One of the significant challenges with managing a product curriculum is determining the appropriate content to enable customers to perform a task. Many organizations rely heavily on knowledge base documentation and create extensive help centers. Some organizations choose to provide more white glove service to customers through instructor-led training conducted by dedicated product trainers or customer success managers. But as an organization scales, selecting the appropriate content medium is critical to maintaining a clear and effective product curriculum. Today we'll look at 5 learning content media and when to use them.
The five most common learning content media are:
eLearning Courses (SCORM, xAPI, or AICC compliant)
Instructional Videos (independent of, but possibly included within eLearning Courses)
Articles & Short Form Documentation
In-Product Walkthroughs and Tooltips
Instructor-Led Training
What are the Risks of Making Content?
Different media come with different requirements and constraints. Mismanaging educational content can result in a poor customer learning experience, higher churn rates, and unnecessary administrative costs. More generally, effective customer L&D conveys thought leadership in your market category. Ineffective L&D creates noise that distracts the customer from achieving success by sending them down rabbit holes of searching through misleading help center articles and upvoting community posts made by similarly frustrated customers. There are four risks of producing learning content:
Overburdening
Inconsistency
Obsolescence
Redundancy
Organizations are at risk of overburdening training and CS departments if they rely too heavily on instructor-led training. As new organizations are building strategic partnerships with key accounts, instructor-led training is critical to building customer relationships. But as organizations scale, they must hire additional headcount to conduct training sessions. This creates added administrative costs and a secondary risk, inconsistency, or the likelihood that different customers will receive inconsistent training and possibly incorrect product guidance.
Overburdening can also occur when organizations rely too heavily on content types that are expensive and time-consuming to make. When overburdening occurs in eLearning and video production departments, designers must race to keep an overly large library of content updated while keeping up with demands for new content as well. This creates a different secondary risk, obsolescence, or the likelihood that outdated learning content will reach customers’ eyes. One way to reduce administrative costs of updating content is by leaning more heavily on media that are compatible with a CMS. For eLearning content, version tracking is necessary to reduce the risk of obsolescence.
A final risk occurs when organizations fail to communicate product roadmaps, or when product training begins solving for customer pain points that should be solved by the product itself. Product curriculum runs the risk of redundancy if it attempts to train customers to perform a skill that could be better addressed by revising the product to make the skill easier to perform or entirely automatic.
The table below summarizes the major risks associated with each content type.
| Overburdening | Inconsistency | Obsolescence | Redundancy |
eLearning & Video | Average | Average | High | High |
Instructor-Led | High | High | None | Average |
Articles | Low | Average | High | Low |
In-Product Guides | High | Low | Average | None |
Content Criteria
Organizations can mitigate these risks by adopting a content selection framework that determines the correct content ratio for their use cases. Two criteria are needed, customer commitment and complexity.
Customer Commitment
A customer’s commitment to learning the product determines the time, energy, and capital the customer is willing to spend. When designing a course, commitment is a factor in both the length of the course, and whether or not to monetize the course. If the customer has already purchased your product, they might be disappointed to discover that they need to pay additional costs for training on how to use your product. If you have monetized training, consider including a number of promo codes in your statement of work.
Large organizations with popular products that are widely used can afford to assume higher levels of customer commitment. Salesforce, for example, markets training to individuals within organizations. Individuals are incentivized to pay for Trailhead certifications because they know it will benefit their careers. There are several factors that determine the level of customer commitment, and a successful customer education strategy will formulate strategic positioning to increase customer commitment. Customer education teams should work cross-functionally with CS, Marketing, and Sales to understand user personae and approximate customer commitment levels. After an MVP curriculum has been launched, analytics managers should pay attention to the time customers are spending on courses in the LMS to better gauge commitment levels.
Need for Prior Knowledge
Prior knowledge is the level of knowledge a user needs to have before consuming the instructional content. I chose the term “prior knowledge” so that users could apply this framework based on their intuition of how difficult a task is, and how much help learners need. A selection framework should be an easy to apply decision procedure for creating content, and should avoid getting too thick into the weeds. There are many ways to define prior knowledge here, but in the interest of keeping it simple, I like using Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Bloom’s taxonomy contains six orders of thinking skills: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Remembering is the lowest order, and creating is the highest order. Because product adoption is the ultimate goal of most product training, applying is the highest order of thinking skill learning content typically aims to teach.
For the purposes of this framework, prior knowledge is the degree to which instructional material must address multiple orders of thinking skills. Instructional content that teaches the learner to apply assumes more prior knowledge (or requires less prior knowledge) than content that teaches both understanding and applying. This is because the lowest level of prior knowledge instructional content addresses is usually targeting either understanding or applying. They do this by assuming the user already has some knowledge about the task. For example, in-app guides teach users how to apply knowledge they already have to achieve a certain output, like how to set up an integration. An eLearning course assumes less, and may address remembering and understanding as well as applying.
