Project
Award-winning training for retail sales associates in the furniture industry.
Learning management system, reporting, whitelisting, custom training, marketing materials
Front end: HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Sketchup
Back end: custom PHP framework, Smarty, MySQL
Design:Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
The Sizzle
Problem: Training can seem boring.
Solutions: We added movement, vivid color, and a faster pace to the training and their interactions.
Whenever possible, we added manipulatives and interactive activities to help cement the ideas being taught. For example, in Room Design, in a lesson about the elements of color, I added a simple manipulative to show the difference between 'value' and 'intensity'. Users can drag a slider and change the value or intensity of a red sofa in the center of the screen. It's one thing to hear the definition, but another entirely to change it yourself.
What Do Supervisors Need?
Problem: Our clients wanted to see their employee's progress more and control their account settings.
Solutions: After lengthy discussion, we created a new section of the website for buyers and supervisors.
This new section allowed supervisors to see their employee's overall progress at a glance as well as take a deep dive. They were also given tools that allowed them to add/remove employees from seats, change licenses, and oversee the completion of worksheets - with the ability to tell individuals to redo or finish them. Managers could also change the pace of the lessons that were automatically assigned via a schedule.
Using 3D!
Problem: We always wanted to add 3D interactive components to the Furniture Product Knowledge, but the effort was considerable.
Solution: I found a library of 3D furniture models in Sketchup's 3D Warehouse.
One of my co-workers and I spent nearly three weeks finding Sketchup models that matched the styles of furniture that were being taught and I cleaned them up, simplifying if necessary, and exported them as a .collada file that could be read into a custom viewer I created. We decided that we wanted to be able to change the color of the textures on a whim, and since the textures are loaded in via relative url, I created a REST endpoint that would serve up the texture image that we wanted based on a database entry in our settings table.