Don’t click here. No, really, don’t.

How to easily add value when including links in your content

• Click here for more information (about what?)
• Follow the process here (which process?)
• Submit the webform here (which webform?)
• See the instructions here (which instructions?)

*These links are not links. Just saying …

Using ‘here’ as your link text isn’t very helpful. Plus it goes against best practice usability principles as it’s not kind to people who use assistive software for vision impairments. The app will read out the links as ‘here, here and here’. 

‘Here’ doesn’t tell your reader where you’re taking them. ‘Here’ is what you should do instead:

• To find out more see: Managing Complaints
• Follow the Cheque Refunds process
• Submit our Contact Us webform
• See: How to apply for course credits

Much more informative. Helps everyone. 

Bob (not your uncle) needs your help

How clean-cut content improves comprehension

Picture Bob, one of your awesome front-line employees. He scans your knowledge articles while trying to help a customer, Mrs Mangels. It’s noisy; the lights are so bright. He swivels between systems…

His tummy growls because he should have gone to lunch 10 minutes ago. Mrs M is grumpy because she’s been waiting ‘for evah’. His Team Leader pings him asking why he hasn’t done that mandatory training course. He finds the right page but there’s so much info to absorb. Hard to scan. Confusing layout. Distracting words. ‘Why can’t they just get to the point!’ Now Bob has a headache. Poor Bob.

Many studies report that reading digital text takes more brain power than perusing physical print and people find it a tad harder to remember the content. Plus, they’re usually not as focused as they would be if curled up in a cosy chair with a Harry Potter novel, a steaming mug of cocoa and a block of Old Gold sneakily tucked under a cushion.

They also don’t tend to read word by word but continually skip forward. And sometimes jump back if they didn’t grasp the meaning or get waylaid by odd words or cluttered punctuation.

In the book ‘Write to the Point’ the author states, ‘We live in an age that favours light punctuation.’

Sam Leith

This perhaps rattles some of you because ‘it weren’t like that in my day, chuck’, and you really, really want to keep adding full stops at the end of your dot points, don’t you (please don’t).

In the online environment people’s gaze bounces from menus, to links, to scrollbars and whatever else is visually thrown at them (ermahgerd, berbles!). Have a look at this Wikipedia entry on Eye movement in reading if you so wish.

Combine Bob’s working environment with something called ‘continuous partial attention’, coined by technology consultant Linda Stone.

She explains it as ‘an always on, anywhere, anytime behaviour that creates an artificial sense of crisis. We are always on high alert, demanding multiple cognitively complex actions from ourselves. We are reaching to keep a top priority in focus, while scanning the periphery to see if we are missing other opportunities. Who’s ringing? How many emails? What’s on my to-do list? What time is it in Bangalore?’.

You experience this yourself all the time; talking on the phone and driving (hands-free of course), drafting an email while on a Zoom meeting (Bob! You’re on mute!), listening to mum while texting your BFF on your iPhone under the table (yes, mum…).

So next time you’re writing a knowledge article, put yourself in Bob’s shoes (size 10). Strip that content down and pepper it with lovely lists. Throw out some of that loitering, up-to-no-good punctuation. Help Bob. Bob will thank you.

Tips:

• Strive for simplicity of thought and simplicity of punctuation will follow – a Style Guide is your friend
• No punctuation at the end of list points* (one sentence per point), titles or headings
• Single quote marks, not double
• Avoid Trademark symbols in internal content
• Be frugal with exclamation marks (one is sufficient)

* Various schools of thought on this but whatever you decide, be consistent – I prefer clean, simple formatting so that my publishers don’t need to ‘think’.

Christmas Fare & Quirks

A jolly tale of festive stuffing (or why avoiding FAQs in Knowledge articles is a tasty treat)

 

In the weeks leading up to Christmas I start hoarding delicious seasonal goodies each time I pop into the supermarket.

Creamy brie, tangy goat cheese; local Yarra Valley delights. Aromatic speciality pates, jars of tiny, piquant olives and sweet pickles, paper-thin prosciutto, artisan wafers and other tasty treats.

Once home, I pack them at the back of the fridge, ready at hand ‘just in case’.

Just in case visitors pop in over the festive season. Just in case we decide to partake of a spontaneous picnic in the park. Just in case a hastily wrapped something is needed as a last-minute gift. Just in case…

The problem is I buy too many things. Every year, most of my Santa stash goes unused. I look smugly at my hoard and when temptation to open a packet or jar strikes, think ‘not yet, not yet’. Or the goodies get hidden behind leftovers and other everyday items, and suddenly they’re past their use by date.

