A kind gnome pass this knowledge retention link to me (yeah, Ima gonna pay for that gnome comment!

It’s worth a full read but the highlights on how we can use those retention ideas to improve our eLearning courses are:

Say it Again if You Want Me To Remember!

Repetition and Retention

Studies show that adaptive repetition aids in knowledge retention.  The gist of it is:

1. Pretest – what do I already know?
2. Adaptive Learning presentation – Show me only the gaps in my knowledge
3. Test – What do I know now?
4. Repeat step 2 – showing only my latest gaps in knowledge.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  The key of course, how do we keep it interesting on those repeat steps. This is where gaming theories come in.

Why am I Taking this Module Again??

Motivation and Retention

Ever wonder why you can sit through your favorite video game and play it again.. .and again.. and AGAIN? I mean come on, after the first two tries, you KNOW the flesh-eating zombie is popping out from behind that car wreck. No surprise there. But still, you shoot and shoot and…

..okay got distracted there…  Anyway, the point being, It’s not the repetition that bothers us. We do that in other situations. It’s the motivation. What’s my reward for killing that zombie?  Well, eventually I’ll master Level 1 and get to Level 2, then Level 3, etc etc.

How’s that relate to mastering BGP?  Well, it’s all in the levels.  First prize goes to the commenter who can equate BGP peers to zombies!  Seriously, though – we already separate our courses into lessons, our lessons into modules.

• How would you change your module design if you thought about it as a level in a video game?
• What’s the student get when they master level 1 (module1) – what have they learned? (Remember those learning objectives? They can’t be ‘Describe Route Reflectors”. They have to be more like “Redesign a Full-Mesh BGP Network using Route Reflectors”.  That is, apply it to what the need to do in the day job.)
• Keep the module (level) engaging.  25-30 questions to master a module (or maybe a lesson?).

Beyond that though, how do we keep it interesting if we are pushing the student back through that Route Reflector material again and again? That’s where we bring in branching.

1. Describe Route Reflectors -what are they, why use them, when do I start using them?  - toss in a procedure or two on how to configure. TEST!
2. Next iteration, present what they didn’t understand – use examples this time. Maybe a video. TEST
3. Another iteration – hopefully whittling down on what the student isn’t grasping – maybe reuse some of the concepts in step 1 with a part of the example in step 2.

Reuse portions of the content, presented in different ways.

Learning in the Now, Baby!

Instant Gratification

This one’s easy – instant feedback on an incorrect answer.  Imagine if that video game paused with a popup ‘Shoot Zombies in the HEAD if you want them to stay dead!”  A short description of what’s wrong with the student’s answer, and then a link back into the course if they want to go back immediately to retake that part.

Um, Was that a Lucky Guess?

Emotion and Retention

This was the one that wasn’t obvious to me.  If you ask me ‘how confident am I on my answer’, that actually helps trigger a better memory retention of the content than if you leave out that touchy-feely question.  The website does a good job of going into the Cognitive Psychology involved, but the gist is – Every question is linked with this confidence factor.   If your confidence is high and you get the question right, you’ve mastered it. If your confidence is low, and you get the question right – lucky guess and you need to go through that one again.

All in all, some nice ways we can improve retention on our eLearning courses.  Question for the commenters – how do we integrate this not only into our work processes, but our thought processes?  :-)

Related Links

• Formative Assessments (part 1)
• Formative Assessments (part 2) 

While this is focused on all book publishers, there’s some interesting takeaways for elearning and techcomm professionals:

• ebooks are on the rise across all industries
• Enhanced ebooks will change the paradigm of what it means to be a ‘book’ – i.e. we’ll move away from the print-to-digital conversion, and create new user experiences within the ‘ebook’ world.
• EPUB3 lends itself  to this enhanced ebook experience.

