Articulate Storyline & Rise Work
Articulate Storyline & Rise Work
Embedded Files
Managing @ Crunchyroll (2023)
Managing @ Crunchyroll (2023)
TOOLS
Articulate Rise, PowerPoint, Getimg.ai, PhotoShop, Adobe Premiere, Adobe AfterEffects
CLIENT
Crunchyroll
👇
This debranded version has been scrubbed of any proprietary or confidential information.CHALLENGE:
After about a month spent developing a 2-day instructor-led deck, our team was grateful that senior leadership wanted to change the approach into microlearnings broken up by HRBP-led talkback sessions, albeit with no adjustments to the launch date. I was facing having to record voiceovers of the deck my colleague created, and I just knew this wasn't going to give us the results we needed from learners.
WWJDD? (WHAT WOULD JULIE DIRKSEN DO?):
While my manager figured out the sprint schedule for development, review, and launch, I consulted my notes from Instructional Design expert/my career idol Julie Dirksen's first book, Design For How People Learn, specifically the following, based on neuroscience:
Learning Objectives: ideally the learner-facing version is a challenge, puzzle, or an obvious value proposition (ex: “Oh no! Your boss’ plane lands in an hour and the xyz will have to be ready” or “How to Photoshop your ex out of your old photos”).
Our brains prioritize urgency over importance, so fabricating a sense of urgency is effective.
Saying “this is important/will be important, so pay attention” just doesn’t work, but other tools like emotional engagement or games can automatically make learners pay attention.
Storytelling helps with engagement and recall (just one story she shares guarantees you’ll remember a random MN traffic law for years). Set up a story with a conflict that needs to be resolved and a protagonist who faces obstacles in pursuit of a goal.
We can’t help but be drawn to mysteries.
Consequences over generic feedback for choices can also make a stronger impact.
We tend to find facts meaningless unless we know how to feel about them.
We better recall funny sentences over neutral sentences.
Tactile activities can help focus.
Make learners feel smart and capable.
Within an hour, I had a concept and picked a tool:
Upon losing a star employee, a manager goes on a heartfelt mission back in a time machine to make better choices during his employee's lifecycle and give her a better experience. I decided that Articulate Rise would be the best way to plug-and-tweak the great content from my colleague's deck into a self-paced experience.
The next day, I taught myself how to generate AI art:
I suspected we did not have full freedom to make original narratives using existing anime characters and I didn't have any internal artist contacts, so I looked up AI art generators. I value artists' work and free AI tools have been associated with art theft, so my hope was that I would ultimately be paired with an internal artist for the character portraits.
I used AI art as a placeholder so my manager could easily see the concept when I showed him the first draft. After playing with Getimg.ai, I had a full reaction palette for the main cast. This had some limitations: the tool couldn't make male faces very reactive, consistent outfits were difficult, and it was very hard to generate an African-American character with natural hair. I was able to use these limitations for creative solutions in the story.
One weekend later, I had a complete first draft:
I worked tirelessly for an entire weekend to ensure my manager could see a complete draft by Monday and keep us on track for our tight schedule. Based on visual novels (a familiar medium for anime audiences like Crunchyroll), I had made a narrative game in which the manager was a player character helping James on his adventure through time through tactile interactions, learning Crunchyroll managerial processes along the way.
MY APPROACH:
Learning objectives were framed as the "why," the value of reading each section, with obvious practical takeaways for on-the-job scenarios. Scenarios and assessments had consequences for player choices.
I used emotional engagement to motivate the player. The game and characters praised the player for already having an excellent reputation with a solid track record among direct reports, to help differentiate the player from the manager character in need of help. Even if the player doesn't "take to" the manager character, I noticed learners loved the other main cast members and, despite being fictional, were motivated to help or please them.
To apply Dirksen's suggestion for a mystery as a hook, I outlined an ongoing mystery hook to build player anticipation of future episodes, which would ultimately resolve in the manager's direct report transformed by a wonderful experience with her manager, choosing to leave the company to strike out on her own business venture.
Result:
Result:
My time with Crunchyroll ended before this wentlive, but learner responses during beta testing were overwhelmingly positive. Learners from different ERGs and management levels told me they loved the approach, were immediately absorbed, and that this was a very necessary learning intervention. This was quite the relief given the training was to be voluntary, rather than assigned, so this made me hopeful learners would tell each other about it and eagerly anticipate future episodes, rather than ignore or de-prioritize the training. I also deliberately sought out ERG leadership for their input, and was pleased to see positive results.
To my astonishment, Julie Dirksen herself told me this may be her favorite use of Articulate Rise that she's seen, and a great example of what good things can be accomplished with such a limited tool "if the design is thoughtful enough." She really liked the use of character and challenge; "the idea of jumping back a year and fixing it with the employee is a great example of creating challenge and urgency."
