Learning Conversations

We spend days and weeks analysing audience needs & business requirements. We carefully craft our materials so they're engaging and follow best practice in materials design. Our developers create code that is standards compliant and accessible.

In theory, we've done everything we can to maximise the impact of our materials.

Yet we can still do more...

1. Make them easy to get to

Cut down the number of authentication steps required to the bare minimum. None at all if possible. Each time a user hits a page asking for a password it reduces their motivation to continue.

Similarly, make sure that the system holding your materials is as user-centred as possible. Relevant materials should not be hidden deep within systems that you have to learn to navigate. That's the beauty of hyperlinks. A link can be placed where the user is to take them straight to the materials.

2. Make them easy to find

The starting place for most people when they need to find something out is a search page. Ideally, your materials will be on the open internet and viewable to a normal search engine. If that's not possible, and they need to stay inside the corporate firewall, then at least make them visible to the corporate search engine (you do have one, don't you?)

And by making them visible to search engines, I mean the whole package, not just the title page, but all the content inside. Obviously that's not yet possible with video or audio files. But if you've got text-based pages, then all that text should be searchable, so a user can jump straight to it when needed.

3. Make them easy to refer

Ideas spread around the internet through people making referrals via email, twitter, blogs, social bookmarking, social networks, recommendations etc.

Your materials should all have a unique (and permanent) URL that can be shared. Even better, each individual page within the materials should have its own URL.

When users get to your content, they should be able to rate it, make comments, tweet it (or use an internal micro-blogging tool - again, you do have one?) and invite other colleagues to view it. It's called viral marketing, and it works on the web. Why don't we use it in our organisations?