GE 30: Value creators - training and education
Customers will value your product's ability to teach them, their team, and the wider organization useful and relevant skills and knowledge.
Even if your product is not positioned as an educational tool, it can still contain a wide variety of features and content that educate your users. This is particularly important when your users operate within a specific industry, have a specific job description, or need to satisfy specific organizational policies or regulatory requirements—which pretty much covers everyone!
It is a given that you must teach users how to use your product, but there is also the opportunity to share information and advice that cover a range of other areas, including:
- Best practices for specific job roles.
- Specialized knowledge relevant to an industry segment.
- Operational procedures.
- Efficiency tips and hacks.
- Health and safety information.
- Internal policy advice.
- Relevant legal or regulatory considerations.
Such information can be presented in traditional help and documentation formats, but further value can be added if the information is provided in relevant bite-sized chunks within the context of the tasks being performed.
The more accurately your product can determine the user context and present specific relevant information, the more value you are providing.
The information itself can be sourced from public materials, compiled and curated by specialist subject matter experts within your company, supplied by your wider community of product users, or provided by the users' peers and colleagues from their own company.
Consider a product that helps recruiters and talent managers write job descriptions for open positions. Someone in a junior position may not be familiar with internal organizational policies or the local regulatory requirements in the jurisdiction into which they are hiring. Product features could not only help users write the job description but also review the completed piece of work to ensure that it meets all company policy obligations and regulatory requirements.
Further suggestions could be provided that are designed not only to meet obligations but also to maximize performance against a configured set of objectives, such as the number of relevant applicants or the number of applications from a diverse range of backgrounds. Assistance can be provided to generate content, review and improve existing content, generate promotional adverts optimized for various channels, and time the release of job postings.
There is not only the opportunity to perform these optimizations but more importantly, to help educate the user about the reasoning behind them. If the user better understands local policies, laws, and recruitment principles, then performance in the current task will improve, as well as performance in future tasks and adjacent activities.
The product serves not only to help a company's users complete tasks but also to train them, enhancing their skills and knowledge in key areas. This helps users manage risk, gain experience, and teach other team members.
There are many ways in which teaching can be built into products, including:
Traditional Help and Documentation
Providing relevant help, articles and documentation in a searchable knowledge repository that is cross-referenced with other articles but also links directly to features within your product where applicable.
Templates
Templates are powerful ways to embed training and education into your product. Templates integrate directly into the user's workflow. They help them get the job done and provide guidance whilst they are doing it.
Templates have an advantage in that they guide a user, but they don't force a user to adopt a particular way of working. A user can choose to use all of the template or delete sections that they don't feel are relevant to them. Build credibility by asking industry experts and subject matter experts to author templates.
Intelligent Dynamic Forms
Most products collect data within their user journeys through the use of online forms. Users generally don't like completing forms and so the shorter the better. Good form design allows users to enter data efficiently by requiring the user to only complete relevant fields and the forms themselves can provide excellent training opportunities.
Careful consideration on the wording of questions, the presentation of options and the dynamically displaying information based on the answer to previous questions can all help educate users whilst collecting the desired information. Pop-up help and sensible default options can further assist and crowd-sourced analytics may be useful in some cases, e.g. "78% of users pick Option 1."
Metrics, Reports and Dashboards - Pre-designed metrics, reports and dashboards are not only useful to provide management information, but they can demonstrate the subject matter expertise that has gone into designing the product.
Returning to our recruitment app example, there could be a predefined report that showed time between interview stages over time along with a benchark recommended maximum time. The pure existence of this report implies that this metric is important and that good recruitment practices aim to reduce the time candidates are waiting in between interview stages.
Education Resource Building Tools - Perhaps your power users are already extremely knowledgable and don't need too much further assistance. However, they may be responsible for or are able to influence other employees within the organisation. These other employees could also be users of your system.
Consider providing tools that make it easy for your power users to take content from your product and compile it into their own customised education and training resources that can be easily accessed and used by other employees within the organisation. So instead of just providing a read-only report, why not provide the report in an editable format and allow you expert user to add commentary and highlight metrics and data that is particularly meaningful for other colleagues?
Allow power users to build communications, newsletters, customise email communications and tailor help and guidance. Your customer will value the ability to train their user populations within the context of the work in interesting and engaging ways. Customisation options such as the ability to apply simple branding options and tone of voice will be valued further.
Certifications and Gamification
Everyone likes to make progress and ensure that efforts are being rewarded and acknowledged. Design certifications that are awarded when a user has achieved a set of pre-defined goals. Assign users smaller rewards such as simple badges or tokens when they complete smaller tasks.
In summary, every product has the ability to educate and train users. The opportunity extends beyond teaching how to use a product's core features and functionality. Teaching can cover industry expertise, best practices, and advanced industry knowledge. Humans instinctively like to master skills and acquire knowledge. If users feel rewarded for their effort and time spent learning, they will value and use your product more than competitive options.