Prototypically Speaking – The Software and Requirements Prototyping Blog

Last week, we discussed some reasons why we shouldn’t always throw away our prototypes. After all, we’ve invested a fair amount of time in them, so it makes sense to put them to as many good uses as we can.

As mentioned, a powerful use of a software prototype is as a training simulation. Well, we received a couple of emails asking for some more detail about using prototypes for training, and how best to do this, so here is a little more information:

To create a training simulation from a prototype, we ask certain things of our prototype:

• It must be stable (in terms of functionality)
  In other words, if we are going to use it to train users, it must reflect the system that will be implemented closely – otherwise the use of simulation will be counter-productive;
• It must be interactive and sufficiently detailed
  Effective training has to feel like a real system, which means it must be interactive. Navigation should work, logins should be simulated, drop-down lists should contain real-world entries, selections on pages should work as a real system would, there should be mock training data and so on;
• It must look and feel complete
  Each aspect of the prototype’s design should be consistent and complete, at least within the scope of the training requirement. There should be no ‘coming soon’ placeholder pages or anything that suggests a work in progress. Bear in mind that what we are trying to do is to make the simulation feel as much like a built system as possible.

Once we’ve confirmed that our prototype meets these requirements, then we need to think about what type of training simulation we want to create.

The two main types of training simulation that we’ll consider are:

Free (unguided) Training Simulations

…and…

Guided Training Simulations

‘Free’ training simulations allow the user to try systems out without imposing structure on what they should do, or how they should do it. Whilst there may be context sensitive help or general guidance on training objectives, the user is left to their own devices to explore the system and make their own discoveries. In these ‘unguided’ simulations, as we aren’t focusing on workflow or operational tasks. We simply want the user to gain confidence in, and awareness of, the system and how to navigate within it.

Guided training simulations are more complex from a design perspective as the overall aim is to guide users through one or more tasks – typically workflow or operational objectives – with supporting contextual material such as a step-by-step help system. Within a guided simulation, the objective is to train a user how to accomplish distinct tasks in a more directed fashion.

To create an unguided training simulation from an existing prototype isn’t a huge task, provided it meets the criteria mentioned earlier. In fact, it’s almost a ‘freebie’ if enough care has been taken within the prototyping process. Certainly, it’s an added-value output whose cost shouldn’t add significantly to the overall budget and whose benefits will certainly out-weigh those costs.

A guided training simulation is a more significant undertaking – care has to be taken to add ’state’ to the prototype – and this isn’t always easy. We need to do this, however, to hold the ‘current’ status of a user’s interaction with a guided task, and also to use this to control the context sensitive guidance materials. Building a guided training simulator requires a greater commitment from management as it will swallow time and resources to create. However, for critical systems, or where complexity is above average, the investment in creating a guided training simulation ahead of time pays off in diminished risk of ‘down-time’ (whilst users get ‘up to speed’) and increased acceptance from those users as they are already familiar with a new system before it is launched.

In a future topic, we’ll cover guided training in some more depth, but for now hopefully this overview will be useful.

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