eLearning Sample

Challenge

The client was a non-profit organization with a focus on advocating for their local autistic community. They wanted to incentivize local businesses to better accommodate the unique needs of their community's autistic customers. Their idea was to create a certification program that would reward local businesses for completing a training course. The contents of this single course would need to be general enough to apply to a variety of customer-facing industries, potentially including childhood programs, entertainment venues, food services, hospitality providers, medical settings, retail stores, and travel agencies, all of which experience very different settings and customer interactions. My challenge as a designer was to achieve such breadth of relevance without sacrificing specific depth of knowledge. Regardless of their vast array of differences, each unique participant still needed to take away a clearly defined, actionable list of items that they could immediately begin to implement. This would require respect for each industry's different needs and perspectives, while still respecting each participant's time by keeping all information relevant and broadly applicable.

Solution

In order for the training course to result in local businesses meeting the needs of autistic customers, the course would first need to educate local businesses about what those needs are, and then make them aware of the different ways in which those needs can be met. Due to the potential diversity of businesses that might participate in the course, a one-size-fits-all implementation plan could not be prescribed by the training. I chose instead to place the focus of this education on "things to consider" rather than "things to do," so that each participating business would ultimately leave prepared and encouraged to develop their own accommodation plan as suited to their own unique workplace.

Since a one-size-fits-all action plan could not be prescribed to participants, and the course was instead preparing them to develop an action plan of their own, I also needed to ensure that the course participants would actually follow through on doing that extra homework. My solution to this was to include an underlying theme of building participants' empathy for autistic individuals. This was accomplished through the frequent use of relatable analogies and customer stories, as creating personal and emotional connections to the course content would ensure a more lasting impression and spark participants' motivation to act.

The final assessment ties all of these components together. The majority of question prompts begin by presenting a realistic customer experience in order to build a sense of empathy, with each question taking place in a different industry environment so as to stay inclusive of all course participants. Then each prompt tasks participants with correctly identifying the general concept that can help staff appropriately respond to the situation, rather than narrowing in on any industry-specific actions that could be taken.

Result

The result being shown above is the final product that was delivered to the client, taking the form of an eLearning course created in Articulate Rise. The delivered product only differed from this preview version in its navigation. This preview version allows for unrestricted navigation, while the actual product restricts the navigation for course participants in order to ensure the controlled scaffolding of information from beginning to end. The client provides access to local businesses that express interest and receives data on course participants' performance scores. They then provide certification and rewards to participating businesses after verifying that 80% of their customer-facing staff has achieved a satisfactory score at the end of the course.