioned your meetups… I know you’re on Twitter pretty much 24×7 as far as I can tell…

(Laughing) It’s on my iPhone!

..and then you guys have the meetups in Portland and you’re at a lot of conferences. Where else are you engaging people that you think has been a good payoff?

Let’s see… the conferences have been great in general. I think you’ve seen… we do our hoody game where we give away a bunch of OpenSesame hoodies and use them to play a game in which people can win iPads and iPods and stuff…

(Laughing) Hmm, I think I’m familiar with it…

Yeah, I was about to say… We’ve given away about 5000 hoodies in the last year and that’s been one of the really fun and successful things, and it’s just so great to meet people in person and not just engage on Twitter, as much as I enjoy Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and Quora and all the other communities I’m in. And we have been organizing the regular monthly Portland-based elearning meetups and we’ve also been trying to do some on-the-road meetups when we’re going to conferences. We had a great thing at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Orlando during ASTD ICE and Dawn Mahoney and Shannon Tipton came and we hung out for a couple of hours and it was really fun. These are people I talk to on Twitter a lot, and it was fun to find out that we really enjoyed each other’s company in person, as well. It’s kind of a treat to meet people in person.

So, this series is all about highlighting great things that people are doing in instructional design and related topics, and not only do I like some of the things that you’re doing, you mentioned in a comment on a previous post some of the people who have influenced you. Would you like to expand on that?

Oh, sure! I had mentioned Aaron Silvers because from a community management perspective, he’s so great at listening to all of the conversations that are happening in a wide variety of different areas and participating and referring people to other sources and answers; he always seems to know what link to send… it’s just a magical skill of his and I’ve benefitted incredibly in terms of creating my own reading list and getting up to speed on technical stuff.

I also met him in person at TechKnowledge in San Jose in February and he very graciously introduced me to a lot of people who were there. So from an in-person community management perspective, he introduced me around and helped me feel at home, which was great because a lot of people there already had strong ties. He does an amazing job for ADL, introducing people to what the SCORM standard is in a human way, and not just in a here’s-some-technical-documentation-scary-manual way; he really helps people find the answers they need in a targeted way, which is one of the most important roles a community manager can fill when they’re advocating for an organization or product. He’s like the Godfather.

That’s… so very true and I’m pretty sure he’s going to love that! Why don’t you wrap us up by giving your top tips for community building?

The first thing I tell people when they ask for advice on this is to be yourself and not be afraid or feel limited by speaking for a brand or organization or company. People want to talk to another human being and not a disembodied marketing bot. So don’t be afraid to say things that reveal that you have a personality, other than just speaking for your organization.

The second thing is that it’s fine if you have a message to get out there, but it’s really important to help other people get their questions answered and get the help they need and connect them with other people. I always tell people who are wondering how to get involved in social media… a good rule of thumb for me is that at least 50% of my communication should be a reply or an answer or a helpful something-or-another… not that I’m counting all my tweets to see if they abide by a formula, but it’s a good reminder for me that people don’t just want to hear me pumping my own blog posts or whatever out into the world. They also want me to listen to what they’re saying and respond. So to me, the 50/50 rule is just a helpful thing to make sure I’m listening.

The third thing is that people love to be asked for their feedback. We’re a new company with new products and we want feedback, so I am always blatant about asking for it. We’re rolling out a new website design soon, so we’ve asked people on Twitter what they think of mockups. I think people want to help and they appreciate that you care what they think.

Kelly will be at DevLearn 2011 (in person!) with the OpenSesame crew. Be sure to stop by and say Hi to them and play the hoody game. Also, check out their new website. They totally put a bird on it.