Visual Framework
The following chart is a proposed framework for selecting content to address different topics. It can be used to categorize training requests and educate cross-functional teams on curriculum strategy.
In-App Guidance
In-App or in-product guidance is suitable for low commitment customers and either a high level of prior knowledge or a low need for prior knowledge. This is due to the just-in-time nature of in-product guidance. In-app guidance can reach customers at critical moments of their onboarding experience and bring forward moments of value before their attention wanes. In-app guidance can be used to promote complex tasks, however guides should be as short as possible. One strategy to promote more complex product features is to give users a feature overview in-app, and provide links in the guide that lead the user to the LMS to learn more.
Avoid overburdening and obsolescence by defining a manageable scope of in-app guidance content. Guide creation time is short, which allows developers to build large libraries quickly. However, if guide admins do not have a planned review process in place, they are at risk of developing more guides than they can manage. Before creating an expansive library, consider these guide features which multiply the effort of managing guides:
Segmentation by User Persona: One of the major benefits of most in-app guides is the ability to segment customers based on various factors. If your product has different customer journeys for different user personae, you may want to create rules that enforce which segments see which guides.
Segmentation by Account: Your organization may also wish to customize guides for strategic accounts. This may make sense for small startups with only a few large accounts, but as your business scales segmentation by account can expose your guides to risk of obsolescence and overburden your teams. An alternative to account-based segmentation is using variables in your guides’ copy that allows you to pull in account names or other information without creating separate guides for each account.
A/B Testing: Conducting A/B testing can greatly improve the quality and effectiveness of your guides. Running continuous testing, however, can greatly increase administrative bandwidth, as each guide you test requires a duplicate.
Localization: Possibly the most difficult effort on this list, creating a duplicate library in a second language will require additional administration aside from just translation services. When guides change, translations need to be redone. Determine your localization needs early on and decide on a limited section of your library to localize if your library becomes too large to localize in full. Localizing guides can be expensive, time-consuming, and the localized guides will require the same amount of maintenance as any other guide.
Your content strategy should take into consideration these four features when deciding the scope of your guide library. Limit guides that attempt to teach tasks which require high prior knowledge and guides which assume higher levels of customer commitment. Focus on creating a small onboarding library segmented by persona, as well as a set of just-in-time guides that activate as a result of criteria being met. Run A/B testing on these guides, and keep the possibility of localization in mind.
Video Tutorials
A well-made video tutorial conveys professionalism and thought leadership. Video tutorials are ideal for customers with high levels of commitment and information that is largely conceptual. The goal with videos should be to promote an understanding of the product. One of the main challenges to creating video tutorials that train product skills is keeping them up-to-date as the product UI changes. The cost and time to update videos is much higher than articles, in-app guides, and any medium containing screenshots or gifs. For example, think of an analytics service. They would need to develop training on how to build a report using their platform. If they choose to use video to train customers, they will need to remake the video every time their product changes. Rather than building training on how to use their product, video training should focus on analytics methodology whenever possible.
Articles
Articles are a powerful tool for SEO, and should be utilized with this purpose in mind. Most good knowledge bases will work with a content management system that allows for easier review and maintenance, but just like with other forms of instructional content, the size of a knowledge base is proportionate to the risk of obsolescence. Combining a knowledge base with a community can mitigate this risk. Community posts are meant to become obsolete, and users aren’t surprised when advice from several years ago is no longer valid. Build a knowledge base that addresses in-depth product features and update the knowledge base in lockstep with product releases. Save less common use cases for a community.
eLearning Content and Instructor-Led Training
eLearning and instructor-led courses are suitable for high commitment users and tasks which require high levels of prior knowledge. A course starts from a lower order of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and works up to application. Because eLearning takes longer to develop and instructor-led courses incur higher administrative costs, both eLearning and instructor-led courses should be highly intentional in their curriculum. The backbone of eLearning and instructor-led curriculum is the customer journey. Learning paths, or the sequence of courses learners follow, should parallel customer journeys, and each course should promote specific moments of value.
Final Thoughts
A selection framework requires the right team to operationalize. Instructional designers should be able to determine prior knowledge. Product, product marketing, and customer lifecycle managers should collaborate to define customer journeys and user personae. Commitment levels should be generalized by user persona and validated by product analytics. Sales, customer success managers, and other roles in professional services are on the front lines collecting qualitative feedback on the product curriculum. Develop processes around gathering feedback and communicating the curriculum roadmap. Also, make sure your customer success managers are aware of the full range of curriculum offerings and incorporate curriculum strategy into their playbooks.
When an organization employs a content selection framework, it mitigates risk and drives not only customer adoption, but also higher net promoter scores, customer satisfaction, and lower customer acquisition costs. Even a lean customer education team can achieve major outcomes when they remain cognizant of their curriculum strategy and intentional in their strategy execution.
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