Tag: MUZZY LANE

Product developers need to know the customer they’re building their products for and how those products solve real customer problems. User-centered design employs personas – fictional composite characters that represent key customer behaviors – to focus and accelerate this process.

Personas can range from simple bullet point lists to thematic design canvases to back-stories worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. As long as the personas you create inform great design, help you understand and care about your customers, and result in delightful customer experiences, you’re doing it right. The world doesn’t have nearly enough of it.

At Muzzy Lane, we’ve built personas for instructional designers based on how they describe the demands of their jobs. Every instructional designer, or ID, is different. But IDs share the goals of increasing student engagement and student success. They also share the obstacles of unrealistic timeframes, strained budgets, and resistance from administration and faculty. They want tools that allow them to rapidly iterate on course designs based on input from subject matter experts, instructors, and students.

IDs excel at structuring and sequencing learning outcomes. But they’re not game designers. We wrestle with whether Author can help them figure out how to develop great interactive role-playing activities. But the truth is that building tools for IDs is only part of the design puzzle we need to solve.

Like them, we care most about whether students benefit from what our partners create with Muzzy Lane Author. We don’t control the content or flow of what IDs build. Our ability to influence and improve the student’s experience must reside within the tools themselves.

Tight feedback loops drive continuous improvement. While IDs carefully sift through feedback to improve the organization and presentation of content (which they can edit and re-release without any involvement from us), Muzzy Lane studies the same audit trails for clues about how to make navigating and interacting with the tools and activities more intuitive and polished. Our guiding principle: Easy enough never is.

If you’re a tool developer and there’s a content builder between you and consumers (whether it’s students, employees, or something else), it helps if the personas you keep in mind for those consumers are real people, not mash-ups. That way you can’t fake whether you care about them. You either do or you don’t. It will show in your product.

Our research on The Potential for Game-Based Learning to Improve Outcomes for Nontraditional Students, funded with a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provided us with an opportunity to interview and interact with hundreds of students.

We learned a lot from their stories and channeled those lessons into developing Muzzy Lane Author. Here are two examples.

Meg (not her real name) studies part-time at a community college where she seeks a phlebotomy certificate. Her classes are a mix of in person and online. She’s in her late thirties, married with two kids. “Actually, I think of my husband as my third child.” She claims to get five hours of sleep per night but concedes she often gets closer to three or four. She works full-time as a home health care assistant. Any day can turn into an unintentional Take Your Daughter to Work Day. When she’s in a line at the store or waiting to pick up one of her kids, she fits in school assignments on her phone. Her schedule is a constant juggling act:

Joe is single in his mid-twenties. He works full-time on the 11p-7a shifts as a certified nursing assistant at a large hospital. “I hate being a CNA but I still try to do a great job every night.” He sleeps for a few hours in the morning before going to the gym to jumpstart his brain for schoolwork. Joe’s a full-time student working toward an associate’s degree in computer science. Once he earns that he hopes to complete his bachelor’s degree at a four-year school if he can swing financial aid. His most essential study tool is his phone. He uses it for everything from video and audio lectures to flash cards to actual programming (yes, he codes on his phone). Full-time employee. Full-time student. No support system. What could possibly go wrong?

Meg and Joe identified time management as their #1 challenge. Family demands, financial pressures, and work conflicts can trip them up at any moment. So they need learning activities and assessments that fit into the cracks between their other responsibilities. By necessity they learn in sips, not gulps. Quick concentrated learning on their phones holds appeal. Mobile first assessments that function as virtual internships can help them prepare for real jobs. They want value and they want it fast.

As its name implies, active learning means getting students to do something: role-play a job, solve a complex problem, or apply what they’ve already learned. If your user’s active and engaged, getting automated feedback and understanding it, failing safely while progressing through a series of micro learning challenges, you may be onto something. There are several great tools out there for building such activities.

Retention and completion percentages don’t lie. The educational odds are stacked against Meg and Joe. But all of the forces that could derail them are what make the schools, publishers, and technology providers that serve them so determined to help them succeed. For us, little things, like knowing that Meg’s daughter gets bored when Meg takes her to work and doesn’t do her homework, and eventually Meg caves and lets her watch TV, motivate us to do the best job we can in the tiny slivers of time Meg can give us. Her daughter needs to get an education, too.

Our cloud-based Author service recently turned one year old. In software years, that puts it roughly in middle school – full of potential but still awkward and gangly, trying hard to impress and fit in, pimply but increasingly attentive to its looks. From a developmental standpoint, our Author partners and their end users are helping us raise Author to maturity. It’s a thrilling and occasionally terrifying process, just like raising real kids.

We try to keep ourselves honest by conferring upon users like Meg and Joe the status implied by the relative sizes of those snug-fitting Russian dolls. “How will it work for Meg?” is a great question to ask alongside “How will it help IDs?” before implementing any new features. “How can we help Meg get outside of (i.e. consume, master, digest) these learning objectives most effectively?” If it doesn’t work for the people we care about most, why are we doing it?

Who are your Megs and Joes?

We still have a ton to learn. If you are a software-as-a-service provider with similar challenges, an instructional designer or SME test-driving interactive authoring tools, a teacher or champion of cutting edge UX, or a student/employee, we would love to hear and learn from you.