Mobile Learning: Crunchyroll Company Values (2023)
Mobile Learning: Crunchyroll Company Values (2023)
TOOLS
Articulate Storyline, Canva, PowerPoint, PhotoShop, SnagIt
CLIENT
Crunchyroll
👇
This branded version has been shared with Crunchyroll's permission.CHALLENGE:
As part of my interview process with Crunchyroll, I was given 4 days to develop a 3-10 minute learning experience that showcases the skills that make me unique and put my full creativity on display. The project also had to include two or more of the following: web-based learning, interaction, PowerPoint/Google Slides, animation, gifs, static graphic design, and (of course!) anime.
I was asked to make the deliverable as on-brand as possible without being given assets, and to leverage their official website for research. The final product was to address Crunchyroll's values, who they are, and what they do. They asked me to make something able to stand alone without the need for explanations or writeups. They wanted the learner to be able to walk in cold and leave satisfied with the learning objectives.
MY APPROACH:
Welcome to my first mobile learning project!
If a learner had to walk in cold without instructions, I thought that posters inviting learners to a game would be an intuitive means to achieve this. I created a QR code scavenger hunt, each leading to a unique learning experience with a secret code the learner had to find and recall later.
I also decided that an intuitive means of assessment, rather than a multiple-choice quiz, would be to plant secret codes in each "lesson," so learners could only be marked as complete if they could provide each one. The codewords I chose were single-word summaries of Crunchyroll's identity, values, and what they do; if the learner had to remember just one thing afterwards, these one-word summaries would be it.
Go on...scan them.
Go on...scan them.
Each QR code is fully functional and leads to a unique interaction.
Result:
Result:
The hiring manager was very impressed with this original approach, and reached out to me personally to let me know. The company hired me to be Crunchyroll's Learning Experience Designer!
Why Oscar (2023)
Why Oscar (2023)
TOOLS
Articulate Storyline, SnagIt, Adobe Premiere
CLIENT
Oscar Health Insurance
As part of my interview process with Oscar Health, I was asked to make a ~5 minute Storyline course that met the following requirements:
Introduce Oscar Health to someone unfamiliar
Include a 30 to 60-second narrated video I'd created myself
Create arrows or buttons for navigation on each page and turn off player navigation
Include layers, resources, and a knowledge check
I used this as an opportunity to play with Oscar's gorgeous assets and also improve on my original 2020 Storyline course. I envisioned the audience as customer service new hires, so I designed the content to highlight what makes Oscar truly special, compared to other insurance companies. I centered the assessment around familiarizing the learner with Oscar's website and contact information before the hypothetical course moves on.
Borrowers on Leave: Do's & Don'ts (2022)
Borrowers on Leave: Do's & Don'ts (2022)
TOOLS
Articulate Storyline
CLIENT
Better Mortgage
👇
This debranded version has been scrubbed of any proprietary or confidential information.
CHALLENGE
I was asked to create a refresher for the thousands of employees that handle loans and talk with customers. This needed to be as brief as possible and cover what language is illegal when discussing loan applications with any borrowers on leave of absence from work.
According to the requester, there was no report of any behavioral issues prompting this training that needed any correction, but releasing a refresher was a good practice and showed our regulators our company was proactive about compliance. Therefore, this did not need to impart a detailed skill from scratch and I felt an assessment was unnecessary.
MY APPROACH:
RESEARCH & STORYBOARDING:
Legal and Compliance gave me notes from investigations and legal proceedings on this topic.
To storyboard, I drafted a slide deck with comics-style visuals. I gave the deck to legal and customer-facing teams for review. One amazing SME pointed out that some employees have to follow a slightly different rule when discussing leaves of absence. Because the training material was largely the same, I added a simple call-out for affected employees.
Once the draft was approved, I adapted it into Storyline. I wanted to keep my Storyline skills fresh.
DIGESTIBILITY & BREVITY:
In the storyboard review phase, the SMEs had already approved my comics-style approach to the material and the accessible language I used to make it digestible at a glance. I also find it efficient to combine the summary, purpose, and navigation instructions on the title slide. Every slide added to a deck or eLearning makes it feel much longer to SMEs looking for a brief learning fix.
I also tried to make navigation as unrestricted as possible so that learners could understand the course agenda at a glance. If they wanted to revisit the course at any time, I wanted them to be able to easily flick to relevant sections for review. Therefore, I kept the default Storyline player. If it ain't broke, after all....