This year, I’m determined to be more judicious in my purchases. I’m also not going to bury my bits and bobs at the back of the fridge; they’ll be in plain sight where I can see them. I shall use them up as needed, without remorse (one can always buy more).

I feel the same way about FAQs in knowledge content. It’s tempting to add them ‘just in case’.  Just in case the main content isn’t clear enough. Just in case we feel the need to stock up on some extra details. Just in case someone insists ‘but, we need them – just in case!’

They linger at the end of articles, mouldering away ‘out of sight, out of mind’ instead of being placed in handy spots where our people can find them ‘in the moment’. Where the information should logically sit – in Key Points, Pricing or Instructions.

Sometimes they’re also a double-up, same content written in a different way, resulting in an over-indulged ‘ate one mince pie too many, push the chair back from the table’, kind of malaise.

So, as one of your New Year’s Resolutions, make it your mission to free your articles from FAQs. Keep all the tasty morsels of knowledge where people can get at them, when they need it. Leave them feeling festively feasted, not stuffed like a turkey dinner.

Merry Christmas, one and all. (Fare & Quirks – see what we did there… FAQs. Ho Ho Ho)

What do you call Santa’s little helpers? Subordinate Clauses.

Designing an emag in PowerPoint! Are you crazy! Yes, yes I am…

I was recently asked to design a template for a magazine style monthly publication, to be produced under the patronage of our GMD and distributed to all staff in our Business Unit (Telstra Consumer and Telstra Country Wide).

The aim was to ‘connect’ our people together, share good news stories, highlight what individuals are doing in the community, and generally let them know that the business is listening and taking on board their feedback. Feedback about processes, products, systems – anything that needs changed and can be changed to make their jobs easier or better serve our customers.

Lovely, I thought. I’ve wanted to learn InDesign so what a good excuse. I grabbed a book, checked out a few tutorials at Lynda.com and off I went. I was fairly pleased with the design – quite different to anything else that was being published internally, it looked fresh and interesting.

While waiting for the content for the first edition, I managed to get involved in creating a template for another magazine style newsletter for the Contact Centres. As they were going to be managing it themselves and didn’t have InDesign, I decided to build their template in PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint.

Now before you all run away screaming into the night in horror, let me tell you that good old PPT is quite handy – if you can get out of the ‘pack/deck’ mentality and think of it as a general purpose layout tool. It’s far less fiddly than InDesign, much easier to use than MS Publisher, and more flexible than Word. Its design tools have greatly improved in recent versions, making the creation of flyers, posters, desk cards, handouts and the like, fast but not furious. And that’s what I use it for, much more than I do for decks.

In the end, the two parties involved with both magazines merged forces and we went with the PPT version. Mainly because it wasn’t clear who was going to be  managing it going foward and I didn’t know what tools they might have access to or knowledge of.

I really quite like it, but the best thing is that just about anyone else can take over what you created and run with it. If they aren’t quite as designy orientated as you, they may not run as well, but run they can. Just as well, as I am now moving on to another role.

So, whatever tools you are using, try and think of them just as that – tools that can help you be creative, quickly, without having to learn something new.

Educate 40,000 employees about Social Media? No Problem!

That Was Then

When my employer (Telstra BigPond) decided to foray into the world of Twitter to extend our customer support options, I was delighted as at some point I’d suggested this could be a good idea, having read of the success of @zappos and others. My delight quickly turned to forehead slapping on watching the promising launch unravel itself amidst the scornful jeers of the Twitterverse which knew just as well as I did that we were ‘doing it wrong’.

I flagged some of the glaring issues with someone on the project team a day or so after the account went live (I think it was a Thursday from memory) but the response was underwhelming. So I went to the top. Our GM at the time knew a thing or two about this stuff and I had confidence that he would give my very concerned Saturday morning email some thought. Next thing I knew, I was yanked into an 8am Monday morning focus group with a couple of like-minded Telstra tweeps to help us get on the right track, with the right people and the right foundations.

This Is Now

That was in October 2008. Today, the guys in our @bigpondteam and @telstra Twitter teams are doing a fabulous job of supporting our customers, answering questions and generally just doing what they can to reach out and assist people, and even have a bit of fun.

