When you create training material or an e-learning course, you do a target audience analysis. You basically think from a learner’s perspective while  designing a training.  You do this so that the learning process is effective.

Now when it comes to creating help manuals or user manuals for applications, do you apply the same principle?

 I have heard people say that when you do Technical Writing, you do not have to understand the user’s mind. All that you have to do is understand how the application functions and document all the tasks and procedures to work with the application. I partly agree with this.

However I believe there is much more than understanding the application and features when it comes to creating  user manuals. When you create user manuals, target user analysis is extremely crucial. When I say target user analysis, I do not mean that you need to interview prospective users of the application. Target user analysis for user manuals has got to do a lot about determining how a user would use the application or product.

How does this matter?  How does it help?

Before we  proceed, download this  N73 user manual.

The  N73 user manual is :

• Nice looking
• Covers all features
• Has all the instructions to use the features

Well, is that not enough?

Let us look at the Table of Contents (TOC)  of the manual.

Here is a snapshot of  the Table of Contents  (TOC) of the N73 user manual:

When you check the TOC closely:

• Topics such as Camera, Media Applications have been given maximum priority because they are placed in the first page of the TOC.
• Topics  such as Making Calls and Messaging have been placed in the second page of the TOC.
• Topic such as Support has been placed in the first page of the TOC.

 Let us shift our focus on the user. When a user uses any phone, what does he/she use it for?  Let us list a few things for which a user might use his/her phone for:

1. Make Calls
2. Message
3. Listen to Music/Radio
4. Take Pictures

Things listed above form the natural workflow of a phone. In any phone, the priority is to make a call and then may be to send an SMS. Music Player and Camera are nice to have, cool features.

Now imagine a user looking for information on how to make calls using N73. He/she has to go to page 63 to learn how to make calls when ironically anyone will want to first make a call using a phone.

One reason why the N73 help manual gives a lot of priority to extra features in the phone is to bring those features to the user’s attention. Many people today buy a phone for its additional features like music player, camera etc. This is valid.  N73 is fairly easy application/product to use and you do not need a help manual to teach you how to use it. So may be it does not matter how you structure information in user manuals for such products.

You have other complex software applications and people feel completely lost and clueless about where to begin and how to proceed.Most people scan user manuals or look for the information they want. In such cases, when the information structure in your user manual reflects the product’s natural workflow, it helps a great deal. Users instantly get a clue about the logical order of working with the features in the product.

 I have tried this and it really works well.

Please leave your comments/thoughts. I would love to hear from you

This month’s game was suggested by Jacob Everist.  The game Time Fcuk as Jacob puts it is  really good mind-twisting game. It is perplexing and a lot of fun.

This is what Jacob has to say about the game:

I played it through and I’m not sure if there’s more than one ending. Basically I like the innovative puzzler gameplay of shifting gravity
and shifting dimensions.  I also like the psychotic stream of consciousness you get from text messages of your past and future self.
 Just the main screen tells you what kind of game it is.  Just look at.  It looks like the deranged writings of schizophrenic neighbor I
once had.  I also like the intentional use of pixelated graphics.

My views about the game

I really think Time Fcuk is a complicated game and I would not play this game for fun because it taxes your brain a lot. I am still figuring out what  this game is all about. I also see I enjoy playing it even without making much sense of the story or concept.

I like the changing perspectives when you press A in your keyboard. This is something innovative.  I also like the background score which gives an eerie feeling.

However I feel this game is not so easy to play.

Let me know what you think

I am glad to announce that I am an independent professional now. This is something I always wanted to do and it has finally happened now.

I launched my site: http://thewritersgateway.com/ that gives an overview of the kind of services I will offer. Of course, there are some pages to be updated. The site will look complete in the coming days.

I just wanted to share this piece of news with my readers and please wish me good luck in my venture.

In case you are interested in my services, please feel free to contact me

I will continue to share useful information in this blog.

So keep reading!

