Overview
A Fortune 50 technology company approached us with the challenge of educating nontechnical business decision makers on a very technical topic: cloud computing. They turned to a digital learning experience to deliver the knowledge that business decision makers required.
Ultimately, their goal was to drive product adoption of and upskilling for their cloud computing solutions. Furthermore, our partner sought to pilot digital learning as both a brand differentiator and growth lever for their cloud computing division.
Organization
Our partner, a Fortune 50 global technology company, was experiencing rapid growth in their cloud computing product line.
Challenge
Our partner faced two key challenges:
- Create a highly engaging learning experience on technical content for nontechnical buyers.
- Innovate within the capacity of their current technical stack.
Creating a highly engaging customer education experience
Our partner already had a robust digital learning program for a technical audience, delivering thousands of programs to millions of people all across the globe in over 20 languages. They wanted to extend this program to a new target learner persona: business development managers, specifically senior leaders and management at Fortune 1000 companies who were responsible for business decisions about moving to the cloud.
Much of the their existing learning material on cloud computing was:
- Too technical: assumed familiarity with IT jargon.
- Too abstract: didn’t help learners make concrete decisions for their businesses.
- Impractical: focused on cutting-edge technology like IoT or AI, which was not always relevant to the learners’ current business problems and could seem intimidating or expensive.
- Irrelevant to role: not designed to meet the needs of managers/executives. Most were lengthy, costly, or involved live courses.
Learners needed something right for their level of understanding to make meaningful business decisions strategically without getting “in the weeds”. The project’s goal was to fill this gap in available cloud education by creating a highly engaging, scalable learning experience targeted specifically at business decision-makers. In doing so, our partner reached a key buyer persona.
Pushing the boundaries of their existing learning tech stack to achieve the highest level of engagement possible.
While Studion often designs and builds new technology solutions for our partners’ learning experiences, we also work within existing tech stacks to maximize learner engagement in a learning experience. In this instance, our design challenge included using their existing tools and tech stack.
Both of these challenges dovetailed to our partner’s goal: driving product adoption, upskilling, and revenue for their cloud computing product line.
Solution
A central principle of The Studion Way (our design process) is that you must engage and test with learners early and often in order to build learning experiences that learners love.
For the first phase of our partnership, the Design & Planning phase, we conducted extensive research on learner needs, competitors, and our partner’s existing materials. From there, we worked with our partner to prioritize learner personas with the greatest potential business impact.
With this strategic groundwork in place, we were ready to apply pedagogical best practices to define a learning experience strategy. We applied our High Engagement at Scale™ framework to address specific pain points felt by our target learner persona.
For this project, the High Engagement at Scale™ strategy focused on:
- Learner-Centered Content: the right technical level, in the right format, for the target learner persona
- Active Learning: Interactive elements to help busy execs extract and apply the knowledge they needed, faster.
- Real-World Outcomes: kept the focus on concrete and probable scenarios in a few key industries instead of abstract, overly technical, or cutting-edge paradigms.
Informed by this strategy, the design focused on articulating and designing Signature Moments–those parts of a learning experience that are critical to learning and unique to the brand, often serving as differentiators in the marketplace. Through iterative testing with users, the team identified 7 Signature Moments for a highly engaging learning experience, including:
- An engaging first hook to attract a busy business person’s attention
- A birds-eye system view to communicate the complexity of cloud computing systems
- Case studies specific to both role and industry.
Studion then built prototypes of the Signature Moments to test, validate, and evolve based on user feedback. What resulted was a differentiated experience that reflected our partner’s brand and value proposition, delivered on their business goals, and met the needs of the users in an impactful and validated way.
Using a learning strategy, prototypes of Signature Moment features, and in collaboration with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), we successfully designed, built, and delivered a self-paced, engaging course geared towards a nontechnical, business user audience.
Impact
Our partner’s cloud computing products and services experienced 45% growth during the year we worked together, and the digital learning experience we created was foundational to meeting the needs of business decision makers.
Furthermore, our partner now had a deep understanding of how to reach a business-critical new audience, non-technical executives, that applied broadly across other product lines. They also had a differentiated and reproducible digital learning experience strategy that they could scale across their digital learning experiences.