And since then, Telstra now has a policy to help our staff know what’s expected of them when it comes to participating in online communities. The 3Rs of Social Media Engagement, put together by Telstra Public Policy & Communication, was made public in the spirit of transparency, but also with the hope that it might be a useful basis for others to start thinking about their own policy.

So that’s how I became ‘officially’ involved in ‘Social Media’ although in reality I’ve been into it ever since I sat fawning over my very first modem (56k!), building r.e.t.r.o.c.i.t.y in 1989 (link via wayback machine), and spending long hours on DreamWeaver forums.

Spreading The Word About The 3Rs

During one of many chats while the 3Rs were being formulated and discussed on an internal Wiki, @M_Hickinbotham, our main Social Media dude, raised the topic of creating a supporting introductory training guide. If we were to make it part of our mandatory curriculum, a short online module seemed most appropriate, given the large number of staff and the fact they are located right across Australia. This could then be followed up with more specific workshops and accreditation training when required.

‘Ahem’, said I, ‘I just happen to be an eLearning developer and might be able to help, you know –  provide a bit of advice and what not.’ Silly me…

Why Online?

We wanted something different from the usual internal corporate courses, which quite frankly are usually boring and text-heavy. It was also important for it to be flexible and easy to update to accommodate possible revisions to the fledgling 3Rs policy, as well as cope with the rapidly changing Social Media arena. A full-on video production with real participants, or even using an external developer would have made this difficult and costly. It also needed to suit a wide range of people, with varying levels of online involvement, from none to highly active.

To cut to the chase, I ended up developing the training package based on the 3Rs policy, from drafting the content to creating the graphics and animations and even being the ‘voice’ of Lilly, our friendly CodeBaby avatar. A bit of tweaking and editing to keep legals and others happy, some guidance and advice from Mike and @danmikhael and it was done and dusted in a couple of weeks. (And no, it was not driven by HR, nor did Marketing or IT have anything to do with it).

How’d We Do?

At this point, we have around 40,000 enrolments with 15,000 35,000 completed so far; 6000 people didn’t wait to be added via the bulk enrolment process but actually signed themselves up after viewing a small intro snippet accompanying the launch intranet article.  We’ve had so many great comments from staff who really appreciated the ‘left field’ approach but my favourite piece of feedback from one of our employees goes like this:

‘I just wanted to say that this has to be the best format of online training that I have had in all the time I have been with Telstra.  I almost knew it would be which is why I did it early on a Saturday morning – I thought it might be fun and it was. Please pass this message on to the developers – Well done! And, I am not a Gen Y’er I am a Boomer :)’

Going Public

In December 2009, the package (minus the accompanying workbook(let) and assessment) was made available to the public. A scary moment for myself, however the majority of feedback has been very positive, not just about the content and presentation, but about Telstra’s bold move to both make the training mandatory and to host an external version.

Only one or two posts thought the delivery method corny or even ‘too radical for some‘ and the voice ‘cringeworthy’ (gee, thanks) ‘, but overall there have been some great tweets and comments:

‘That voice is pretty great. I’ve actually never seen a corporate social media policy presented this creatively. Like the digital characters too. All around, impressive job by Telstra.’

‘I love that they are making everything available online – transparency is great. Not only does it show that they care about the public’s opinion but it also helps those of us tasked with creating our own social media policies for our organizations! Thanks for posting this!’

‘This is brilliant! This is part of what social media’s all about, sharing ideas to help others while looking for ways to improve and, for corporations, providing a venue for transparency. Now that’s a company I’d like to work for!’

Behind The Scenes

We’ve had quite a few enquiries from around the globe asking how the module was put together – this post explains how I developed a previous course along similar lines. The main difference with the 3rs is that captioning is now available in the CodeBaby application but I wanted this feature to be optional in the animations. I ended up creating two versions of each animation (captioned/not captioned) and set up a variable within the flash interface to toggle these on or off depending on your preference.

Just a few of the related posts seen around the web:

• eGov.au – Telstra publishes staff social media training package
• Social Media Training Guide & Video: this is free yet priceless!
• Does your business get it? – lessons from Australia
• Telstra Makes the Social Media Call
• How Telstra trained 12,000 staff
• Impressive Social Media Training
• The 3 Rs of social media engagement – a model for corporate policy training
• Best Employee Training Program for Social Media
• ‘Not foul lousy PowerPoint slides and PDFs’ (Google translated)
• Australian Telstra is far, far out the window… and done well (Google translated)
• Social Media Policy: Telstra shows how it’s done! (Google translated)

Using CodeBaby to Create an Interactive Comic

In a previous post I mentioned that I’d won a 2009 LearnX Award for an online course I created for my employer, Telstra BigPond, using the wonderful CodeBaby application.