Cheers,

Rupa

Have you seen a kid take a toy apart and fix the toy together again?  This might seem like a childish act of taking things apart just for fun. But then this childish act of taking things apart can also be a huge learning process. 

Here is someone who talks about how he and his son break down a musical piece and  learn to put the parts and phrases together:

Just like working through a reverse engineering problem, my son and I first break each piece down into its individual phrases.  We then experiment with different strategies for learning each phrase, often further breaking a phrase down into smaller parts.  We finally “solve”  a piece by slowing putting its parts and phrases back together.

I have also seen people who have no knowledge in HTML design web pages by just analyzing how other web pages have been designed.

When you are trying to learn Instructional Design, you start with the concepts and then go on to do practical exercises on analysis, design and storyboarding.

Well, how about breaking any training material or e-learning course apart before you actually learn to create one?

Yes, I am talking about reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material to learn how to do Instructional Designing.

Before we proceed further, let us understand what reverse engineering is all about.

What is Reverse Engineering?

Wikipedia defines Reverse Engineering as  the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation.

In simple terms, reverse engineering is breaking an object into its basic parts in a logical fashion. It is the process of analyzing and learning how the object was put together.

What does reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material mean?

Reverse engineering an e-learning course or any training material means analyzing, finding and documenting the following:

• Who uses the information in the course and for what purpose?
• What could have been the results of the requirements gathering phase?
• What could have been the development process for the course?
• What has been covered in the course?
• How is the course structured?
• How is the information structured?
• How is the course flow designed?
• What are the course objectives and learning objectives and how have they been derived?
• What is the instructional approach used?
• What are the  instructional strategies used and how or why were such strategies used?
• What could be the visualization  for each slide?
• How are the assessments designed?
• How did the Analysis and Design document look like for the course?
• How did the storyboard for the course look like?
• How is the course layout and navigation?

Questions as listed above and many more such questions will help you reverse engineer an e-learning course or any training material.When you are reverse engineering an e-learning course you are not trying to create but trying to think how the course was created. You are not exercising your mind to come up with new ideas. You are thinking hard how ideas for the course have been derived.

The next question is how can such an exercise help you gain Instructional Design skills.

How reverse engineering helps?

Most freshers feel lost while doing instructional designing because they fail to understand the basics and the essence of instructional designing. Freshers feel less confident because they lack basic skills and fear making mistakes.

When you reverse engineer an e-learning course or any training material:

• You gain basic instructional design skills with great ease
• You get to understand all Instructional Design concepts instantly
• You understand the relevance and importance of creating any training material
• You understand what goes into creating an e-learning course or any training material without racking your brain
• You get to know how a storyboard is related to the end product (e-learning course/training material)
• You get the essence of visualization and its importance in creating any training material
• The end product (e-learning course/training material) is your reference and guide so there is no fear of making mistakes
• You are focused and learn faster
• There is no information overload

In short you gain a lot of confidence to do instructional designing on your own.

My experience

When I read this training material on the web: CSharp for Kids, I tried to reverse engineer and find out how story has been woven so well to teach a programming language.I tried to figure how things have been made so simple when the subject is a complex programming language. I was amazed at the use of cartoons in the book and I studied how they have been designed to fit with the story.

Well, this was indeed a great experience and great learning too

Have you tried learning Instructional Designing or anything for that matter through reverse engineering? Please share your thoughts and experiences

• Description about the product features
• All tasks that one can do with each of the product features
• Steps to complete each of the tasks

Most software product tutorials are product feature centric.

Here is an example  of a product feature centric tutorial for Camtasia. The very title of the tutorial indicates it is about adding a callout and setting callout properties in Camtasia.

The tutorial above tells you all that you can do with the callout feature in Camtasia. The tutorial talks about placing callouts, resizing callouts, the different kinds of callouts and so on.

