The common thread of Training and Learning Modules in Corporates is the writing tools used to capture expert knowledge. In most cases, these tools are Desktop applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Word or Adobe InDesign; however, the tools for publishing and implementation are very limited in terms of presenting the material.
Flatted PowerPoint presentations and downloadable PDFs are not interactive and dynamic enough to be used on different devices, and the content is siloed with no one source of truth for users to look to.
Information regarding the company and its products has been omitted and obfuscated in this case study to comply with NDA.
Are we solving the right problems?
With users in Medical enterprises such as Biosense and GE Medical, Ginger-Gene has provided the Howtool KMS SaaS to Manage all the training, support, and marketing material, however, they were operating as a Concierge MVP with parts of the product still in development.
Such part was a graphics editor meant to emulate the look and feel of the PowerPoint editor and would function as a visual input field.
All PPT files were then created manually in the KMS so they could be dynamic assets in the database and not just siloed static files, this created a time-consuming and a learning curve bottleneck that prevented users from using the system with confidence to upload their materials and use it with ease.
This lack of engagement from our users was mitigated with the help of our design team, who basically created and published training materials for our users at their request.
How might we help our users create and manage more content on our platform? with confidence!
Research:
To test my hypothesis I contacted some of the Education Managers and Marketing Managers whom we work with to participate in an interview to better understand how they use PPT in their workflow.
5 have agreed in participating, not a huge turnout but a turnout nevertheless.
I chose to use the Five W’s method to get a complete picture.
Here are some of the answers:
Initial ideas:
What would a solution to this issue look like?
- Is it developing a PowerPoint isotope?
Out of the question! - Is it providing a minimum viable graphics editor on our platform?
We had a graphics editor, however, it was unstable and would have meant a disaster shipping it to production, besides, our users are not about to learn how to use a new graphics editor, besides it’s not really solving the time-consuming issue since each Presentation meant creating a similar one in the graphics editor.
What is the most time saving and easy to perform solution then?
Automation! If we can unpack a PPT file for all its content and distribute it in our KMS and make it as simple as uploading a file we will tackle all issues.
I presented the idea to my CEO and the users whom I interviewed and the feedback was positive.
Kickstart
After receiving the green light on my project I went back to search if there’s an existing solution but I soon discovered that we needed to develop it ourselves since all similar solutions are either deprecated or just converting all slides to images.
I consulted with our Head of R&D who advised hiring a freelance developer who specializes in Office Object Model, I used the services of arc() (F.K.A Codementor X) to recruit Ivan a freelance developer.
Designing the solution
The original user journey for creating a new Step-By-Step guide made the user go through a wizard with many input fields which after submitting it the guide could be edited.
I decided to bypass this wizard and inform the users they can upload a PPT file to auto generate a Step-By-Step guide.
I estimated that my alternative user flow will cut down workload by 98%
What did we accomplish?
In the end Me and Ivan had produced a working version of the PPT service in the backend side which could bundle an entire PPT file to a readymade Howtool guide; However, due to budget issues it was never implemented on the Howtool product and my time in Ginger-Gene had ended before we could test it out.