For us, the ability to create a rich media experience for our users, along with enabling interaction, will breathe new life into our content. But it’s not just a technology shift, it’s an authoring shift as well.  We will no longer be authoring text, or text with spiffy graphics. We will be authoring a rich experience that brings our information to life for the user in ways not possible in print or our current online/pdf world.  As authors, we’ll now have to consider:

• Is this idea best conveyed in text, graphics, video, flash, audio, etc?
• Can I enhance the users ability to grasp the topic and apply it through interactive media?

Add to all that, the joy of XML authoring for reuse and you can see our jobs get very interesting, very fast!

• Expect as good an experience as the desktop
• May be looking for that quick snippet, but many times are looking for the full content. Plan accordingly.
• Don’t randomly remove content – keep the core content available on Mobile (tho need to reconsider navigation etc for smaller screen).
• Extra clicks to get to content is okay, so long as it is leading to the right direction. Make decisions obvious.
• Serve the same content to all devices, but optimize experience for the device capabilities
• Apply Minimalist principles to ALL your content. Will vastly improve user experience, no matter how it’s accessed.
• Enhance content with metadata (helps drive the right styles to the right platforms)
• Don’t repeat print constraints for all devices. Print will become the minority platform of the future!

Futher reading:

Responsive Web Design

Mobile First!

This is is being presented at this year’s DevLearn 2011 conference:

Content Strategy Across Connected Devices 

Interesting highlights:

• Content developers’ goal – create an engaging educational experience for screens that are convenient, not simply converting existing content to smaller screens. Converting existing elearning content to mobile format is a lesson in futility.
• Design training content for mobile first, not desktop or print.
• Content development should become Agile – continuous experimentation and improvement.
• Design upfront what your smallest content component will be (and optimise for that in your CMS, processes, and UI deliverables)
• Users may experience different interactions/layouts based on mobile device, but learning objectives remain consistent.
• Users will move between mobile, tablet, desktop. Plan for this constant shifting and ensure learning objectves are met even when functionality is missing (e.g. flash on iPad).
• Create default reference design for each of the device types you’ll support and know the limitations of each.
• Develop content for the chunk, not the slide.

Well worth reading in full!

• Search terms – going beyond the terms that link to your content, what other related search terms are there out there that you are missing out on.  One client  insisted on using their product name everywhere to try to build out their brand. Great idea, but the search terms show customers weren’t searching for their specific product name, they were searching on the underlying technology (video conferencing). By not associating that important keyword with their product, the company was missing out on the vast majority of search referrals. Lost opportunity for sure.
• When your content works and when it doesn’t – using metrics like time on page etc, can give an indication of when your content is useful (longer on-page times) and when it’s skimmed and ignored.
• Prioritizing content updates – This one I’ve done myself. Web analytics clearly showed the most important topics our customers were going to again and again. Those topics went through a major overhaul to ensure they were clearly written, relevant to the customer base, and accurate.

I thought I’d take a stab at converting her steps to my own technical documentation work, and here’s what I came up with:

