Playing with colours

I love to play with colour in a piece of learning, but we don’t always get the chance. We always need to pay close attention to the company brand and the colours they use.  Whatever we create has to truly represent the company we are working for.

July 2019 gave me the opportunity to work on a really exciting project with a chance to play with the brand colours when easyJet approached Omniplex and the Cursim team for help with the design and build of an eLearning module to form the beginning of a larger course for new recruits to the Cabin Crew training programme.

Coming up for a concept for this project was really straightforward. EasyJet are an iconic brand, with a firmly defined colour palette, and I felt that this set of colours would be great to play with throughout the module using a range of mechanisms, animations and transitions to move us from one colour to the next. No standard navigation here; the ‘next’ button was going to move with the slide designs and colours.

Our contact at easyJet was hoping for a module with a playful approach, which truly engaged the learners, leaving them excited to start their training programme. This gave me great scope and the freedom to get as creative as possible. For the sales proposal, research as always was key. I needed to fully understand the easyJet brand; not just the elements we see on television adverts, but the smaller details we see on the company websites, apps, airport publications etc.

The research, brand guidelines, and online resources showed me that easyJet had a distinctly clean and stylised approach to their visual design across the organisation, giving me a great understanding of what works for easyJet, and similarly what does not. The easyJet team had already done the hard work of putting the module outline together, with audio script, and suggested slide style or interaction; so, I could just be truly creative, taking this outline and turning it into something really visual.

This content needed to be followed through in sequence, so what better way to navigate through the content than with a flight path to represent a journey?

Each section is a stop on the journey to show progression, and to easily revisit a section. I use stock imagery when putting a storyboard together so that I can show the client what I am aiming for with the design, and also to give the Graphic Designer a clear brief over what I want for the course design.

Designing the content itself was fun as the easyJet team use both Storyline and Vyond for their learning content. This meant I could use both mediums in my designs, combining Vyond videos and characters into the course design to give me the flow I was hoping for.

I wanted to use Vyond videos in a range of ways, including just for a character. This meant I could design slides which use a combination of the Vyond video character, storyline elements, and custom graphics to give a great feel with lots of animation potential.

An element of gamification was introduced with a ‘collect the stamps’ challenge. easyJet currently fly to 33 countries, so I set about hiding 33 stamps within the content; one for each country. This turned out to be harder than it sounds, and I had to get inventive. Stamps were often hidden and semi transparent to make them less obvious, and hidden, or merged into the background.

The design and build had more slides than a typical course design.  This was so we could really play with how we move from one slide to the next in a more seamless way. We didn’t just use the built in Storyline transitions. I wanted the sequence to animate from one slide to the next, so I planned for a slide to be a transition. One example is where a plane flies across the screen with a wide vapour trail which moves the screen background colour from orange to white. These animation transitions don’t need to be complicated; just appropriate to the setting giving a smooth effect, and they can be of anything relevant to the topic.

The module is scattered with interactions and knowledge check activities, and varying ways of moving on to the next slide. I had to make my apologies to the content developer, Muhammad Islam, for any headaches my design and random navigation For example, after a click to reveal interaction, I wanted the learner to click on an arrow at the top of the screen to launch an animation of a projector screen coming down from the top of the screen.

I might have created more work for myself with this approach, but I wanted the content to seamlessly move from one piece of information or activity to the next.

Research gives me some great insights, and I even had something to use as a random ‘take a guess’ question at the end of the module. This question broke some of the formal learning design rules, which annoyed one person on our team. But I wanted this final question to be totally random, purely for the aim of sharing a factoid about easyJet; nothing more, nothing less. Try the question for yourself!

Do you know how many locations
easyJet fly to in the UK?

The easyJet team were fantastic to work with on this project, fully embracing my sometimes outside the lines designs, and giving some useful and insightful feedback that helped to truly refine the end product. Having a great rapport with your SMEs is essential, and their knowledge and passion for their learners made them a joy to work with. I only hope I can work with them again in the future.

And hats off to Muhammad Islam for the storyline build, and Tanzeel Ayub for some stunning graphics…   they took my mad designs and ran with them, turning my storyboard into a fun to take module. I enjoyed waiting for each review, so I could see just what they had created. Watching my designs become reality is definitely the best part of any project.

If you want to see a working demo of the final module, visit the Cursim website.

Did you make a guess?

Do you want to know the answer?

…

easyJet fly to 18 airports across the UK.

(I didn’t realise we had 18 airports!)