When you work with callouts in Camtasia, you are likely to get flustered trying to manually resize the callout in the timeline. The callout will refuse to get resized. This is such a serious usability issue. People spend hours figuring out how to resize callouts in the timeline. If you notice, this particular tutorial above, which is about callouts, never ever once mentions or captures this usability issue. So imagine if users trying to figure out how to increase callout length in Camtasia, go through this particular tutorial, how frustrated they would feel, when they discover that this tutorial has no solution to their problem.

Product feature centric documentation and tutorials are good to have because they give a nice overview of the product features. But then it is even more important to have tutorials that will focus on the problems users  might face while they are using the product feature, especially if the problem is not going to be fixed in the product for sometime.

This is where user centric tutorials for software products work wonders.

Here are some examples of user centric tutorials for Camtasia :

• How to increase callout length in Camtasia
• How I learnt to work with Camtasia 
• How to achieve smooth visual effects in videos using Camtasia

When you look at the user centric tutorials above, they capture :

• Real use cases
• Real problems
• Solutions for all common problems

Well, such kind of information might go into the troubleshooting guide. But then it again takes quite a lot of effort for users to search for the problem and solution. Instead if you have short tutorials on common problems that users might face, it will save so much of their time.

It really makes a lot of sense to include such user centric tutorials in  help manuals or user guides where the user is likely to check for help. 

If a software product is complex or has an usability issue, the users will appreciate if it is revealed upfront and the solution is disclosed. After all users want to effectively use the product and not get surprises or shocks while trying to use the product

What do you think?

I started the Game of the Week series in March 2009 and have managed to post quite a few games and my reviews every friday in this blog for the past 7 months.You can find all the games posted so far here.

Here are the top 10 games that you accessed and played through this blog:

1. Super Stacker 2
2. Edheads Design a Cell Phone
3. Pizza Hot
4. Bloxorz
5. Get The Glass
6. FarmVille
7. Post It Draw It
8. The Scruffs
9. Show Jumping
10. Pavlov’s Dog

I want to specially mention this game called Velma Vision that caught a lot of attention. Thank you all for playing the games that I post and also reading my game reviews.

To take this forward, I need your help. I would  like to invite  you to help me find some really good games that are freely available on the web.

If you find an interesting game and would like to feature that game in this blog, please send me the game url @ ruparajgo19@gmail.com. I will post the games in this blog with  full credit given to you.

Please note that the Game of the Week series now changes to Game of the Month series. Starting October 2009, you should find a game on the last day, every month.

Hope you continue to enjoy the games that I post.

Cheers,

Rupa

So the classical approach to teaching Instructional Design to a fresher would start with the question “What is Instructional Design?” , then move on to Instructional Design theories and models, Instructional Design tools and the Instructional Design activities would be taught after the learners have got a grip of the theories, concepts, tools and so on.

At the end of the training program, the learner will have to do a storyboard for which he/she will be evaluated and given a certificate. So typically the course duration for such beginner level course would be three months.

Now this is one approach to teaching Instructional Design.

What about the Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Design?

Have you heard of a Hello World program? If you have not, let me quickly tell you what a Hello World program is.

When you want to learn Java programming or any programming language for that matter, you first write a simple program that will print Hello World. People who have no prior experience in programming are asked to write a Hello World program, so that they quickly understand the principles of a specific programming language. People write a short code to print Hello World and run it to see how it works. They also trying making small changes to the code and then they run the program to see how the changes get reflected.

So when I say Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Designing, I mean a quick workshop or a tutorial , that will help freshers create a complete e-learning course on a very simple topic. When I say “complete” I do not mean just the storyboard, but the digitized e-learning course, may be using some rapid e-learning tool.

When the fresher actually completes creating this simple e-learning course, he/she would have gathered a lot even without getting into the Instructional Design theories, concepts and models. After this, the fresher gets to learn more on Instructional Design and undersands better because he/she has already tried a hand in creating a complete e-learning course. Instead of overloading a fresher with lot of information at one go, mentoring and coaching the fresher to gain hands on experience might work well.

