E-learning

“When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’.” - Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management

We’ve all been hearing the term ‘design thinking’ being thrown around as part of conversations. You may have already read about how several companies such as IDEO pioneered the design thinking process. However, that just leads you into the next question: Can design thinking be applied in non-product design areas as well? For instance, would you be able to replace the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model and use design thinking as part of your learning framework?

Well, here’s an illustration of how we at Innostrat, did just that.

We were approached by an organization that wanted us to help in communicating a complex quarterly report to employees. Although people were expected to read the report, no one seemed to be actually doing so. In design thinking parlance, here was the ‘mystery’.

We began by trying to get a grip on the problem – the Immersion phase of the design thinking process. Our team approached the context of the problem from the client’s point of view as well as the learner’s point of view. We used this understanding to act as a springboard to address design challenges.

In the Observe phase, our designers asked as many questions as they could and reflected on the data they gathered.

We used the Define phase to focus on the needs of the learner. We asked the question: How might we get the learner to read the report? We applied the Pareto principle by asking the stakeholders to identify the top 20% key areas of the report. This is the source content that we would be working with.

All of our ideas came together during the Ideation phase. No ideas were rejected and even the smallest of ideas were encouraged. Our designers were virtually given an empty canvas to work on and they went ahead and dreamed the wildest and riskiest of ideas.

Our team finally zeroed in on the idea of creating a unique, customized, game-based e-learning solution – we decided to use Gamification. The game was in the form of a treasure hunt where the learner needed to reach the treasure by answering questions along the way. The learner was presented with a treasure map that incorporated check points where the learner had to stop to answer questions. All the questions were drawn from the quarterly report. In essence, the learner now had a compelling reason to read the report or validate their knowledge of the report. This was the heuristic that solved the mystery.

In the prototyping phase, we did rough and rapid sketches before we selected visually appealing, game-like screens for the course.

In the testing phase, we used stakeholder and learner feedback to refine the product. One of the key takeaways from this project was to be able to build an algorithm or a repeatable model for solving similar problems or ’mysteries’.

Our process leads us to believe that Design Thinking is not just an esoteric concept and it can be effectively applied to varied domains.