Lights, camera… details

April 3, 2024

When you see a (good) movie, the overall experience should leave you feeling exhilarated, or frightened, or heartbroken—whatever the creators intended when they decided to tell the story. But a critical part of that is a whole set of details that have been sweated over in order to give you that final experience—the color palette, sound, lighting, costume, music, and so much more. And the trick is this—when they are all done right, you won’t really notice most of those details explicitly; but when they are done wrong, they can ruin the whole effect.

In a recent webinar, we spoke with Deanna Bowlby from the CarriersEdge Content team and Amber Hutt from the Support team to look at how much thought goes into the behind-the-scenes details and why it’s critical for the overall user experience not to miss any of those hidden steps.

Building a seamless experience

On the content side, Bowlby describes an elaborate system of research, vetting, review and production before a course can ever see the light of day. At its inception, the rigorous research of the topic requires consistent cross-referencing with SMEs. Once the core content is set, though, it still needs to move through graphics, voice, and translation. Finally, there’s a separate block of work that goes into building the tests and assessments to make sure they reflect the material accurately.

And just like in a movie, the user may not even notice a lot of that attention to detail precisely because it’s done right.

If the voiceover speed is off, or a translation uses the wrong word, or a clickable button doesn’t work right, the effect is broken, but if sufficient care is taken during the building process, the user should only notice a seamless experience.

Where things get tricky

Unlike a movie, however, the challenges of providing that great user experience don’t end once the title is released. Courses need to be updated and refreshed to remain current, and that presents a host of other challenges.

Under normal circumstances, a driver will have courses assigned to their profile, which tracks usage, completion, test results and more. This reporting and tracking feature is particularly important when it comes to retraining intervals and certification expiry because it allows safety managers (and insurers!) to know exactly who has what training and who is going to need recertifying and when. It also shows the complete history of when drivers have taken courses, and how well they performed with them. But when courses get refreshed, that history can get skewed if care isn’t taken to preserve it.

When changes need to happen

Courses can change in different ways—maybe there is new information to go in, slight updates to a few pages, sections that are no longer relevant, or the underlying regulations have completely changed. Depending on how much is changing, the course may need to be refreshed, or it may need to be retired and replaced completely. For example, suppose a course is just receiving some updated content but the overall structure and length of the course remain the same. In that case, the team can just swap out the old one and the user shouldn’t notice any big differences (apart from the new information). On the other hand, if there are large, wholesale changes that require entirely new modules and structure, the course would have to be switched out completely for a new one.

That creates a wide spectrum of “update” options – everything from small wording changes to complete replacement – but that also opens up the question of how to reflect that in a driver’s profile. For smaller changes, most fleets wouldn’t make drivers retake a course they’ve already completed, but if it’s a complete rebuild then it may be necessary to redo it.

If a driver’s recertification timetable is attached to a course, and that course is being replaced by a new version, wouldn’t that disrupt the reporting and tracking because that data is attached to the original course? The answer is yes, if you’re not paying attention to the process carefully.

When originally faced with this problem, Hutt says that the team had to rethink the user’s admin dashboard and redesign it to include a new section for “retired modules”— a place where managers could easily distinguish between new and retired modules, and track histories attached to each. When a course is being replaced, the Support team has a rigorous process for identifying all the places where assignments and histories need to be updated. She goes on to say “Our development team works in the backend of the LMS to ‘link’ the latest completion or course status from the original course to the new course.” This ensures that if the old course shows as complete in reports and on the user profile, then the new course will display the same properties. It also makes sure that if any customers have assigned a retraining interval to the course, the next time users need to retake the course they’ll be assigned the new course and notified correctly at the right time.

How the team figured out this solution highlights one more element to “sweating the details”—thinking up creative solutions. It’s one thing to know which details to pay attention to so you get them right (i.e., the problems you already know will come up); it’s another thing to be on the lookout for problems you haven’t faced before, and have the creative flexibility and resources to take them on and find a solution.

Movie magic, but more

In the end, getting the user experience you want is a mix of rigorous attention to all the details you know about (like making a movie), as well as a dynamic, creative response once you’ve rolled it out—having the sensitivity and responsiveness to see when a change is needed and to manage it in a way that the user barely even knows is happening. And that’s how the real magic happens.