And yes, it's sort of stating the obvious, but it's such a key bit of obvious I wanted to talk about it.
I'm coming round to believe that the choice of platform (be it eLearning, Intranet, Social web or whatever) although important (in terms of the choice of tools you have open to you), the really important factors in terms of success of a service, are:
"in every service we build online, good communication & engagement is so much more important than the tech"
1. how well you communicate with users about what the service is for and how they can use it
and
2. how easy and rewarding you make it for them to engage with the service
I think the clearest examples are thinking about the reasons why people love facebook and hate their corporate intranet. It explains why despite everything you do students always complain about not being able to find things and disliking your learning environment. To start to fix it, we need to improve our communication (both ways of course, listening is under-rated!) so they know how it works and why we're doing what we're doing the way that we're doing it.
Of course it's better if you think about 1 and 2 before you release the service rather than after. If you want some ideas on how to achieve number 2, then I'll point you at my Fun Engineer post.
1 comments:
I think your point 1 is critical "how they can use it"; I've found that for things that are technically fairly simple (e.g .twitter) it's often the "what's the use" that's the hardest to get over to people, where things that are much more complex (e.g. SecondLife) people can often see the potential - just the technology is way too scary.
We're also having a 'communication review', though sadly that tends to be focussed on 1 way communication, rather than the two way some of us are trying to encourage.
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