eLearning designer Steven Loomis and WBT Systems Head of Design and UX, James Sheil, look at emerging technologies, such as performance support applications, which may impact on the design of future eLearning solutions.
If you are new to designing for mobile and wearable performance support applications, adopting a holistic perspective can help guide your activities. A holistic perspective will focus on the user experience and help you see what a user will try to accomplish with your tool. Considering and using holistic guidelines can help you answer the fundamental “Can I” versus “Should I” design dilemmas.
As eLearning designers, our years of experience, practice and study enables many of us to look at projects and know which rules to follow or break. The growing prevalence of the Experience API, the Internet of Things (IOT); and mobile and wearable devices may soon challenge this confidence. We may soon be required to design and create performance support applications to support these technologies, rather than relying on our traditional eLearning solutions.
This may seem daunting as designing apps for wearables and other mobile devices is probably a new area for many of us. Don’t let a lack of experience, practice, or study in these emerging areas get you down. You can succeed in these environments by adopting a holistic perspective to your design decisions.
By approaching your design from a holistic perspective, i.e. the whole users experience with your product, you can gain some key insights into what you should do as opposed to what you can do. Below are some holistic principles that can provide this direction and guidance.
We’ve all experienced the family, couple, or group disengaged from each other as their mobile devices are out and in use. Even when alone, we all too often tend to disengage ourselves from our immediate environments by busily documenting and sharing our experiences for online consumption rather than remaining “present” in our environments. How many experiences are diluted because participants are only partially present or engaged? Our performance tools and apps will need to consider this dilemma as they disengage our users from their immediate environments. This represents a problem as they will interrupt interactions and lead to multitasking. These weak experiences will not create satisfaction or high outputs from our users.
Keeping your users engaged and in their present activities should be a key focus of your apps.
Ways to do this include:
Recommendation engines are used to facilitate content distribution. These engines look at user preferences as well as histories to identify content that users might want or need. As organizations get better at connecting data profiles, our performance apps will employ these tools to identify gaps in performance and their associated learning opportunities.
A problem Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, and others continue to face with their recommendation engines is diversity. In this regard, using simple algorithms or relying on Subject Matter Expert (SME) curation can create filter bubbles where users only see/access a narrow set of content options. In business this could polarize environments and limit ideas. To innovate and form deep understanding, users have to be exposed to divergent thoughts, ideas, and voices.
If your learning solutions are providing content in the form of articles, videos, and other media to address learning gaps, you need to challenge your users by giving them different viewpoints, levels of content and types of content. Exposing users to a variety of sources should be a key focus.
Ways to do this include:
Performance support tools like job-aids, help files, and wizards are designed to bypass the learning function. Their use is appealing as they allow users to perform their primary tasks without having to internalize a large amount of information.
This e-memory has great potential in making our employees efficient and productive; however, problems occur with these tools when true expertise is needed. With their use, deviations or new variables can throw off a user’s outcome. In addition when time is critical, searching for and using a performance tool may not be appropriate.
With apps and devices, a goal of our performance tools should be to move users toward mastery. To do this, your apps will require more than just alerts, notifications and aggregation. Moving your users toward mastery will require practice, repetition, and feedback.
Ways to incorporate these activities include:
Increasingly our expectation of technology is that it is attentive to our needs and wants. Technology needs to be responsive to what we are doing and where we are at. In this regard, an app on a device is no longer a user’s final destination or experience with that app data.
Users may start a search on a smartphone and then complete a purchase of that item on a laptop or tablet. In this multi-screen world, apps work in conjunction with each other across devices. Expectations are that the data within these apps will seamlessly follow each user. Part of this transition is updating app interfaces to support the limitations of certain device types (watch, phone, tablet, and laptop) or to highlight specific advantages of certain device types.
For example, a complex UI can’t easily be created for an app on a smart watch, but that app can serve to collect relevant data that may be used by a different device. At a later point in time, a tablet or laptop might be used to render that data in a format that is attentive to that user’s goals for that moment.
Your users will often use multiple devices to accomplish their goals and your performance apps should support this need.
Ways to do this include:
Data will be a critical component of your performance support applications—collecting, organizing and acting on this data will drive your apps. As such, organizations should focus on protecting user data as well as using it ethically.
If this fails to happen, users may not embrace your applications or your organization may be open to legal disputes. Ways to make security a focus include:
A holistic perspective can help you take a bigger look at the user experience. This 10,000 foot view can help you see what a user will try to accomplish with your tool.
Rather than adding a plethora of new features and functions within your apps just because you can, a holistic approach will keep you focused on what your users really care about.
The ultimate success of your performance support tools will depend on their ability to meet your unique performance problems. As you analyze these problems, you may find the need to place greater emphasis on particular holistic values covered in this article, e.g. Security vs. Reflection. Regardless of whichever values you choose to focus on, considering and using holistic guidelines can help you answer the fundamental Can I versus Should I design dilemmas.