All freshers who start with Instructional Designing typically work on linear e-learning courses and most often only do storyboarding.  So is it not important to teach the most important skills that will make a fresher productive at workplace? Instructional Design is like programming. You gain mastery and expertise over a period of time. You internalize  Instructional Design concepts over years. So what is the point overloading them with lot of information at one go?

What do you think?

• Considering the young generation joining the workforce and that they are likely to be impatient to get hands on, will not a Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Design work? 
• Instead of a three month beginner level course, will not short end to end beginner level workshops with lot of mentoring and coaching work?
• If you want to hire a fresher, what would you look for? A certificate that the fresher can do Instructional Design or the fresher can exhibit hands on experience in Instructional Design or not?
• If you are from a different country, I would love to know how you teach Instructional Design to freshers? What is the approach you follow?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.

FarmVille is a highly addictive multiplayer strategy game that you will find in Facebook. The objective of the game is to build and manage your own farming business. You can easily play this game using simple mouse clicks. The game proceeds in levels. Your success is measured as you move up the different levels, you make more money and expand your farming business.

Here is a snapshot of my farm in FarmVille. I am a level 8 farmer

Let me now give a brief overview of the activities you do in this game.

Low Level Activities

Creating your persona

Before you get started with the game, you create your own persona using the persona builder. Your persona executes all the activities for you in your virtual farm.

Ploughing the land

Ploughing costs money. So you plough portions of your land depending on how much money you have.

Buying

After you plough, the next step is to buy some seeds to sow. In Farmville, you have a market, where you can buy all the stuff to run your farming business. Here again, you buy seeds depending on the amount of money you have.

Sowing/Planting/Rearing

After sowing, you need to keep checking for the harvest.When you buy seeds, check for harvest time. If you leave it overtime, the crops wither away. You can plant trees. You can buy animals and rear them.

Harvesting and Selling

Once the crops are ready for harvesting, you sell them and make money.You can also sell cow’s milk and goat’s milk. You can sell sheep’s wool. S0 everything in your farm can fetch you money.

Adding Neighbors

When you add neighbors, it is an advantage to your farming business. You can visit your neighbors farms. You can make money by helping neighbors clean their farm. You can send your neighbors gifts and they send you gift in return.

High Level Activities

Watching business profit/loss

As you keep repeating the low level activities to run your farming business, it is very important you watch the cash inflow.  You need to keep track of how much money is coming in and how much you are spending. You must make sure nothing gets wasted.

Strategising

As you move up levels and you expand your farm, you need to strategise and plan how to make the best use of available resources to sustain and grow further.

Investing money

You invest money in seeds, plants, animals, vehicles, homes etc. Wherever you are investing, you need to keep the overall business in mind and see how this can fetch you more money. You need to spend money judiciously.

Noteworthy Aspects of the Game

Simple Usable Interface

The game has such an usable interface that you do not need to read the help instructions to play the game.  Everything is neatly places and is easily accessible.

The top bar has options to send gifts to neighbors, invite friends to FarmVille etc.

The main bar clearly indicates progress, business profits.

The tool bar has tools to execute activities in the farm.

The market is the place where you buy things.

There is a bar at the bottom of the screen where you can add neighbours.

Easy Game Controls

You just have to click on things using the mouse. You get all the options that you require. There is no chance that you will get confused on how to proceed in the game.

Use of Indicators

In the farm, when you mouse over you should see some figures in percentage indicating how much time is left for harvest. This way you are informed of the progress and you know when you can expect a harvest.

Similarily if is a cow is ready to be milked, that cow gets highlighted. For example in the image below, there are 3 cows and one is highlighted.

This is really a good idea to use such visual effects to indicate progress or completion of a process.

Theory of constructivitism in learning applied

This game does not tell you how you should make money out of your farming business. It gives you all the tools you need to do your business. You learn how to do business by experimenting, through trial and error. You learn to do business yourself.

