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As a sub-contractor for an established L&D firm, I plugged in to develop storyboards for two separate courses.
The firm is an established Learning & Development contractor in the retail space. It offers learning modules tailored to the specific needs of its clients, and has worked with many big-name retailers.
My area of responsibility began with a short list of bullet points provided by the firm. From these, I built a finished product with well-sourced and well-structured information. The storyboards incorporated activities throughout, to enhance user learning and engagement.
Audience:
Employees of retail business clients sought out by the contractor
My Roles:
Content research and investigation; information structuring; activity development; scenario script-writing; sample visual mockups
Tools Used:
Figma; Retail research publications.
Aim:
To provide storyboards that will add significant value as finished products
Two separate courses were written for the firm. The first concerned abusive customer behaviour and its target audience were employees on the shop floor, sales assistants and the like. The second course looked at how to support organisational change, with a prime focus on the management and ownership of retail business.
For each, retail research publications were investigated in order to source necessary information. In both cases the key purpose was to inform—as such information had to be curated in a punchy, concise and memorable fashion.
Investigation of information sources revealed a strong focus on behavioural science and its application. At a lay level, this translated to a need for a development of skillsets based on emotional intelligence.
In each course, information was ordered in a tactical manner. To take the example of the abusive customer behaviour course, the intention was for users to experience the program in the following order:
In this way, retail employees would have a mental map of how to deal with real-life interactions. They would know how to identify signs of abusive behaviour. Once identified, they would implement de-escalation techniques to bring the interaction to a stable footing. If unsuccessful, they would know how to go ahead with proper escalation procedures in order to bring the interaction to an appropriate end.
The topic, if at first seemingly basic, is really a very broad and complex one. So that users take in as much information as possible, the course offers punchy formatting with concise explanations.
The below image is a design mockup for 'types of abusive customer behaviour'. Users can click each sub-category to pull up the corresponding information tab. Each sub-category is summarised with two sentences at most, in order to keep the delivery concise and to-the-point. The interactive presentation prevents the learning module from becoming a disengaging wall of text.
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To provide an element of realism to these courses, the storyboard implemented a scenario-based approach to activities. To again take the example of the 'abusive customer behaviour' course, each of the three topics ended with an abusive customer scenario. See image below.
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The same interaction, at different stages of development, was split across the three topics. Below is the script as a whole.
The L&D firm wanted 5 quiz questions incorporated into each of its courses. I decided to base these questions on the scenarios I created.
In the 'abusive customer behaviour' example, each of the three topics had the same structure. First the information was delivered. Second, the scenario played out. Third, the user engaged one or two comprehension-style quiz questions based on the scenario.
The five quiz questions are summarised below:
See below Quiz Question One for an example in full.
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In addition to scenario-based comprehension activities, the storyboards planned for drag-and-drop activities to keep the learning engaging in each topic. This style of activity is not intended to test a user once something has been learnt—rather the intention is for the user to learn the content whilst undertaking the activity. See an example below.
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