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Tag: mobile

3 Impressions from the mLearn Conference

It’s been two full weeks since I returned from the eLearning Guild’s mLearn Conference in San Jose. I had hoped to have this blog post out within two days, but I suppose we all struggle with things that we “need” to do taking precedence over the things that we “want” to do.

As usual, I’m going to give you my interpretations from the conference rather than a blow by blow. For another perspective, check out Brian Dusablon’s  recap here.

1. “Anything but a course”

This was actually a quote from thought leader and friend Clark Quinn from his keynote. The theoretical talk on the conference floor was that mobile was not about pushing courses onto phones, yet there was a trade show full of folks pushing tools for converting and authoring courses for use on phones and a line of people waiting to hear how it’s done. Mobiles devices have real advantages and the explosion in growth is undeniable, but a course-based strategy just isn’t what your users are ultimately looking for. Your users want their mobile device to help complete the objectives of real and meaningful work. They want to use their mobile device to DO THINGS that align with their personal goals for their job, not the goals of the training department. When we understand and embrace this truth, “anything but a course” will only ring more true.

2. Tablets and phones are different animals

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again, tablets serve user needs in different ways than smartphones and deserve to be designed differently. Adaptive CSS  and various authoring tools are doing a great job of helping us make sure that content looks good on both but a tablet isn’t a giant phone and a phone isn’t just a little tablet. While they have similar features and sometimes the same operating system, one makes calls and the other doesn’t. One is really good for taking pictures, the other not so much. One can fit a lot of information on a screen, the other you can fit in your pocket. You get the idea. In an age where BYOT (bring your own technology) is happening whether you want it to or not, your users will tell you how, when, and what type of device they want. It’s our job to listen and make sure the things that we design meet their needs. One caveat though, bring your own doesn’t mean any device ever made under the sun. I see a lot of people spending money supporting platforms that were dominant at one time, but don’t seem to have much of a future. You can put constraints on BYOT…

3. BJ Fogg is a very smart man

Stanford-based psychologist, BJ Fogg is a brand new favorite for me and he deserves a look by you, too. He’s doing some really interesting studies and experiments on what he calls building “tiny habits”, and he is showing some amazing results creating systems for behavior change. This is stuff you can use right now. Check out his website and make sure you do some reading on his Behavior Grid.

Nine Ideas from TEDx Grand Rapids

Back in December I wrote a blog post that included my application to the TEDx event in Grand Rapids. I was in fact selected to attend the event with 700 of my peers on May 10th. It was my first TED event, and it absolutely lived up to its billing. It was a day filled with inspiration, hope, and ideas without the stodginess of a motivational seminar. I’m a convert, and I will contribute to as many of these events as I possibly can.

I’m sure someone will write a recap of the event outlining what each speaker said and what they got from it. I’m instead going to let you in on the nine tangents or ideas I had as a result of where I was, who I was with, and what I heard. However, I have to warn you, when I allow myself to be open to new ideas; the results aren’t always all about business.

  1. Thinking about interfaces, how does silverware affect our relationship with food? Do western food implements increase the efficiency of us shoveling food into our faces? If so, what other everyday interfaces are good interfaces in terms of function, but actually feed undesirable behavior?
  2. There is no such thing as south Detroit. It is a lie perpetuated by a Journey song. No one should ever tell stories about a boy growing up on the south side of Detroit; the notion is all wet.
  3. There is a distinct difference between consulting and designing… and they don’t always complement each other. It’s true there may be a lot of consulting that goes into a design, but if you start to design before the consulting is done you may never find the actual problem. Sarah Bloom from Google wrote a good blog post on this last week, and I thought about it when talking about design at TED.
  4. An Epic Fail is a failure so big it takes the sting out of the failure. In thinking of practical ways to force epic fails consider this: How much and how quickly could we learn by designing something to fail and then allowing it to happen? If it doesn’t sting, we could iterate on all the things logic tells us shouldn’t work only to discover a really great thing that does work. This was talked about in terms of gaming, and games done right can have epic failures.
  5. I want to create a comedic character called TED Nougat. An obvious parody of Ted Nugent, TED Nougat could be the liberal alter ego with a soft fluffy center.
  6. The idea of Insanely Good Process got me thinking about situations where repeating the same thing and expecting different results isn’t considered insane. Good process should always have the same steps, but insanely good process should produce better results each time you engage it.
  7. Curating ideas is worthwhile whether it be material, context, or knowledge. Who said libraries can only contain books full of knowledge? One speaker at TEDx had a library of materials that could be used in packaging. What if we had libraries of stuff that had been tried before at our companies? It goes beyond knowledge management.
  8. This year the number of cell phones will exceed the number of PC’s in the world. In some areas, the availability of phones will be greater than food or water. That means applications developed for mobile devices have the potential to reach more people than the computer ever has.
  9. Fault does not excuse responsibility. I remember as a child thinking things were not my fault and that it just wasn’t fair that I was held responsible for things that weren’t my fault. Either because we choose to accept responsibility or because it is placed upon us, fault only speaks to fairness; responsibility trumps both.

