Thinking Critically Through Experiential and Environmental E-Learning

My first job was at an Arby’s. I learned how to make sandwiches, work the register, work drive thru, clean dishes, prep for the day, shut down the store, etc. I was taught how to make each sandwich, the correct order to place the ingredients, and how to wrap the sandwich. All this I learned from a book, a few triple laminated guides, and from making a few sandwiches on my own. I felt pretty comfortable and ready to make my first sandwich for the customer. What I wasn’t ready for was the 5 for 5 sandwich deal that was available. Five Regular Roast Beef sandwiches for $5.00 (a great deal compared to today’s prices). Suddenly on the sandwich monitor there were three 5 for 5 orders, a Super, two Arby’s Melts, and a Chicken Cordon Bleu. The Super needed extra sauce and the Cordon Bleu had added lettuce. Someone working the drive thru yelled back that they needed their Arby’s Melts first and that the second order of 5 for 5s needed cheese. I had limited space and limited time to make everything I needed. More sandwiches were popping up on the monitor. The frier and slicer were beeping. Customers were waiting and managers and employees were shouting. I was in a panic. What is going on? What goes on what sandwich? Did they say they needed cheese on the sandwiches? Do I have enough chicken? Was this worth making only $5.25 an hour? If I didn’t perform my job well we could lose time, lose money, and upset customers. This was real life and I didn’t have the experience I needed.

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A Look at Personas

When defining the best solution to any project, one step within the discovery process is the creation and use of personas. User personas are fictitious characters who represent unique groups of users. We use personas to understand how different groups of users will use a website and application. By focusing on how a persona interacts with a website, navigates to content and through content, understands and retains the content, we can begin to understand the different user experiences that occur. These user experiences must fulfill the goals, objectives, and needs. This step can also help determine new goals, objectives, and needs as well as limitations users may have.

It is a good practice to find two or three user personas and one or two administrative personas. But each opportunity is unique and can derive any number of unique persona. First we must understand the different user personas. To do this we must understand the audience(s). This can be done by talking with our clients, their audiences, defining surveys, focus groups, looking at demographics, and general research. A lot of specific information can arise such as (to name a few):

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Make a Meal, Not a Shopping List

When starting a project, it is easy for us to gather up a shopping list of goals, wants, needs, and ideas. We may say “I want a chat room, a product configurator, a calendar, a blog, a forum,…”  - you get the idea. In fact this list is a great component when within the discovery and defining process. The more information and ideas we can put on paper, the better. But this is shopping list. It is a list of ingredients that don’t necessarily relate to each other. We buy ingredients to create a meal. There are a lot of ingredients we like but we must understand the that not all good ingredients can be put together to create a great meal. We choose ingredients that have their own unique flavors, textures, and colors, that intermingle to form the perfect tasting meal. This same idea can be applied within training, educational, and marketing applications. It is important that we not only define and develop the individual components, but how these components work together to form a comprehensive, cohesive experience.

When we make a meal we pay attention to how it tastes. We make adjustments to the ingredients to make the next meal even better. Metrics, or measurements do the same for your applications. We don’t make a meal and not wonder what people think of it. We don’t give it to someone and not ask how it tasted. The process continues past the development of your application. Use it yourself, find out what others think, and review the analytics.

If we focus both bottom-up and top-down, explore ideas that are detailed while stepping back to review the big picture, there will be no stopping our pursuit in creating more engaging, better measurable, and more delicious applications.

6 Elements of Great Usability

Usability is a word that is often heard, yet is not often understood. What is usability? Why spend so much time on usability? How is it measured? When done right, usability can increase user productivity, provide a higher retention of information, and raise user satisfaction by creating and providing a stronger experience. Understanding what makes something usable or intuitive is never clearly defined. There are many factors that should go into the design of a usable solution. Usability is a component of user centered design, and is based on the goals, objectives, and even the limitations of you and your audience. Usability can be broken down into six elements that overlap each other to provide one cohesive experience. These six elemental groups are defined as: goal solving, intuitive, efficient, functional, satisfying, and memorable.

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Illumen’s David Charney Speaks at CD2

David Charney, Chief Creative Officer at Illumen, speaks at CD2 about the user experience and design. CD2 (Chicago Designers and Developers User Group) is focused on nurturing the collaboration between designers & developers and the importance of the user experience and how it relates to creativity and technology.
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Higher Education turns to Interactive

Purdue University continually explores the future of interactive learning in an effort to find effective and engaging content delivery methods for it’s faculty and students. On August 28th Purdue’s Vet School invited Illumen Group along with Dr. James “Butch” Rosser of The Stealth Learning Company to present the topic of Experiential Learning and how it’s shaping both academic and corporate learning environments. Over three sessions, the trio provided insight on Experiential Learning’s past, present, and future. Audience members consisted of faculty from Purdue’s Vet Sciences, Nursing, Engineering and Agriculture Departments.

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Illumen at Gartner Healthcare Summit

Chris Okamoto co-presented the Gartner keynote with Dr. James “Butch” Rosser at the Gartner Healthcare 2007 Summit in Miami. The keynote topic was “Video Games and Simulation of Safe Surgery”. Chris walked through real-world medical projects that blended gaming and simulation components, providing a glimpse into today’s challenges and tomorrow’s solutions. The Gartner Healthcare Summit is widely regarded as the industry’s most comprehensive healthcare IT and business conference.