The client we were helping has training for anyone interested in making the most of their advertising platform, marketing or analytics tools, etc. These are widely available pieces of training for all, but it is due for an update.
The same is also used to train internal sales and marketing staff and is not popular with the learners and course designers on this platform compared to some of the newer offerings.
The search and ads business leader were looking to prevent learners from becoming "completionists". This was considered a problem as it would lead to their products and services not being consistently implemented by partners and newly recruited internal sales and marketing staff.
They had tried avenues that gamified the experience for internal users but decided to avoid it because it reinforced the "completionist" behaviours mentioned above. Their research pointed them towards two avenues they had not previously explored: social learning and personalized learning experiences powered by ML.
To solve this problem, the client's learning and development team approached us.
How can social learning be applied in the context of designing a user experience for online learning?
What would a social learning experience look like for learners?
A collection of things that I took charge of at various stages during the project.
Finding the right principles to guide social learning design thinking
Words have power. As designers, the principles we establish at the very beginning become powerful spells that shape our work. On some rare occasions, we get to work on deeply rooted subjects. This lets us dig deeper into research and academia to reveal something grounded and capable of anchoring any design. An evolutionary ingredient.
One of those critical ingredients is learning. How we learn is a part of our evolution. And the academic world has contributed a large amount of research in this area. When we began work on researching social learning, it quickly became apparent that we had to be the ones to define it. There can be many different interpretations of social learning; some are more contemporary, and others are more academic. An alignment is needed.
When most of us hear the term Social Learning, it elicits the modern manifestation of social. Automatically the mind thinks "Social Media" plus "Online learning". To find our principles and guide our research and ideation, leveraging this definition leads us down the path of Yu-Kai Chou's 'Octalysis' framework used by many to design communities and shared experiences. Which is a reliable start.
Using a broad brush like Octalysis to paint on the nuanced canvas of the mind and how it learns would have led us to generalize some things. Principles like "competition" and "scarcity" are great motivators and are proven to work. But only as far as getting people to take action.
Authentic learning and mastery of a topic require more sustainable layers of motivation. Shared spaces of creativity can open the mind to greater possibilities. A museum, a brainstorming workshop, a room filled with friends and Lego, a physics symposium, a busy and competitive night market, or a VR simulation. They all have one thing in common. They put a learner’s self into perspective while allowing for riffs, jams, fun, mischief, critique, reflection and creativity. These interactions create a sub-culture, which have a different impact on a learner’s relationship to the platform and other learners.
In 1977, Albert Bandura and his team discovered a better way to articulate what makes those scenarios above much more conducive to learning. But they were designed for shaping classroom environments and the like. So I synthesized these principles for providing the team with a framework to craft digital experiences to guide the design.
After establishing a framework, we wanted to further express how other platforms used Social Learning drivers to differentiate and create more engaging lessons for their users. Here is an excerpt of the competitor analysis for which I established a format that the team could contribute to and expand.
The study was designed to showcase examples from other platforms where social learning was at play. It was anchored back to the social learning principles.
With robust principles, it was possible to use them to create the following how-might-we statements, which led to several great ideas we could develop using sketches.
With the help of our visual designers and UX designer, we gave life to some of the most popular ideas. Below is a wireframe I worked on.
The above wireframe shows how a learner’s profile is tailored to showcase many different learning achievements, including contributions to the community. And the user who wants to accomplish similar things can observe someone’s learning journey, supplement their achievements to their own learning plan or simply reach out.
A great mix of designers, analysts and some folks from the learning and development consulting at Deloitte formed this team.
The research allowed us to demystify social learning and suggest a framework for applying it. We also created prototypes of how some of the principles could be used in future versions of their learning platform.
