Storyline 360 Project: Workplace Email
A slide from the Workplace Email Project
Project Overview
This portfolio sample was self-sponsored. For the purposes of planning and development, I borrowed from my past experiences creating training for a department at the State of Oregon. The project was created with this department in mind.
Model
I employed the ADDIE model for this project.
Analysis
My analysis focused on client needs, audience, desired outcomes, learning constraints, delivery, pedagogy, and timeline.
Client Needs
The client wants workplace communication, especially email to improve. Some problems:
Too many follow-up meetings, emails, messages, etc.
Emails that take too long to understand or interpret
Misunderstood emails
Emails that are ignored
Audience
Career people in a corporate environment. Most of these workers focus on financial considerations. They are college educated and have a basic understanding of writing and communication, but they need review or deepened understanding about communicating effectively in writing.
Desired Outcome
The client wants trainees to improve the clarity and efficiency of their workplace writing. A successful outcome would demonstrate:
More concise messages
Readily understandable messages
Fewer follow-up messages
Learning Constraints
Workers are not able to attend a live session to learn these skills. Learning delivery will need to be strictly online and asynchronous.
Delivery
The training will be online and asynchronous. The course will be created in Articulate 360.
Pedagogy
The clients wants an engaging, scenario-based learning experience. Trainees need to demonstrate their familiarity of the concepts with incorporated competency-checks.
Timeline
No deadline was required for this project, but it was created over the course of two days.
Design
I employed Cathy Moore’s action-mapping approach to guide my development.
What is the business problem? How will we know we’ve solved it?
The business needs better email communication among employees. We will know when we’ve solved this problem if the employees begin communicating though email more successfully, with fewer misunderstandings.What do people need to do, and why aren’t they doing it?
Employees need to follow better email composition practices. They aren’t doing it because they are unfamiliar with the best practices.How can we help them practice what they need to do?
They need to deduce good from bad email composition methods in a workplace scenario.What information MUST they have to complete the practice activity?
Employees must be presented with clear standards for core email composition practices. Examples will be invaluable.
Development
I began development by creating a simple set of storyboards. The storyboards outlined the slide progression to be later developed in Articulate Storyline.
In the end, I modified the content slightly from the storyboard concept, but performing this step allowed me to plan the scope of the project and adjust the content before full development.
Storyboard 1
Storyboard 2
After the storyboarding, I created some mock-ups of the project in Adobe XD. Doing this design work in Adobe allowed me to quickly create slide samples before moving on to Storyline. I later revised the appearance of the slides significantly after receiving feedback.
Once I was satisfied with the basic design in Adobe XD, I began creating the project in Articulate Storyline. Beyond repeating the design from Adobe, the Storyline development involved programming triggers to control the scenario branching experienced by each user, depending on their interaction.
Integration
After finishing and publishing the project for web usage, I uploaded it to AWS. I customized the settings to public on AWS to ensure that the sample remained visible.
Evaluation
Review and testing of the project revealed that some of the design and navigation needed improvement. I went back to Storyline and changed the following:
Added an avatar with programmed reactions to reinforce the consequences of user choices
Removed graphic elements that looked unpolished
Improved overall layout of the slides
Finished Project
View the finished project.