The lovely CodeBaby people have popped a brief snippet of said course on their site as an elearning case study. Before you skip over there to have a look, I thought I’d just explain, briefly, how I put it all together.

In one sense, it’s quite a task for one person to do something like this from scratch in a short timeframe, mainly due to the need for attention to detail and being able to multi-task with different content and apps. On the other hand, using a combination of tools makes it possible for a single developer to produce something quite sophisticated and effective.

Why a Comic?
When you are producing material about expected behaviours it can sometimes make the learner feel a little anxious or possibly negative up front. As this course is about workplace culture and high performance I decided that a comic book story-telling format would immediately generate interest and a compulsion to ‘turn the page’ to find out what happens, rather than just relaying information.

I’m a big fan of story-telling anyway; providing examples that are meaningful and that produce an emotional reaction is much better than paragraphs of text.

This project is an interactive comic created with a range of different software tools but you can create your own comic using PowerPoint and some clip art or stock photos. If you have Articulate then adding audio is a breeze. But here’s what I used:

Ingredients:

• CodeBaby
• Flash
• The Flash Flipping Book Component
• Fireworks (or other graphics software)
• Comic Life
• Wavepad (or other audio editing software)
• Blue SnowBall Microphone (or other mic)

Writing the Script
It’s really important to make your stakeholders understand that this is a detailed production and that you get sign-off on the content before you start development. When you’re dealing with audio and animation you really don’t want to be going back and making changes. That said, Codebaby does make this much easier than if you were using video and actors!

As this is a story format, the content needs to be written as a script. I simply use Word to set out the storyboard and mark which bits are audio and which are visuals/text/animations. This helps your reviewers to understand the flow and how the end result will ‘look’. I don’t have time to create mock-ups and I usually develop on my own so I can picture what I want to do in my head, but if you’re working with a team you may need to put more effort into this step.

When I start writing I often have a jumble of disparate facts and figures, bits from legals and SMEs. It can be daunting to make a start but I plonk it all into the document, separating each topic or idea into a table cell. Then I can begin to get rid of duplicate or similar information, move the order around and it soon begins to make sense.

Keep the tone conversational and mark words or phrases that should be emphasized when spoken. If you’re doing the audio recording yourself, you’ll be familiar enough with the content to know what you want to do with it – read it out loud as you write to hear how it will sound. If you’ll be handing it on to someone else, you’ll need to provide more specific direction.

Flipping Book
Realistic flipping pages are very difficult to accomplish in Flash and require more programming skills than I will ever have so a pre-built component was the way to go for me. I used Flipping Book which is very customisable. Your content is ‘pulled’ into the component through an XML text file which specifies each page as a jpeg, png, or swf file.

I created the surrounding interface in Flash, including the introduction, conclusion, music controls, and a Flash menu component. Flipping Book just drops onto the stage as its own component.

Audio
First step is the audio. I use a Blue Snowball microphone (because it’s so cool looking!) and a portable soundbooth to record each section as separate wave files. Make sure you do your recording under the same conditions – same room, same distance from the mic, same volume – in case you do need to re-record a section. I’ve tried Audacity and SoundBooth but keep coming back to WavePad; I just like the easy to use interface and it does the job quickly. More audio tips from me.

CodeBaby
Got your audio? Now you can play with the wonderful CodeBaby! It’s such a fun app to use and makes you feel like a real director. I use one of the stock characters, but you can have one custom made if you need a particular look, (it comes with quite a big selection of male and female avatars to choose from).

I wanted the CodeBaby pieces to stand out and be reserved for the main character, rather than animate the entire comic. I can’t draw so I hit on the (brilliant!) idea of using the other stock characters to create the comic effect by posing them and taking screenshots.

This worked out terrifically well as I could import the screenshots into another application (Comic Life), combining them into scenes, adding speech bubbles etc without having to engage other people for more audio work or spend more time producing complex multi-character animations, which I didn’t have time for.

Because I’m going to insert each CodeBaby animation into a separate swf file I produce them individually; import an audio file, animate the character and export as a swf.

