Before leaping into the world of designing my dashboard and how I want it to flow, I wanted to take some time and focus on one of the end users. To do this, I employed an approach called a design story or design narrative that allowed me to build out the problem that would encourage a user to use the Informal Learning Lab Dashboard. Below is my narrative.
Gerald Harris is an instructional designer and corporate trainer at Horizon Analytics. He has worked for the company for over two years, designing and developing skills-based training for the 5000+ employee data analytics company.
He has a Masters in Instructional Design and recognizes the importance of understanding his audience so he can design the best training to fit their needs. Over the last few months, he has been leading in-person trainings on AI integration to help streamline employee workflows.
During these training sessions, there is time for a lot of open discussion around how employees are currently using AI, the challenges they are encountering, and workshopping how they are solving those issues. As Gerald listened, he heard how the employees are practicing self-directed learning using various methods, YouTube videos, articles, podcasts, asking the company’s AI chatbot, knowledge base articles, and other job aides.
Gerald began to wonder about the bigger picture of how his audience is getting information while they are problem-solving in the flow of work. He wondered about what forms of training they gravitate towards the most and what trends there are about the frequency that individuals are searching for information. If he could understand the learning materials that his audience uses in their day-to-day work, he could more effectively develop resources that align with the needs of the employees which could in turn help to solve problems faster.
Over a coffee break, Gerald was describing this gap to Annette in the people analytics group.
“If only there was a place I could go where I could see what types of resources employees were engaging with during their workday, it would help our team design and develop better training resources.”
Annette said it sounded like what he needed was a dashboard that would help him track the informal learning of the employees. Luckily, she had just read about the Informal Learning Lab Dashboard that could do just that and be fully customizable to any organization and their data streams.
She sent over the link to the article and Gerald quickly sent out an email for a demo. The Informal Learning Lab Dashboard seemed like the perfect method to be able to connect the dots with how employees learned in the course of their daily work and the resources that the Learning and Development team were designing.
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