In Part 1 of this post, I reviewed some of our company’s history with learning products and how we traveled the circuitous path to arrive at the launch of Xplana.com. I also talked about three elements that have contributed into our general product design foundation.
Don’t Work in a Vacuum — Be aware of the work and thinking done by others, as well as the strengths of similar products and markets.
Develop a Core Product Philosophy — Before you create a single design document or even start your wish list, make sure you have a clear and firm core product philosophy. Ours is simple — connect individual learners to content and communities.
Be Aware of Your Product Principles — There are three fundamental principles that guide our decision making with regards to product design: 1) the shift from group to individual; 2) the shift from building to integrating; 3) the shift from controlling to granting freedom.
These guiding principles are mostly useful to us when we get into “gray areas” or tight spots and can’t decide which direction to take with out product design. They are concepts we can refer to in order to help us re-ground our thinking and re-focus or purpose.
Once you have a basic product design foundation, you have to establish key areas of focus that will determine what features and functionality to prioritize, as well as how you architect and deliver those things to your users. With regards to Xplana.com, we have four general areas of such focus. These are what really form the boundaries of our vision and direct us to our end goal of a rich social learning platform.
- Focus on the individual learner (any kind — student or master learner/teacher) — This goes back to our core philosophy of connecting individual learners to content and community. Our belief is that in an ideal social learning network, each individual learner should maintain control of where he/she goes, as well as with whom or what he/she connects. In traditional learning systems, like an LMS, the design is intentionally around the concept of a group or container. These systems have not real purpose, in fact, without a formal learning community of some kind. While a social learning platform like ours can certainly support groups — informal and formal — they are not the center of gravity. This should and does guide our decisions about features, workflows, roles and permissions.
- Focus on connections and aggregation — We always start with the individual learner, and then begin asking how we can facilitate connections, our goal being to encourage individuals to create a certain amount of network/learning complexity through these connections. This desire for connection means bringing in as much content as possible through as many channels as we can integrate. In our initial launch, for example, we will feature direct integration with YouTube and Photobucket for publishing and aggregating content. we will pre-aggregate and categorize news and blog feeds and also allow/encourage learners to add new ones and share them. In addition, we will pre-populate our digital content library with as many open educational resources as possible. Any of this content, along with the content created by our learners can be shared in multiple ways, not only with users within Xplana.com but also with friends and connections via Facebook and/or Twitter.
With every feature and design element, we ask ourselves “how can this be used to connect?” This focus helps drive a number of other product design pieces as well. For example, we believe strongly that we shouldn’t re-invent any wheels. People already have tons of content all over the Web. We want to encourage them to keep using and adding to that content while we provide a convenient, single location for bringing it all together. Also, our drive to connect people to content means that we spend a significant portion of our energies on information management — personal tags, taxonomies, and search. We believe that our success, in part, is directly related to the ease with which people can find what they want.
- Focus on the disaggregation of content — Overall, we view our product concept as one that is “containerless” — rather than begin with pre-conceived notions of how learners want to collect or organize their experience, we focus on providing and open arena in which they can explore and work, along with the tools to build the containers of their own design and choice. With regards to content, this means breaking content down into as many disaggregated pieces as possible so that users can have the greatest flexibility possible in building their own resources.
- Focus on distribution — Connecting, at least in our view of a social learning platforms, means connecting wherever or whenever a learner happens to be. This means providing a framework for mobile distribution that allows learners to create and connect (content and people) with a wide variety of devices and options. To that end, we will launch our platform with apps designed specifically for the iPhone and Android OS platforms. We will begin by focusing on the individual students and their learning lives, and then extend the framework to support master learners/teachers and a more distributed notion of our platform itself. Ultimately, we believe that learners should be able to choose, at a granular level, which pieces of our platform they want to use at any time (as well as how they use it).