Taking a More User-Led Approach to Learning

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 | Instructional Design / E-Learning, Technical Communication

I’ve been thinking about user-led learning lately. I have a set of tutorials that we refer to as “tours.” I imagine this term was chosen because the object is to give new users an overview of how to use the various parts of the application to accomplish the main task.

Some Background

Let me give you a bit of history on these tours. Before I was assigned to maintain the project’s documentation, these tours were built as PowerPoint presentations and run through a Breeze engine to create a Flash presentation. (I don’t know if Breeze in that form exists anymore.) Some pages had short videos created in RoboDemo. The presentations contained links to move forward and backward, so the intention was for the user to go from start to finish, similar to taking a tour in a museum: You begin in one place and move through a linear experience.

When I upgraded to the version of Breeze that came out after I took on these files, I found that somehow, multiple videos could play simultaneously. I could start a video on one page, then go to the next page and start that video. I would hear additional mouse clicks. If I went back to the previous page, that video would still be running.

Messy.

I manually moved the content into a new set of HTML pages because I knew that one page loads at a time, so it would be impossible for multiple videos to be running at once. I took the opportunity to learn CSS so I could lay out the pages that way.

The Years Passed By . . .

That was about three years ago. We didn’t really have the budget or the time for me to do anything further except make small updates—until now. So in the meantime, I tried not to think much about what may not be working well as far as the users’ learning went.

The product manager did say that when he would get phone calls and direct the caller to the tutorials, they didn’t call him back. So they must have found useful information. What could be problematic about the tours?

The Problem with the Museum Tour Approach

Now that I have some time to analyze the effectiveness of these tours, I’ve realized that the kind of hand-holding we’re providing may not be the best approach. We do have users with computer and Web experience across the spectrum. But it’s argued that learners absorb more information when they discover it on their own than when they’re lectured at.

The current approach is essentially a lecture. In one of the early sections of the tours, users are shown the parts of the interface. But it gets pretty granular, each page containing a screenshot that in turn contains a caption describing one of the options or lists. The user has to click Next Page for each one. It seems fairly tedious.

I talked about this (and reviewed my idea, discussed below) with the user education team. As Paul pointed out, people don’t access information in a linear way on the Web. The Internet is all about multiple-point access to information.

The Self-Guided Tour

I got the idea to use Captivate to create screenshots with rollover captions and embed them in the tour pages. This way, the user can read about the parts of the screen that he has questions about rather than being almost forced to read about all of them. The hope is that this kind of self-led learning will be more beneficial and long-lasting.

Allowing room for discovery in this way also allows me to condense the information into fewer pages. In three or four pages, I can provide the same amount of information that currently takes a dozen clicks to move through.

Of course, the downfall of this is that users may not get all the information they need. If I leave them to discover, they may move on through without stopping to ask questions and find the answers. Or they may get a few answers but not take the time to get others. But that’s the risk.

Next Steps

First, I need to make sure I have a good proof of concept and compelling argument for making these changes. Then I’ll run this idea past the project manager and product manager and get buy-in for changing the approach and some of the content of the tours. But the product manager was hired the same day I was, so the planning and creation of the tutorials pre-dates him; I don’t think he’s married to the current construction. I believe the probability is good that I’ll be making the improvements I’ve discussed and generally making the content more effective.

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