A Fresh Approach to Immersive Scenarios | Tangram Flip Series
February 7 • Written by Julie Dozier
In our Tangram Flip series, we’re sharing the story behind a moment where Tangram flipped the script and did something unexpected to bring about radical results. A recent design workshop for an eLearning program brought Where’s Waldo? to the table to inspire the design behind the context-based scenario application.
We are about to launch an all-employee eLearning for our client about their organization’s value proposition. Two of the program’s goals are to teach employees about the official value proposition framework and show them ways to talk about the organization with friends and colleagues.
Our Approach
This value prop eLearning was requested by a team that doesn’t have any learning programs in place, so they haven’t worked with L&D previously. We wanted to give them a great experience by inviting them to participate in the creative process.
First, we set up a design session to workshop the learning objectives and brainstorm ways for learners to practice the concepts. Here are some of our outputs:
How we want learners to feel:
Entertained – take a fresh approach, something different, new
Amused – include humor and personality
Inspired – plant ideas for the future, show how easy it is
What we want learners to do:
See different realistic situations where they could talk about the company
Practice using the value prop framework to organize their thinking
Our Design Flip
In our brainstorming, we talked about how we wanted learners to feel like there were different conversations happening all around – at the office, across the street, walking to lunch .... and then naturally, Where’s Waldo came to mind 😀.
We all got excited about creating an illustrated scene on a city block based around an office building with all these moments happening. You’d be able to see little scenes with people inside the windows, outside on the street, and in the coffee shop across the street.
We knew we were using solid learning theory with scenarios that gave learners opportunities to practice. But we wanted to take it to the next level and make it an immersive learning experience. So instead of presenting the scenarios one by one, we flipped the script by immersing the learners in a world where they can see opportunities for the desired behaviors happening all around them. We are simulating the actual context of conversation in a way that feels like the natural flow of our learners’ lives.
The energy this design element gave our group was electric! In our experience, if the design team and the client are excited about a fun element of the design, that spirit and energy come across to the learner 100% of the time. And our goal is always to surprise and delight our learners! We had the confidence to run with this design.
The Results
We had our graphic designer create some simple but fun illustrations of people talking, walking, working, and drinking coffee together. Clicking each scene pulls up a scenario with a close-up of the two people talking. You see their conversation and the person’s bio, and then make a choice about something to share about the company that relates to their interests and background.
It perfectly captures the spirit we were going for – the realistic and easy sort of feeling that these conversations and situations are all around us.
Note: Originally, we wanted to go “full-Waldo” with little people filling up the entire scene, but we restrained ourselves and kept it simpler to speed up design and build time. But don’t worry – you know we’ll find another project where we can do that soon 😉.