Smart Learning with your content and meeting employees where they are
Project
SmartyPal is a Philadelphia-based learning technology start-up focused on using a game-based approach to improving corporate learning and development (L&D). The technology allows L&D professionals to create fun learning games tailored to their L&D content which engages employees, increases “contact time” with educational material, and improves the effectiveness of the time spent learning. This technology is intertwined with robust data collection and analytics capabilities which allow our system to make intelligent content recommendations and provide important insights to L&D professionals that document their return on investments in learning.
My Role
As the lead UX designer, I participated in the company's recent expansion to corporate L&D field and collaborated with product managers, engineers and CEO to conduct user research, develop concept and UI design. I defined the product with company leaders. I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision, design principles and content strategy. This helped to evangelise ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making. I stopped working at the project after the first beta round as of July 2017.
Involvement
User Research
Wireframes
Journey mapping
User personas
Front-end development
Cross-team collaboration
Competitive analysis
Usability testing
Work Type
Work Project
Date
2017
The Challenge
“In times of change learners inherit the Earth while the learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
- Eric Hoffer
Today, and for the foreseeable future, companies operate in an environment that demands constant innovation which requires speed to keep pace, flexible business models, and engaged employees.
Millennials representation in the workforce (estimated to take 75% of total population of workforce), digital technology, and the changing employee / employer paradigm is forcing companies re-think their greatest asset - PEOPLE.
Current L&D models in companies have the problems as follows:
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Passive: The training process is either boring or passive for the new employees and the interns
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Irrelevant: Much of the L&D process is irrelevant to the actual jobs, making people unfocused and/or delivered untimely with training materials old enough to have any realistic uses
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One Size Fits All: The current training has same process for all the people, which might work for some but neglect the others
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Training = Performance: Currently training lacks the ability to consistently grow the employees and increase the performances over time
To maintain success, organizations need to be as nimble as the changing landscape, which is being accelerated by technology. In this landscape, preparing workers to fulfill the needs of their roles has become less like building a stone house that will stand for 100 years and more like building a motorhome, which can be easily moved and modified to meet the needs of the future environment. Successfully meeting this challenge requires a paradigm shift in employee learning and development. The new paradigm must be one in which employees treat learning as an integrated, fun, and enriching part of their job and must help companies get a larger return-on-investment from their learning and development spend.
The Discovery
We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase.
Some questions we asked are as follows:
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Is L&D a big focus at your organization?
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When is L&D delivered?
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How is L&D delivered?
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Do you and your colleagues find the L&D useful and relevant?
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How could this experience be improved?
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What providers, tools, processes are used to deliver L&D?
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Can you share with us L&D materials, procedures, etc?
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Are there other (relevant) pain points (and solutions) you experience in your day-to-day?
These are the key insights that defined the launch version of the product:
The Vision
We are focused on learning and development for businesses with a large number of employees and a focus for training and developing them in a world where the half-life of a learned skill is 4.5 years. The proliferation of technology is outpacing employees skill sets, affecting companies ability to compete. One of our goals in participating in this event is to pitch to a wide variety of industries, some of which we have not yet directly explored, and discover whether there are specific needs within any of these industry segments that we should be aware of for product development and marketing purposes. Furthermore, our goal is to identify objective pain points for our target market where SmartyPal can demonstrate measurable outcomes.
RAMP-UP
EMPLOYEES
effective onboarding helps employees cteate impact faster
REDUCE SURVEY
FATIGUE
Game-based assessments generate valuable insights painlessly
Prep-for and reinforce in-person and web-based training programs
MAXIMIZE TRAINING EFFECTIVENESS
Persona
Based on the preliminary research, we developed a persona. His name is Travis that represents the generation of millennials who as we shared earlier make up 1 in 3 employees in the US workforce on their way to representing 75% of the workforce in only 8 short years!
Travis Jones
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Be a top customer service representative
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Help my team members be productive
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Be competitive for raises during review
Goals
Personal Traits
Behaviors
Performance
Birth Date: 09/09/1993
Employee Since: 06/01/2016
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Extrovert: He enjoys being around with other people
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Empathetic: He cares about his employees well-being and their frustration
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Optimistic: He tends to look at things in a more positive ways and expect good things to happen
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He also like his peers as they climb through company ranks
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Like many of his generation Travis didn’t necessarily “hit the ground running” coming out of undergrad. Can we blame him? Global competitiveness and the speed of technology growth requires a continuous evolving and growing employee.
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As a Customer Service Rep Travis will polish his skill set to perform at a high level in his current role while developing skills for his longer term growth and advancement.