Five Attributes Your Mobile Sales App Must Demonstrate

It’s been a little while since I’ve written about mobile, but I committed this week to do a talk at the eLearning Guild mLearnCon, June 19-21 in San Jose; so it’s top-of-mind. My talk is going to be about the design process we used in an actual development scenario for a client of ours. That particular application never saw the light of day, but it got me thinking about the components of that application and why we were so passionate about including them.

Specific to the sales audience, we believe the following five attributes are critical to the successful adoption of a sales-focused mobile app. Your sales app must be:

  1. Relevant everyday – On the surface, this means the content must be kept up-to-date. While that is critical, when you dig a little deeper, it also means the content must also be applicable every day. It has to be more than learning about the future, tomorrow’s product, or the sale they might someday have. It has to help them do their job today.
  2. Improve some aspect of the sales process – Sales has always been and always will be about more and faster. If your mobile sales app doesn’t help them increase or accelerate the sale by letting them access more information faster from different places, or work with other people in your company more efficiently, sales people just plain won’t use it. In fact they will find some other mobile app that will help them, or they will spend that time doing some other activity even if that’s Angry Birds.
  3. Integrated across sites and systems – In most companies, there is no lack of systems or internal sites designed to support the sales team. If mobile devices can even access behind your firewall, chances are those systems and sites aren’t very useable on a mobile device, and you can’t expect your team to ferret out and adapt while they are on the go. Your mobile app needs to be a combined interface to the sites and systems that are most critical to the sale.
  4. Socially connected – Mobile technology at its core is about real-time communication. If your app doesn’t take advantage of this, you are missing something really important. Imagine situations where your app can help sales people get answers in seconds, when it used to take hours.
  5. Intuitive – The reason Apple’s products are so pervasive is because they always put the user experience first, even if that means it doesn’t do everything that you imagined. This isn’t a ringing endorsement of Apple by any stretch, especially for the enterprise, but the point is that it has to be better than easy. It has to be intuitive to the point where it feels automatic to the end user. Mobile apps do not have, nor should they need, training programs. They just work. You are better off not including a piece of functionality rather than including one that needs to be explained.

This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive design guide; just five things you need to consider. Of course, there are big differences between organizations and the processes that they use. Device strategy, even if it’s “Bring Your Own Device” or BYOD, also factors into design. However, if your app does these five things successfully, it will make a difference in the performance of your sales team.

Key Learning from the Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration Summit

Having just returned from the Gartner Summit, I thought a quick recap was in order. Besides I need a break from my measurement series (Part I, Part II, Part III)

Things got started with Gartner VP and Analyst Whit Andrews taking the stage carrying a shovel. My first thoughts were he we go with another speech about breaking new ground, but I should have known better. His comment was “A Gartner guy with a shovel, never a good thing.” But it turns out, it was a prop for talking about Minecraft, an online game both he and his son play on a regular basis. Here’s a YouTube of him previewing the shovel theme. It set the tone to talk about gamification, but the rest of the conference was decidedly higher level and talked about building and maintaining higher orders and evolutions of portals and content management.

Side note: While researching Whit Andrews I found this hilarious text-speech YouTube diatribe.

Day 1: Portals & UXP

All of the sessions I attended were geared more towards the portal end of the spectrum. Within the realm of portals, the major focus areas were User Experience (UX) and mobile. Of course there is a ton subtlety and secondary topics. I won’t cover every session, key sessions, and perspectives here.

My first session was Gene Phifer talking about User Experience Platforms or UXP. Any reader of the Media 1 blog knows this is a huge focus for us right now. The UXP definitely has a place in the corporate landscape and is a critical piece for creating alignment between people, process, and technology. Gene’s original article on UXP is a great overview of the session. For more of Media 1’s vision for how UXP can drive performance, see Chris Willis’s blog post “Social, Mobile, Integrated…UXP and Your Future Workforce.”

“Using Generation 7 Portals to Attract and Engage Customers” with Jim Murphy was up next. While this session was geared somewhat towards customer facing portals, the same principles apply to employee or internally-focused portals. With a lot people I talk to, “portal” has become a bad word. In a lot folks’ experience, portal technology has been purchased, implemented, and subsequently fallen short of expectations. What we have to realize is that portals have evolved and continue to evolve. The biggest shift I see in portals is that they are moving away from being company, department, or role specific and they are getting personal. When you put the individual at the center of the design and you surround that person with filtered and specific options, portals get a lot more compelling—and that’s the root of why Media 1 is bullish on UXP.