• Define your content – That would be user guides, references, release notes and the like.  What is it all doing? It guides customers in using our products to their fullest potential. If we get into things like troubleshooting guides, then we have an added benefit of reducing support costs to the company by solving customer problems with our content. Desired characteristics? That would be accurate (free of technical errors) professional quality, ease of use/readability, and ease of localization (that comes from our editors who tell us when we are phrasing something impossible for the translation folks to deal with).
• Assign values to your content – This is where educated guessing comes in.  Some things can be clearly defined – $500 is the cost for the average Technical Assistance call to the company, so each topic in that troubleshooting guide could save the company $500. If we have 10 topics, and make some assumption like 10% of the 1000 visitors last month to that content found a solution (and thus avoid a support call to the company) we get a number around  $50,000 for that troubleshooting guide per month in cost savings to the company.  We can extend this model to configuration guides because we know our own support folks point customers to our guides to solve their issues.  How about quality and accuracy? Well if we assume a certain cost to the company for fixing documentation errors (Say $100 per doc bug), multiplied by 5 customer-found bugs per month, we run over $6000 a year. But that doesn’t account for customer frustration, and whether or not that documentation error ended up in a customer support call to resolve the issue, plus that support person tracking down the correct writer to fix the problem.  If we assume 1 in 5 customer-found bug has an ‘extended’ cost (support call, customer frustration and potential lost revenue) we can say improved quality content saves the company $12000 a year, per product. (For a company with over 1000 products, that number gets very big!)  The last way we can quantify content would be to estimate lost revenue. With a deepdive in web analytics, we can determine if our customers come to our documentation from marketing collateral. If we then assume a small percentage of those customers are evaluating the product, then good vs bad quality technical documentation can mean lost sales and that would also be a sizable number. If the average product purchase for a high-tech networking company is $10,000, and poor content leads to just 1% of 1000 potential customers going someplace else, the lost revenue is upwards of $100,000 per product!  Again, the numbers get quite big, and then you compare those numbers to what it would cost the company to hire additional top quality writers to address the issues. The average cost of a full-time employee runs around $255,000 (full benefits included). That means one fulltime writer on that troubleshooting guide would still save the company $250,000 annually on technical support calls.
• Measure every way you can - Web analytics can tell you how popular some content is (and some content isn’t!)  Getting beyond that, we can again, use support call logs (if available) to determine how often our documentation solves customer issues (and thus shortens the length of a support call). Also, internal email aliases point to our content to help each other out, and then there are customer-facing forums that use our content. Then customer interviews can add to the value equation. What are they looking for and do we have that information? What are their top tasks when using our product? Do we have those tasks clearly covered in our technical documentation?
• Baseline it all – Assign value today, and then use the same analysis after we make changes to determine if we can see measurable improvements. Do we get more hits on certain content? Less technical errors in our documentation because of improved SME review processes implemented?  Measure at the baseline and then remeasure six months or more after you’ve implemented change to determine its effectiveness.

To kick things off, go check out Sarah O’Keefe’s Scriptorium post on the use and abuse of DITA (aka babyDITA). Interesting discussions going on in the comments, and can I say  again  -BEST. CHART. EVER.

Stop Counting Clicks

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Back in the dim dawn of website design, there was an unwritten rule -Don’t burying information more than three mouse-clicks away.  That 3-click rule has long since been disputed (here , here , here , here , and here ).

The number of clicks isn’t what is important to users, but whether or not they’re successful at finding what they’re seeking.(here )

The guiding principal instead should be make all clicks easy/obvious!  If the user knows she’s clicking the right option on a given navigation page, and that option was obvious (not cluttered with 30 other clickable options) she’s got a growing confidence she’s on the right track and will keep clicking (provided subsequent options are also obvious).

What’s This Have To Do With Content?

Content can be separated into bite-sized bits that a customer navigates to on the website, or it can be grouped into larger documents (multi-chapter user guides, etc).  We can group content because it’s all related information, which is a good thing, but when the presentation of that grouped content becomes too difficult to scan and navigate through, we are no longer helping our readers.

So when we decide what goes into a user guide, are we basing this decision on how much that content really needs to co-exist? Or are we grouping it together under a vague title (like user guide vs administration guide) that is forcing our readers to make a vague choice?

Image via Wikipedia

And how much of that choice is driven by this old rule that we don’t want extra clicks to get to our content.  Once they open the guide, that’s it, right?

Fast, Easy Clicks Trump the 3-Click Rule

As content creators, we need to understand how the user experience guidelines have changed and adapt our content accordingly. As part of that, we need to look not only at our grouping, but the clarity of what is hidden under that grouping.  Will a reader know to look in the vague ‘user guide’ vs the equally vage ‘operations guide’? Would they be better served by an extra few mouse clicks that navigate deeper and allow us to ungroup some of that content and raise visibility of what was hidden?  These are our decisions to make, in association with the UE design folks to optimize our reader’s choices and fast scanning decisions to find the content they are looking for.

Related articles

• Shrink to Fit (braintraffic.com)
• The technical communicator’s survival guide for 2011 (scriptorium.com)