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Then there is the whole dynamic of an employee that has his own ambitions, curiosity interests, and ultimately has preferences for when, how, and what learning content he wants to consume versus what the company needs to consume.
Team Median
Service Calls
Goals
Solutions
SmartyPal’s learning and development software drives measurable business outcomes with its Smart Games Library and Adaptive Learning Algorithms. Smart Games are short, fun learning games that gather data to inform personalized content recommendations and insights. They are based in learning science and the reality of learning and development in the modern workplace; SmartyPal delivers bite-sized content that can fit any schedule, spaces it over time using adaptive learning algorithms that maximize knowledge retention, and packages the content in games that provide a fun and active learning experience with immediate performance feedback.
Game-based Learning
There is clear evidence that game based thinking and gamification can
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be applied to most learning needs
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offer instant feedback
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appeal to the millennial workforce
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offer a learning environment when used in tandem with sound scientific principles can prompt behavioral change
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thus positively impact the performance and bottom line of the organization
On one end of the continuum is Structural Gamification, which is purely external incentives (often referred to as extrinsic motivation) for completing a quiz, for example. These involve elements like points and badges to provide external stimuli to keep the learner motivated and engaged.
On the other hand, there is Content Gamification, which is about altering or designing the course itself to be more game like. This time, the course has additional game mechanics such as levels or quests to complete, for example. You may stumble upon an Easter egg, some unexpected surprise that makes you want to explore more, that presents you with more quiz material, for example. So here the content needs to be altered to create a balance of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in driving learning and engagement.
Zsolt Olah, "Engage the WORL&D! "
Smart Games can be used to support L&D efforts, including:
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improving knowledge retention for existing L&D materials and courses
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reducing survey fatigue while still generating valuable insights for decision-making by using stealth and game-based surveys and assessments
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making on-boarding faster and more effective by immersing new employees earlier
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keeping them happier, and recommending engagement with the most relevant materials
Therefore, three small games were designed to meet the objectives. The first, Fliq, is a ball flicked towards the correct answer block. The second, QuizPop, is to let user to pop bubbles at the correct answer and the third, Puzzle, is a old school dungeon game that asks the employees to free the knight.
Access Anywhere
Smart Games are easy to setup, use with existing L&D content, and deploy across all screens. They are designed to drive fun interaction with your L&D content and automatically manage new content recommendations. They create a superior learning experience for employees while saving manager’s the hassle of curating good recommendations or having to convince employees to keep up with their training.
Question Recommendations
The Adaptive Learning Engine serves learners relevant content via SmartGames, provides them immediate feedback, adjusts question difficulty based on performance and produces insights for employees and managers. Hence, on the manager side application, the wireframes are designed to allow them flexibly change question library in the games.
A Personalized Learning Path (PLP) informed by the data gathered through the Smart Games - The content within the Smart Games is personalized to the employee in two ways: a) each employee sees questions/tasks that help them work on their growth areas and b) based on performance within the games, each employee sees recommendations for other content (videos, in-person training, internal documents et c) most relevant to them.
Question Management System
Sample question bank
Data-driven Adaptive Learning Systems
Every time a user is shown a question, we track:
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Did the user interact with the question? attempt it? complete it? get it right?
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Interaction time
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Number of attempts, hints (if any)
Since questions are associated with topics, we track for every user & for every topic:
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Questions seen: For each, last_outcome and timestamp
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Cumulative scores and % ratios:
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How many times a question on this topic has been shown to user
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How many times a question on this topic has been attempted by user
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How many times a question on this topic has been correctly answered by user…
ENGAGEMENT DATA
play frequency
session length
# of questions
topics engaged
PROFILE DATA
name
age
grade
etc.
QUALITATIVE USER RESPONSES
Possible interactions for future games:
Voice recording
Text input
Picture/video taken by user
ASSESSMENT DATA
items seen
attempts
correct attempts
With the help of the data, it can then be used to help managers make decisions on wether the employees are performing well or not and track the skills of them. They can also update the quality of the content if current questions do not meet the needs for job performance. As for employees, the adaptive learning system can change difficulty of the questions based on their performances on the games and will recommend relevant courses/games for them to further develop their skills.
REST APIs are used to access data and adaptive recommendations
The two product streams allow both the employees and more importantly, managers/HRs to view the data. Hence, we designed the wireframes to show performances and engagement data on server side and number of correct answers on the client side.
Information Architecture
I designed the flow based on the idea of flexible check performance on manger/HR side and can allow employees to practice easily as well. If an employee has difficulty in the training process, then manager can change training materials based on the needs of that person without changing materials for other people.
Interactive Prototypes
Usability Testing
After designing the prototypes, we make a questionnaire to test out the product both for the games and the basic workflow.