Jim Murphy describes the characteristics of Generation 7 portals as featuring:

  • Analytics
  • Portal-less Portals
  • Context aware
  • Portal ubiquity
  • Emerging UXP
  • Widgets dominate
  • Mobile dominates

Jim and Gene teamed up on another session later that afternoon called “Employee Portals: The Revenge of the Intranet” to address the employee-specific side of the portal equation and aptly drew the connection that the employee portal is the heart of the new intranet. The changing ways that we work have driven the corporate intranet from being information portal to knowledge portal, then to process portal, and now to the latest generation of intranet portal that includes social functionality, mash-ups and combined applications, and has a mobile enabled interface. Social is the connective tissue that ties people to process and information—or people, process and technology in the Media 1 vernacular. More than social, the new portal-based intranet (SharePoint portals included) also enables information management and process management driving alignment to corporate goals. Gartner defines the must have characteristics of the next-generation intranet as:

Current

  • Social
  • Business process enabled
  • Analytics and optimization

Near future

  • Mobile
  • Context aware
  • Gamified

Wish list

  • Enable user content contribution
  • “App store” model

Day 2: Gamification & More

Day 2 of the conference started out with Jane McGonigal’s  compelling presentation “Reality is Broken” on the role of game play on our society and consequently how we can use those principles when addressing the needs of our organizations. Jane’s presentation was based on her book is Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. While I’m not always a fan of gamified approaches to development, I must admit to having some changing perspectives based on this presentation. One of the key advantages to gaming is the resiliency gained from repeated trial and error—and sometimes subsequent failure. I think that’s why a lot of people find golf compelling and certainly the incredible volume of Angry Birds play would also seem to reinforce that supposition. Seems to me that many corporate gamified approaches take a “failure is not an option” position and with the absence of failure or the possibility of failure, you miss out on the resiliency benefit and ultimately engagement that the “game” was intended to create. I’m going to do a future blog post on this topic alone. There are some very compelling distinctions between playing, competing, achievement, failure, and losing that deserve to be explored.

I spent the afternoon of Day 2 exploring sessions on UI/UX, people-centered strategy, Yammer and Mobile. Not that these sessions weren’t valuable or intriguing, but I have to assume you have something else planned for your day other than reading my blog.

I finished up the conference with a case a study from GlaxoSmithKline where they talked about their cloud-based employee portal solution, which happened to be a SharePoint 2007 site. While many of their experiences and concerns aligned with my other clients’ SharePoint installations, the fact that the SharePoint farm existed in cloud space created very few if any new concerns. Instead, it appeared to show considerable value to GlaxoSmithKline along the lines of the value proposition of other cloud services.

The final keynote of the conference was from Seth Godin. It was engaging and inspirational to say the least. While many of the examples used where on how to create compelling messaging, or “purple cows” as he calls them, it’s not much of a stretch to see how that relates to how we market performance improvement to our own organizations. It’s more than position; it’s the stories we tell.

In summary, the conference served as an excellent confirmation that I’m talking about the right things with my clients and in the right priorities. It also has taught me that I have a different perspective to bring to gamification and a new understanding of what it takes to make these games compelling. And finally, not that I needed any more convincing, we need to find ways of engaging employees on mobile platforms in meaningful ways. Our obstacles are just that, but mobility is critical to the new work environment.

More Thoughts on Mobile Learning

Here at Media 1, we’ve been looking at mobile for quite a few years now, and my personal experience experimenting with mobile goes back to the Palm® Pilot days. The trick with mobile has always been overcoming the hurdles associated with varying platforms, sufficient bandwidth, LMS connectivity, and being able to produce compelling content. While all of those challenges to mobile are still present, the general sense is that mobile is truly becoming more accessible.

Several viable authoring systems are now available that allow you to develop once and deliver to the vast majority of platforms, while the mobile devices themselves have larger screens and better connectivity. Many LMS now have mobile-specific connectivity, leading us to the remaining challenge of creating compelling content. Having Adobe® Flash available on almost every platform (with the exception of the iPhone) certainly helps, but much of the content I’ve seen still lacks an engagement factor. The mobile content that appears to be most successful is different in two ways:

  1. It is framed as performance support, not training.
  2. It is focused on messaging, not use of media.

When it comes to performance support, one of the best applications I’ve seen was a product-related reference guide from Sephora and JC Penney. Delivered via iPad, the content provided both product fact and application techniques for beauty products in a manner that was both educational for the consultant and shareable with the customer. While it wasn’t executed on a phone-based mobile device, I think it’s indicative of the types of mobile content that can be deployed successfully.