You do your business in your own style. You look at what your friends are doing and learn lessons. This is what constructivitism is all about.

Example of Immersive Learning

This game has this virtual farm setup where you try you hand in farming. The experience is interactive and engaging.You get an idea as to what it means to do business in the whole process of playing the game.

A good exercise for  spurring creativity and individualism

This game gives you lot of scope to use your creative skills. Your creativity come to play especially when you are arranging things in your farm. So each farm looks unique. You make decisions individually and you do things individually. There are no rules as to how you need to arrange your farm or what decision you need to take.

The choice is all yours. This is where you learn a lot through experimenting.

Key messages – growth and sustenance

I am not sure if the game actually ends. You play FarmVille continously. So the objective is not to complete the game but to start a farming business, expand it and sustain it. You choose when you want to stop.

If you are already playing FarmVille, please let me know your views about this game. If you have not played the game before, play it now

When I was working on my tutorial videos using Camtasia, I noticed that after I produced the video in a shareable format such as avi, the video did not have a smooth transition from one slide to another. There was a slight jerk or a random zoom effect.

When I previewed the project before producing it in avi format, the transition was smooth. The problem occurred only after I produced the video in avi format. I struggled to fix this problem on my own. I could not solve this problem. Then, when I asked my colleauge, he said using transitions is the only way to achieve smooth visual affects in videos created using Camtasia. I used transitions and it did work very well.

So here are some quick steps to include transitions in your camtasia project:

1. Open your project in Camtasia Studio.

2. In the left hand side, in the Task List, click on Transitions.

3.  You should see the Transitions pane with the list of effects that you can use for slide transition.

4. You should also see the storyboard with all the slides as follows:

5. Click on an effect in the Transitions pane, drag and drop it in between the slides, particularly into the slot that has a blue arrow. Side Left is a good effect to use for slide transition. I have dragged and dropped it between the slides as shown below:

6. When you right click on the slot that has the transition, you should see options to set the speed of transition. 1 Second Transition is a good option to choose.

7. Save the changes.

Now when you produce your project in avi format or any other shareable format, the transition from one slide to another will be smooth.

If you found this post useful, please leave your comment

The Incredible Adventures of the Food Detective is a fun learning game. The game emphasizes on the importance of healthy eating habits for youngster. In this game, you play the role of a junior detective. Your objective is to investigate unhealthy habits in young boys and girls and suggest healthy food to each of them.

You need to simply click on the mouse button to play this game. There is nothing challenging about the game. This is a guided game, where you are told at every instant what you need to do. Yet you never get bored because you know the objective of the game is to convey an important message and not to challenge you.

When you start with the game, you get to choose the girl or boy whose case you would like to investigate. For example I chose to investigate the case of a girl called Althea, who skips breakfast.

All that I had to do is click on the clock to  indicate to Althea that it is breakfast time and click on a healthy food like cereals or banana for her to eat.

When I succeed in making Althea eat a healthy breakfast, the case gets closed.

You get similar other cases to solve in this game. Each case is unique. The problem is specified at the outset and you need to find a solution which is not difficult at all.

You also get mini games to play at the close of each case. These games are fun to play and do not necessarily facilitate any kind of real learning.

The message “Eat Healthy” is quite predominant in the game.

What I liked about the game

• I liked the use of the anchor or agent (amazing food detective) in the game. She engages and involves you in the activities. You cannot ignore her or get bored with her
• I liked the graphics, choice of colour, the voice over and the sound quality
• I appreciate the way fun activities have been designed to convey an important message
• I like the use of labels that give you some quick fact or the nutrition value when you hover over each food item

The  Surprise Element in the Game

It was a surprise for me, when I got the following message after I kept the game window open, without interacting with it for a long time. I could not play the game for 60 minutes after that. This is really funny,  though not so user friendly.

In short, the game is well designed and worth a play

Play the game now and leave your thoughts in the comments section.