It helps to think about your naming conventions when you are handling so many files eg audio01.wav goes into codebaby01.swf which goes into flashcb01.swf and so on.

The extra good news is that the latest version of CodeBaby includes captioning. It’s an enhancement that’s in its early stages of development but a nice addition none the less.

Fireworks
I paste my CodeBaby screenshots into Fireworks to crop, resize or position etc. Saving them as PNGs means I can then import them into Comic Life in a high quality format. I also use Fireworks to lay out pages that aren’t in the comic format; these could be graphs or some other illustration.

You’re probably now getting an idea of what a detailed process this type of project actually is…

Comic Life
You don’t absolutely need Comic Life for this but it does help lay out your non-flash pages and makes it easy to add different kinds of speech bubbles and add text or other effects. You can import backgrounds and the CodeBaby character pngs into ‘frames’. I export each Comic Life page as a high quality PNG. Make sure the page sizes match the Flipping Book component page size.

I also used Comic Life to create the comic style headings by taking screenshots of the text and editing them in Fireworks, then copy and pasting into Flash.

Are you getting confused yet?

Flash
It’s a bit complex to explain in this post but I created a Flash file that pulled a CodeBaby animation (swf) into an empty movie clip, added a preloader progress bar for each clip, some smarts for checking if it had loaded, and added controls to stop, play or scrub the clip. Looking at the code I’m not quite sure how I managed it, but I did. Again, make sure your page size matches.

Once this file was set up it was just a matter of making a copy and changing the code to pull in a different swf, or move the page contents around for differently sized CodeBaby animations or other content.

Flipping Book XML
I don’t complete all the different components before starting to put the comic together as I find compiling it as I go often sparks new ideas or helps me iron out layout issues, find a better page order and so on.

The Flipping Book XML text file makes it easy to pop in new pages as you go or change the order around – it’s just a matter of quickly editing it in Notepad and resaving the file.

The Results
There are a lot of other issues and steps in such a project but I hope this overview gives you some ideas of your own. You can see the results in the case study snippet.

CodeBaby and me – LearnX award winning team!

If you had been in my kitchen one Thursday afternoon in March you may have wondered why I was hopping up and down, clapping my sweaty little hands and squealing with glee. Luckily this silliness lasted but a few minutes before my usual calm serenity returned.

You see, I’d just found out in a roundabout way that I had won a LearnX award, to be presented at their April 2009 conference. Considering the fact that I had only entered the previous week, a day before the deadline, the win came as quite a surprise but a pleasant one to be sure. I hadn’t even intended to enter, but was encouraged to do so by a delightful man from Symmetree.

Some time last year I persuaded my employer to fork out a tidy sum so that I could get my greedy paws on the fantastic CodeBaby animated avatar software – don’t ask me how, they must have just come back from a long lunch. We purchased said software through the Australian supplier, Roland from Symmetree.

Over the following few months Roland would contact me about program updates and interesting bits and bobs (helpful chappy that he is). During one conversation I mentioned how I was using CodeBaby to create an online course in comic book format and he was intrigued. I promised to send him a copy of the finished project. I did. He was quite impressed. In fact, he sent it to the CodeBaby boffins and they were equally impressed. How nice, I thought.

At the time, he made mention of the Awards and that he thought I should enter. ‘Pshaw!’ I said. (Actually, I think I tittered and said ‘Really? Oh well, I’ll think about it’ and promptly thought no more about it). That was, until Roland called to say that he thought my course was so good that he’d persuaded his company to pay my entry fee if I agreed and would prepare the submission. What a nice fellow!

So, in the end I did enter, I did win the platinum award for my category and a shiny crystal trophy is now gathering dust on my desk. Huzzah!

Wanna See The Course?
You will be able to quite soon because the CodeBaby people, rather happy that their software was a major reason for the win, asked if they could host my files on the Showcase section of their site. They also actually really liked the content and how I had incorporated CodeBaby in a unique way – taking still shots of the characters to create the comic book effect. In the words of their product managers, “It was so interactive and engaging, we didn’t want to stop until the very end”. Nice.

They are also using it ‘on the road’ as a nice demo example of how their product can help a developer autonomously create quite a sophisticated elearning experience.

So stay tuned and I’ll post a link and a bit more about how I created the module when it’s up and running. Here’s the link to the post explaining how the course was created.