Absent the larger format of the iPad or Flash-based content, other successful mobile performance applications display an awareness of good writing and storytelling. People read books all the time. Books don’t have animations and rarely have pictures, yet publishing remains a multibillion dollar industry. Text is easily displayed across almost all devices. It’s logical that we re-frame our concept of what engaging mobile content is to include writing that is compelling and not just a collection of fragmented bullet points from a slide deck. Think back to the text-based discovery games of the early 90’s and how maybe some of those principles could be applied to writing for mobile.

There is also huge upside to performance support delivered via e-reader devices. Both Kindle and Nook now have educational text branches of their business focused on the education market. But for corporate practitioners, what’s not to like? Big Screens, non-fatiguing text, wireless connectivity, and falling prices for hardware make this segment one to watch.

While good writing for text-based content is critical, the untapped potential for all mobile devices is in how they can be leveraged for around-the-clock access to Social Learning communities behind the corporate firewall. Take a look at how much activity on Facebook and Twitter is now originating from mobile devices. Now imagine how much more use your corporate community could get if it was accessible from phone-based mobile devices.

I believe that eventually we will see compelling content on phone-based devices, but I also believe that tablets and e-readers represent a significant opportunity. They serve as an excellent stepping stone that can help us define and produce good mobile content without some of the constraints of the smartphone. As mobile moves forward, we also have to figure out realistic ways to allow mobile devices access to content behind the corporate firewall.

For more perspectives on mobile, check out Chris Willis’ prior post “Mobile Learning – Are You Ready?” 

Learning 2010 and DevLearn 2010: Social Learning and Communities

It’s been a busy last couple of weeks as I travelled to both Orlando for the Learning 2010 conference and to San Francisco for a portion of DevLearn. Attending sessions on Social Learning and Communities at both conferences, it wasn’t so much about learning new things as it was a confirmation of our beliefs and writings on Social Learning to date. It’s always nice to get some validation, but more importantly it’s an indicator of overall corporate readiness to adopt Social Learning principles into learning strategies.

It was also nice to see that there were quite a few companies who have chosen Microsoft SharePoint as the underlying technology for their efforts. However it was disappointing to see many of the sites shown showed little attention to aesthetics, user experience, or true collaboration. SharePoint is capable of so much more. Not only can it look great, but you can also mash-up work flows, forms, discussion, and blog elements to form a cohesive community with true collaborative functionality.

Beyond SharePoint, there were a number of key take-a-ways for those developing communities based on any technology platform. Probably the most pervasive sentiment was that communities are so much more than a collection of functionality. You can build the sexiest community site with chat integration, message boards, blogs, tagging and all the rest, but still see low usage rates if you don’t plan for more than just the functional community framework.

At some point at Learning 2010, I read an interesting tweet from a well known and respected colleague at Intel, Allison Anderson. She wondered “Why is it when we do create and open environment, we get low participation?”

Successful corporate communities have ownership, a pre-planned group of super-contributors, and are centered on functions or tasks that people want — and need — to have conversations about. Not every group within your organization needs a community, but when you plan carefully and pick the right focus areas you may hit on a community that has the potential to become self-sustaining.

Another question heard quite often at both conferences was in effect: “How do I control what people put up on the community?” The knee-jerk answer to this question is that you have to monitor it closely, but the truth is that you shouldn’t have to. People have to be allowed to have opinions, and if those opinions cross the line to misinformation or slander, then most companies already have a way with dealing with that. The point is in order for communication to open and active, there has to be trust. It can be a balance, but you have to temper trust and control.

I also overheard another comment in the crowd about how popular their community was at first, but how a year later it had virtually died out. While this person was looking for suggestions on re-energizing their community, it got me thinking about whether or not this was a bad thing. Sometimes, groups have a logical lifespan. It’s not always a bad thing when a conversation has run its course; it can mean that the topic has reached a new baseline of competence, and that has to be a good thing.

My final thought in retrospect on these two great conferences in respect to Social Learning Communities, is that we have to find a way to make our communities accessible and relevant on mobile devices. I find myself increasingly relying on my mobile device for my own social networking activities and would dare say it surpasses my desktop use by a good margin. I can’t help feeling that our busy, travelling, and multi-tasking team members feel the same way. While many social networking platforms include some mobile page support, SharePoint included, gaining secure access from a mobile device remains elusive in environments that require hardware/software security and encryption.

Looking to the future of corporate communities and social learning the potential is clearly evident. However, that potential can only be fully realized with care full attention to:

  • Design and planning for the function AND use of the community
  • Appropriate topics and focus areas
  • Trust
  • Accessibility and usability from both desk-based and mobile devices

Media 1 can help you plan and build SharePoint communities that work. For more perspective on corporate communities, check out my prior blog “Communities of Practice: Batteries Not Included”.