Facing Facets
As you can probably tell by now, most of what we do at NogginLabs is e-learning. And of a lot of this e-learning is rooted in telling stories, because we think that stories are a great mechanism for driving learning.
To support that, a lot in our courseware features repositories of testimonials and stories from real-life experts sharing insight and examples of how they were able to handle particular challenges or issues. Hearing an authentic story from a real-life person is about a million, billion times more engaging and relevant to a learner than reading boilerplate text about best practices, right? We think so too.
The thing is, it can be difficult to organize all that information in a coherent, intuitive way so that learners can find the stories that are most relevant to them without requiring them to browse through all the different stories in the system all willy-nilly.
For situations where people have a really good idea of what kind of story they want to hear, something like a regular search query would be sufficient. They could type in whatever query they have, and navigate directly to piece of content that they were looking for.
Faceted search and guided navigation, on the other hand, work really well in situations where people don’t know exactly what they need to know. Without getting too far into the details, faceted search allows each object in a system to be assigned with multiple classifications. That means that you can get to any one thing via multiple, different ways. Using the different points of access allows users to discover those stories that they didn’t quite know they needed to hear.
A recent Webinar rekindled my interest in faceted search, and how it applies to the work that we do. The session was led by Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang (who literally wrote the/a book on Faceted Search) of Endeca, who are not only super-smart and interesting but, for the record, had A+ speaking voices.
Although it’s kind of new to us, guided navigation and faceted classification are both de rigueur in things like e-commerce. Let’s take a quick look Amazon.com as an example:
Amazon.com allows users to browse for books by format, category, and price. Amazon.com users can navigate through the items in, say, the Books section by drilling down through a number of different category headings like “Price”, “Genre” and “Format” to find, for example, an inexpensive murder-mystery that can be downloaded onto a Kindle. And users can get to that object through a couple different ways.
By manipulating these different facets of classification in different orders, learners can intuitively find the content they need by searching by the facet that’s most relevant to them.
But what’s that mean for us in e-learning land?
Say we’re building a resource to support salespeople – salespeople in an industry with a complex, constantly evolving set of products serving a complex, constantly evolving customer base in a complex, constantly evolving marketplace. That’s a tough job, and in order to be successful, those salespeople need to have a wide range of knowledge.
A well-indexed repository of expert stories would allow salespeople to leverage our tool to quickly review key concepts going into sales interactions and to find stories that are targeted to specific customers, products, market competitors, or any other category that’s particularly useful.
So, in our system, we might have an expert story with a senior salesperson telling a story about how she went into a conversation about “Solution X” with “Customer Profile X,” but how, during the course of that meeting, she was realized that Customer X’s business would actually be better served by “Solution Y” and was able to capitalize on that opportunity. And now the customer is happy and that salesperson has earned enough commission to buy a fleet of jet skis, all thanks to asking the right questions.
A story like that speaks to a point that you’ll find in almost every possible kind of sales training – find out what your customers need, don’t make assumptions. But this story is rooted in the language of that organization/industry and is put in a real-world context that’s familiar and authentic to the learner. It’s a real person talking to the learner in real language, not in the boilerplate language of PowerPoint bullet-points.
Again, the issue for us as designers is ensuring that the learner who would get the most from a particular story actually hears it.
So we would index that story in our system under attributes that correspond to “Customer Profile” and “Solution Type,” and we might even have access points for something such as “Needs Assessment.” The learner would be able to access that piece of content by using any of these lines of entry to find stories that are relevant to a product they support… a challenge that they’ve been facing in the field… or a type of prospect that they’re about to engage.
Organizing repositories of testimonials and expert with faceted search principles allows us to provide learners with a flexible learning experience that supports exploratory learning experiences that allow for multiple lines of inquiry. And that adds a lot of value to e-learning courseware, right? We think so too.
Bill Cochran
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Senior Instructional Designer
NogginLabs, Inc.