Challenge:
Employees don’t prioritize learning at work and don’t have a place to easily share learning with peers. The current employee learning program prompts employees to complete 40 hours of learning known as Think40. However, we noticed a spike in learning at the end of the year rather than a steady increase in learning throughout the year.
Idea:
Institute a culture of continuous learning at IBM. Both managers and employees would benefit by staying relevant in their skills and prepare them to adapt quickly to changes surrounding the company. This personalized learning application aims to help learners achieve their learning goals.
Purpose:
User feedback sessions were completed on the iOS version of the YL Boost app and the Web version using a cognitive walkthrough testing methodology. The aim was to evaluate users’ reactions and opinions of this new app and to validate the UX, ensuring users can easily complete their expected tasks.
Results:
Users were able to complete key tasks in the interface without significant difficulty on mobile, though several areas of optimization and enhancement were discovered or suggested by users. The web version did not do as well as mobile. With small group studies, usability and efficiency issues are the most important discoveries.
Continuous learning habit
Continuous learning habit is defined as an enterprise wide learning goal which is set at a minimum of 1 hour of learning per week which can be updated by learners based on their individual interest.
Notifications
Notifications is vital part of the application which is integrated with most of the user actions in the app that allows them to align with their learning goals
Goals
Goals are learning activities, badges or roadmaps which can be set as personal goals by the learners with a set deadline.
Featured Goals
Featured goals are learning goals set by enterprise to a specific Org, BU or to the entire company to reskill employees in the company’s strategic areas of interest
Sharing
Sharing enables learners to share any learning content available on the app with their peers or fellow IBMers.
Challenging
Challenging is a gamified approach of learning where learners can compete with fellow IBMers on specific learning within the app.
Learning streaks
Learning streak is an uninterrupted achievement of continuous learning habit goals.
Slack Communities
Slack communities are based on the areas of interest that are recommended based on the learner’s profile to help them to collaborate with professionals with similar areas of interest.
Personalized experience
With smarter recommendations users can personalize their own experience by combining analytics, IBM Watson and feedback. Much like Amazon does with its recommendations for books, movies and other goods, our team created recommendations based on related activities, a learner’s history, job role and other factors.
Recommendation algorithms, along with Watson tagging, help tailor suggestions to a learner’s interests and skills. As learners respond to recommendations, the algorithms learn their likes and dislikes, and will respond with better suggestions. This ever-adaptive customization is key to accelerating the development of every employee.
IBM YL Boost is a personalized learning habit planner. It empowers IBMers to build learning habits, keep up with learning goals, stay motivated, and learn with others. The first mobile app that gives learners a personalized and social learning experience, wouldn't exist without the collaboration of a multi-disciplinary team of curious and creative individuals.
It's essential to interview real users in order to build impactful solutions. It's okay to spend more time on user research to better understand users pain points than to rush to finish high fidelity designs. Luckily, when you're building a product for an internal use, there's many volunteers that will be willing to give their feedback.
Strong communication between team members, management, and cross team to discuss rapid change by leveraging agile methodologies. I led team retrospectives, where team members discussed what went well, what went poorly, and what needs improvement which inevitably enabled us to work better together.
Good design was delayed in preference of quickly adding new features. This led to extra work in the long run because functionality that wasn't thoroughly worked out ended up receiving negative feedback and increase defects as more users started to use them.
