Designing for data

Last night’s lrnchat was about ‘data’ how its used and how its not used. Good discussion. I did walk away thinking a lot about the discussion because what I saw was a lot of fear around the idea that we’ve been doing this all wrong to begin with.

Now most of us wouldn’t fess up to this, nor would most of us even recognize the fear, but I saw a lot of people talking about how poor existing data is coming out of ‘learning systems’ but finding every excuse in the world not to find something that did work. One of my favourite comments was ‘Tin Can has great potential, but what does it have to do with metrics?’. That folks is nothing but fear and ignorance and I don’t want that to sound as bad as it does, but I’m being straight up.

When the subject of web analytics was brought up, lots of ‘many of us don’t have web analytic teams’, or ‘what do web analytics people know about measuring performance’? When I don’t have immediate access to people or things, I like to use something called the Internet to find people and communities that can provide meaningful information to help me self educate. There are communities and professions dedicated to data modelling and drawing meaningful data for their businesses on which businesses make critical decisions. I know this may come as a shocker, but I doubt any large business decision was ever made based on LMS data. So if we want to understand how to create meaningful data, maybe we should look to those communities that do this already. Guess what…web analytics people meet that criteria. Not having a person around who does this is no excuse given whats available to you on your freakin’ phone.

So… lots of resistance and lots of complaining. Fear and ignorance. No one is going to like that.

So let me try to add something positive here. what I like about the new Tin Can API is that I can use it to create the infrastructure I need to support designing online activities that generate data I want. Quick example. I have a block of text. I need to know whether the content is engaging. If I put the text on a single screen for somebody to read, I’ll never know if they’ve read the whole thing, the first paragraph or 2 paragraphs etc. If I spread the text over three screens, and make the navigation from one screen to the next an optional element as far as ‘achievement’ goes (people aren’t clicking next cause they have to), if someone actually goes through all 3 pages doesn’t that mean something? Whats the percentage of people that didn’t go through all 3 pages versus those that did? If the majority of people don’t, doesn’t that mean something over if they did? If my goal is to make sure people read it and nobody goes through all 3 pages, then I guess the text isn’t as engaging as I’d like it to be and I have decisions to make. yes? Well before Tin Can, I had no way to do this in a consistent way or correlate that data to potentially other organizationally relevant data. What if everybody that reads page 1 and everybody that reads all 3 pages contribute equally to the organization (imagine their sales people)? Do I need all 3 pages?

Designing for data is something marketing folks do all the time and its ALL ABOUT PERFORMANCE. Did you buy more product? Did the engagement in their social activities generate more revenue for the business? They couldn’t be more performance focused in the right way. Learning people for some reason still give a damn about learning. What they should care about is whether what they do has an impact on the health of their organizations. Find ways of correlating the two.

Designing for data means that you design activities that generates data. Use that data to make correlations to the health of the business. Tin Can offers you the standards for building that plumbing. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. There are people that do.

Tagged as: design, ISD, reuben tozman, Tin Can