What's a good way to train employees on how to use the software you've just created?

Question

I'm working in a small company and weeks away from deploying a web-app that will be used a lot. Everyone at one location will have to learn to use it, and although I think it's pretty easy and intuitive I may be biased.
I've written a help guide with plenty of screenshots that's available on every page, but I'll still need to train everyone. What's the best way? How do you take a step back and explain code you've been working on for weeks?

Answer 1

First try to avoid the training:

Perform usability testing to ensure your web app is intuitive. Usability testing is a very important aspect of testing and it is often ignored. How you see your system will probably be very different as how a new user sees your system.

Also add contextual help as often as you can. For example when I hover over a tag in stack overflow, I know exactly what clicking it will do, because it tells me.

Also this may seem obvious, but make sure you link to your documentation from the site itself. People may not think of looking in your documentation unless its right in front of their eyes.

About training documentation:

Try to split up your material into how your users would use the system. I personally like the "trails" option that Sun created for their Java tutorials. In this tutorial you can do several things, and you can chose on which trail you'd like to go.

Support random reads in your help documentation. If they have a task to do in your web app, then they should be able to get help on that without reading a bunch of unrelated content.

Make sure your documentation is searchable.

About actual training sessions:

If you are actually performing training sessions, stay away from explaining anything related to your code at all. You don't need to know about the engine to drive a car.

Try to split up your training sessions into very focused aspects of your system. If you only have 1 training session available to you then just do one specialized use case of your system + the overall description of the system. Refer to the different parts of documentation where they can get help.

Letting the community help itself:

No matter how extensive your documentation is, you'll always have cases that you didn't cover. That's why it's a good idea to have a forum available to all users of the system. Allow them to ask each other questions.

You can review this forum and add content to your documentation as needed.

You could also open up a wiki for the documentation itself, but this is probably not desirable if your user base isn't very large.

Answer 2

Few ideas:

Do you have some canned walk-through scenarios? Don't know if it is applicable for your product, but I built a pretty substantial product a couple years ago and developed some training modules that they'd work through - nothing long, maybe 15 minutes tops for each one.

I put together a slide presentation that hit the highlights to talk about what it does. I would spend about 10 minutes going through the app's highlights to familiarize them with it before doing the hands-on stuff.

People don't tend to read stuff, unfortunately. You could put hours and hours into a help document, and still find that folks simply don't read it or skim over it. That can be frustrating. Expect that answers that are in your guide will be the topic of questions your users will have.

Break up any training you do into manageable chunks. I've been to a full-day training exercise before and the trainer broke it into short pieces and made it easy for me to get the training topic in my head. You don't want to data-dump on them because their eyes will gloss over and you'll lose them.

Ultimately, if your app is highly usable, it should be a piece of cake. If it isn't, you'll find out. You might want to have a few folks you know run through your training ahead of time and give you constructive criticism on it. Better to fix it before the big group is trained. You'll be more confident in the product and the training materials (whatever they are) and you'll likely have a better training experience.

If applicable, provide an online help/wiki/faq for them. Sometimes that is helpful.

Best of luck!

Answer 3

I'll be looking into something like this too in the next few months.

In your case, hopefully the UI has already undergone user acceptance testing. You say you work in a small company. Is it possible to get the least tech-savvy person there to try it out? In fact, get them to try it out without any guidance from yourself except for questions they ask. Document the questions and make sure your user-guide answers them.

The main thing for me would be logic and consistency. If the app's workflow relates logically to the task it has been designed to accomplish and the UI is consistent you should be OK.

Answer 4

Create a wiki page to describe the use of your system. Giving edit rights to the users of your system lets the users:

• update the documentation to correct any errors in the initial release of documentation,
• share any tips on usage they may have found.
• share unusual uses for the system that you may not have thought of.
• request features.
• provide any workarounds they've found while waiting for the new functionality to be implemented.

Answer 5

You should really have addressed this issue a lot earlier in the development cycle than you are doing.

In my view the ideal scenario for corporate software is one where the users design their own application and write their own documentation and I always try to strive for this. You should have identified key users early on and designed the system with them (I try to get my users to do basic screen designs and menu layouts in Excel or similar - then I implement that as static pages and review before writing a line of significant code, obviously they won't get the design right first time, but it's your job to guide them - and ideally in a way where they think they came up with the correct design decisions, not you :-) ).

These users should then write the user documentation from this design in parallel with you developing the system. I have never seen help documentation delivered by a IT department/software company used significantly in a corporate setting. Instead what happens is the users will create their own folder of notes and work-arounds and refer to this (in fact if you're ever doing system analysis to replace an existing system finding the 'user-bible' for the old system is a key strategy). Getting the users to write their own documentation up-front simply harnesses what will happen anyway - but this is vastly easier if the users feel they have ownership of the system because they designed it themselves in the first place.

Of course this approach needs commitment and time from your users, but generally it's not that hard a sell. It's trite, but working as a facilitator so the users can develop there own system rather than as a third party to give them a system pretty much guarantees user acceptance.

As you are where you are you're too late to implement all of this, but if you can identify a couple of keen, key, users and get time from them to write their own documentation then that would be a good move. If you can't get even that then you need to identify an evangelist who you can train to be the 'departmental' expert and give them 110% of your energy to support them.

The bottom line is that user acceptance is based on perception, and this does not necessarily correlate with how usable an system actually is. You have to focus on the group psychology of this as much as the reality of the system, which tends to be tricky for developers as we're much more factually based than most people.

Answer 6

Try a few users first, one or two in a small company. Mostly watch, help as little as possible. This tells you what needs to be fixed, and it creates an experienced user base - so you are not the "training bottleneck" anymore.

Turn core requirements/use cases/storycards into HowTo / walkthroughs for your documentation.

For a public training, prepare a 10..15 minute presentation (just that, not more!) that covers key concepts that the users absolutely must understand, than show your core walkthroughs. Reserve extra time for questions about how to solve various tasks.

Think as a user, not as a techie: - noone cares if it's a SQL database and you spent a lot of time to get the locking mechanisms right. They do care about "does it slow me down" and "does something bad happen when two people do that at the same time". Our job is to make complicated things look easy.

It may help to put the documentation on the intranet in an editable form - page "comments", or wiki maybe. And/or put up a "error wiki" for error messages and blips - where you or your users can quickly add recomendations, workarounds and reasons for anything that does not go as expected.

Answer 7

Rather then train all those people I have chosen a few superusers (at least one person from each department) and trained them to teach the rest of the employees. It is of course vital that those super users are

• well respected in their departments
• able to teach
• like the application

The easy way to ensure that they like the app is to have them to define the way it should work :-). Since they should work with this app each and every day they are the prime stakeholders, no matter what management states