Educating retail staff around the world with engaging elearning content was the goal for this project. Taking careful consideration of the Sonos brand, and giving it a premium feel that showcases their products and services.
Sonos Elearning
For this project:
Skills
- UI Design
- Elearning Design
Software
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Articulate Storyline
- Adobe Captivate
The brief
Sonos wanted a way that they could train and educate retail staff around the world about their products. The required training material included things like how to set up and use their product range. There were initially 20 modules required, and they all needed to be localised in 7 different languages!
The process
The content was initially driven by a series of PowerPoint sales decks that had been previously created for the client. After establishing the key points for each required topic, we started out by storyboarding the new elearning modules in Photoshop. This allowed us to be more creative than we would have been if we’d dived straight into the elearning authoring tool, which initially was Adobe Captivate.
Animations were created for the intro and outro slides that we used throughout the series. These wrapper slides made the modules feel part of the same family and became more recognisable as the learner would complete more of the training.
One of the modules was a special ’emulator’ module, where the learner could tap through an example process within their app. In the video below, you can also see how we used voiceover to enhance the learning experience.
All of these modules had to be translated. This was a surprisingly quick process – once we had the voice over ready, we could translate 1 module p/hour.
We later switched to Articulate Storyline which opened up some new interaction possibilities, such as a 3D product turn-table and also this drag and drop interaction:
During this transition to Storyline, we also simplified the UI and updated it to use slightly newer brand images.
The solution
The final set of modules were put onto Sonos’ new LMS (Learning Management System). They were compiled into an easy-to-follow training path with quizzes to accompany each module.
There are now over 10,000 users on the LMS completing content on a daily basis.
Summary
The most challenging part of this project was working with authoring tools. They can be quite restrictive, making it hard to adapt an original idea into something that actually works.
That being said, I think the modules ended up looking really good. They were easy to follow, and the information was appropriately broken down into bite-sized chunks, making it easier to retain.