THE HEART:
Finance employees often forsake their big firms and came to mission-based companies like Better and Aspiration because at big firms, "customer are reduced to numbers." At Better, they often emphasize to their employees that buying a home is personal and life-changing, often reminding us that most of our customers are first-time buyers.
I leveraged a little story-based adult learning. I included an epilogue after the scenario sequence. To keep the "human" element in the lesson, I gave the borrowers names, desires, and a happy ending. So often, compliance training takes on a "don't do this or else," but I wanted the learner to feel a positive impact that reflected our company values.
Result:
Result:
The Director of Compliance Management reached out to me to say: "I had the chance to review this and I am again so amazed at the training you put together! Thoroughly enjoyed this! We are so lucky to have you :)”
As Better scaled to 10k employees, Compliance/Legal decided to enhance our fraud training to go in-depth on reporting fraud in the hopes of increasing (and streamlining) fraud reports.
The audience had to encompass a variety of audiences: new hires, season employees, and department with exclusive workflows. Sales and Underwriters have very different jobs, so the course had to be clear when it was speaking to customer-facing learners versus employees who only handle/investigate customer documents.
I included call outs to help make this clear, and enhanced some of the customer-facing content with my own experience identifying suspicious customer behavior. I made sure to have SMEs review the course on an annual basis to ensure the process information did not become outdated.
Result:
Result:
We saw an increase in employees recognizing and properly reporting fraud, and the process of developing training helped us to streamline and polish our fraud reporting process to make it more scalable.
Advertising Compliance for Marketing Employees (2021)
Advertising Compliance for Marketing Employees (2021)
TOOLS
Articulate Rise
CLIENT
Better Mortgage
Better operates in 2 of the top 5 most regulated industries in the US, marketing has been under increased regulatory scrutiny in Better's industry for much of the company's existence. To reduce the amount of back-and-forth between Marketing drafts and Legal review, the Legal team had crafted a (long, dry...legalese-ridden) deck on Marketing Law 101. Booking these two-hour trainings was a drain on limited bandwidth, so they asked me to run these trainings. I did them one better: I drafted a self-directed elearning based on the deck, and used layman's terms or energetic language to make the material accessible (which I submitted for Legal accuracy review, and repeated on an annual basis).
CHALLENGE:
Competing priorities, deadline crunch: At the time, I was also revamping the Compliance training curriculum, wrapping up annual training overdue enforcement, and preparing my Red Flags course
MY APPROACH:
The May 5th launch deadline for several of these projects had to be prioritized over a more interactive experience, which is why I had to use Rise and accept that interactions would be limited.
Result:
Result:
I'd love to show that we reduced back-and-forth between Marketing teams and Legal review. While user behavioral change data did not come my way, I am happy to report:
We had a self-paced, deploy-anytime solution. Given our rapid growth, this was much more scalable and definitely came in handy when teams would suddenly take on marketing responsibilities and need training ASAP. This also freed up our regulatory lead's bandwidth.
We were able to show state and federal regulatory agencies that we had come up with a standardized, trackable, mandatory training on the many, many requirements marketers in our highly regulated industry need to know!
Finding Free Clinics (2020)
Finding Free Clinics (2020)
TOOLS
Articulate Storyline, Loom
CLIENT
California State University Fullerton Instructional Design course
BEST VERSION video learning object 1.mp4I made this video for the lesson by splicing different videos together (credited in the lesson).
Fall 2020 at CSU Fullerton, I was tasked with creating a 5-10 minute lesson in Storyline with:
at least 2 user interactions
a graded quiz and results page
I designed a lesson for a hypothetical health class at my alma mater, Lakewood High School (LHS), a Cleveland suburb. In this lesson, students learn about the limitations of health care access without insurance, and how they could help a friend (or themselves) locate affordable medical care and other services in the area. To liven up the quiz portion, I used music cues that would only trigger for correct answers, with a unique sound for each question.
I put much consideration into the learner's relationship with this class and the broader context.
CHALLENGE:
Many learners have a hostile relationship to LHS.
MY APPROACH:
To avoid a kneejerk hostile reaction, I deliberately avoided using LHS branding in the design. However, Clevelanders have an overwhelming sense of local pride, so I used as much Cleveland imagery as possible.
CHALLENGE:
Learners often feel they aren't being treated like adults despite their maturity, and are skeptical that their health class is accurate.
MY APPROACH:
I drew on external resources learners could explore on their own. To avoid "easy" truths and shame-based learning, I alluded to the genuine racial and economic fears related to medical care by including clips of Black Americans sharing stories of family members getting sick when they avoided the doctor.
Clips from the first Articulate lesson I ever created.
Result:
Result:
I aced the assignment, but I really see this as a jumping-off point. After this experience, I got much better at design, button interactions, and more Articulate skills.
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