The more I sit down and look into the creation of this design, more ideas seem to come to my mind. What I have narrowed my project down to is this: I will create a presentation that will essentially walk three different potential customers through my company's product (Stride Academy). The three customers will be: A) Principal of a school, B) Teacher in a school, and C) Student in a school. My thought is to have an initial page with three characters: A, B, and C with a the heading "If you are a Principal, Click Here, etc. Following the design pattern of Broken Co-Worker, or choose your own adventure, the following screens will be different depending on each selection.
For the Principal selection, the idea is to share the benefit of using the technology program from a school perspective. Showing school wide progress, emphasizing engagement through technology, will be important. For the Teacher selection, the emphasis will be on engaging through standards that are currently being taught. Focus will be on Student Grouping report, Quiz Builder, resources that will benefit the teacher during the school day. For the Student selection, the emphasis will be on the games and the motivation of the program. Highlighting badges, coins, games, and ease of use will be key.
I went back and watched a few of the example Storyline projects again for inspiration and really liked the Sales Orientation layout. I can see a mix between that design and Broken Co-Worker working really well for this project. I also watched the Lynda tutorials of Storyline and believe it should be fairly straight forward to manipulate through. I haven't used Storyline before so I am looking forward to diving in and putting the ideas to practice.
Brooks, I love your idea of making the presentation interactive. I think the Sales Orientation and Broken Coworker are awesome design guides for a style that would work well for your audience. As a high school math teacher, my experience with private programs and applications has not been very good (but GADOE ones are worse!). Few are well-aligned at the high school level, the games are often not aligned to the standards and level they say they are, and then often don't work right. Many schools are adopting programs like Classworks, which Elementary teachers seem happy with but it was completely inefficient and inappropriate at the high school level and we (thankfully) were heard and allowed to discontinue use within weeks of the adoption. I tell you this all for a reason. 1) I'd like to see programs address the needs of upper-level math students 2) It is usually a district or at least school-wide adoption, which means teachers are being forced to use something they have no experience with and may begin use with a predetermined negative attitude...so with that in mind any introduction needs to be very user-friendly. All the tools, bells and whistles are great and teachers will likely pick all of that up over time IF they and their students find the program easy to navigate and figure out how to use without laborious tutorials or professional development training sessions. From my perspective it is THAT which has to be conveyed to get teachers to buy in to the idea, and whoever your point of contact is for the sale knows this (although sometimes they ignore it, unfortunately). I have been in Sales (non-educational) and have been a teacher for the past 16 years. I know you have to convince us you are solving a problem and making our job easier and student learning more effective. That's no small task to convey in a short video! Kyle suggested to me a "sandbox" environment for a Schoology training session I'm working on. I think the same principal would apply for you as well. If a prospective user can "play" in a preset environment and find they can successfully and easily get around and create/modify/find the tools they might need, then they will be more likely to buy the product. Good luck with the project and what looks like a terrific product/service!
ReplyDelete