Organization: Personal  |  Any industry  |  ORIGINAL: 2018 UPDATED: 2024

Software: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Photoshop, Wellsaid Labs

UPDATE NOTES:

As a consultant, I rarely have time to go back and update my portfolio, but in June of 2024 I did just that. When I originally built this course in 2018, I was just getting good at variables and triggers and this was one of my first demos. Going back in 2024, I spent a good ten minutes laughing at how clunky I’d made this course. I had been so proud of this demo! Thankfully, years of further skills development and I know now I was blissfully unaware of the faults in my variable logic. Oh, I did a great job for the time and before a lot of Storyline updates made it easier, but it was also wonderfully terrible. It’s good to look back and see how far you’ve come!

Without putting too much effort into the update, I fixed a lot of my confusing variables, updated the audio files using WellSaid Labs, and fixed the text issues created when Storyline updated a couple of years ago. The launch button at the top is to the new version, but if you’d like to see how far I’ve come and have a good laugh with me, you can launch the old version by clicking here. The text changes were nothing I could have anticipated, but notice at the end just how clunky and broken the state changes and triggers are. Enjoy! I know I did!

Brief Background: Open up any stock photo site and look for pictures and vectors featuring people. Look at characters in the authoring tools we use. One thing becomes clear - there is a very frustrating lack of diversity. Not only in skin color, but in body shape and physical limitations. While things are getting better, but slowly, unless a team has a graphic designer or photographer that can supplement where the stock falls short, education tends to have a pretty standard cast of characters. This is a problem when we sit down to design and develop education in which we say, "This is why this information is important to you," and then provide the learners with education filled with examples of people who do not look or live like them at all. 

Personal Goal & Design Solutions: I set out to offer another option. 

It doesn't solve all the problems, but I hoped it would start everyone thinking about those little ways we can make our education better reflect who our learners really are.

This short demo was built in Articulate Storyline 360. The purpose is to show that this potential solution would not take extra time and in fact, creating the underlying variables and extra graphics took me less than an hour total. 

This education demo was built as if it were targeted to new employees during orientation training at a hospital. The scene opens up on four new employees of various ages, experience levels, job types, and ethnicity. The learner is given an option to play the education as one of the four characters of their choice. Each also comes with different personalities which could play into the education for a little more fun. Once chosen, the new employee gets to their floor and meets their onboarding educator. This is where the demo ends. 

Project Goal: To demonstrate a possible solution to incorporating more diversity and personalization into our modules without significantly increasing production time. 

Personal Reflection

Making this demo was so much fun and it reminded me why I love being an instructional designer. So much of our work sometimes feels like order taking with very specific objectives and a very short timeline that we don't get a chance to really sit back and consider how we can make the education meaningful, really meaningful, to our learners. When projects are coming through at breakneck speed, sometimes thinking outside the box and tackling bigger solutions becomes a wish rather than a reality. I worked on this on my own time and reconnected with my love of instructional design and mentoring. Helping my colleagues grow with me is so rewarding to me personally.