Great post in UXmag.com on User Experience Leadership.

I wanted to point out a great article I read today on UXmag.com - 5 tips for effective UX Leadership by Paul Holcomb. His insights speak to many of the frustrations I know I feel when working on a project, especially when working in isolation (functional silo!). How do you move beyond being seen as the deliverables person, and move into a more strategic role within your company, or with your clients.

Greg often talks about what questions need to be asked BEFORE a project starts - and it is almost as if he and Paul got together on this article. I think it is because, from a UX perspective, these are common sense considerations. But common sense depends on common perspective, and when most of our co-workers or clients are NOT looking at things from the UX perspective, but rather from a project management or team management or even SME perspective, those things that are common sense to us aren't necessarily going to be common sense to them!

Check it out - its a great read!

Wade

How to Replace the Master Page in SmartBuilder

I recently found myself in a situation where I needed to update the Master Page on 5 different lessons.  Through client revisions and added functionality, the original Master Page had evolved a great deal. I was frustrated to learn that although you can copy entire pages via the Page Sequence List (Edit/Page Sequence from the Authoring Stage), the Master Page is not included in this functionality. Faced with the prospect of recreating all of the actions in the Master Page across all 5 lessons I decided to search for a more efficient solution to no avail. My search was not completely fruitless as I did turn up a few capabilities that when combined can produce the same effect.

7 steps to Replacing your Master Page

1. Open your lesson and save a copy.
   
2. In your new saved copy, open the Page Sequence dialog and delete all of the pages in your lesson. (You will need to be viewing the Master Page to accomplish this as SmartBuilder will not allow you to delete a page you are currently viewing)
   
3. Save this cleaned out lesson as a template
   
   
   
   
   
4. Publish your new template. (found in My Content / Work in Progress /Templates) This will place your template in My Published Content / Templates allowing you to apply this template to a lesson.
   
   
   
5. Open your lesson that needs the Master Page replaced, choose to view/edit the Master Page. On the Authoring Stage, press CTRL A (select all) and then Delete.
   
   
6. Delete your Actions.  If you view your Action list you will see that all of the actions are now colored red.  This is because all of the objects these items were tied to have been deleted. Delete all of these Actions.
   
   
   
7. The final step is to apply your saved template to your now cleaned out Master Page. From the Design Tab in the Template Pane, (on the bottom right) click on Apply Template. Locate and select your template in the Select Template dialog box.
   
   

You have now replaced your Master Page!  To apply this method to additional lessons simply repeat steps 5-7 on the desired lessons.

Know of an easier process?  I would love to hear it!

What I 'Got' from eLearning DevCon 2012

It goes without saying (...or, um, typing...?) that there was much to learn from this year's eLearning DevCon 2012 (http://elearningdevcon.com/), or "ELDC2012", held in the very beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, June 6-8th, 2012. Greg Gardner, Damian Liska, Stephanie Spinapolice, and myself - all from ICF International - had the distinct honor of participating in ELDC2012 in several ways, such as:

Stephanie Spinapolice at the ICF booth

• Presenting on highly technical topics
• Giving bring your own laptop ("BYOL" sessions)
• Having an exhibitor booth...
• ...As well as being a sponsor the conference itself

However, beyond this, there are some very important 'take-aways' from ELDC2012, which I shall list here in no particular order or fashion:

Michael Sheyahshe giving presentation

• SLC is beautiful
• Having never been to Utah for any reason, it was nice to see such breathtaking views.
• People are excited to both learn about and utilize technology
• Directly after my talk on Augmented Reality ("AR"), one audience member used the information from my talk to create AR for her friend's band. While she was amazed at how easy it was, saying it took her 50 seconds, from start to finish. It is one of the best compliments, as a presenter to have someone actively use information I've given, almost directly in front of my eyes.
• ELDC2012 participants are highly diverse, ranging from Designers, Developers, Programmers, and anything in-between

• During my sessions and presentations, I noticed how diverse the audience members, participants, and other presenters were. As I answered questions and had ensuing conversations afterwards, I found that ELDC2012 participants came armed with questions and interest levels all across the board. They certainly kept me on my toes.
• Social networking is alive and well
• Not only were there many continuous Tweets on ELDC2012, I also made several friends at the conference, using social networks.  Power to the people !  :)
• Thoughts on thinking



 Neuroscientist, Dr. Art Kohn

• Dr. Art Kohn's Keynote on "Know the Mind. Know the Learner" was insightful and entertaining. The 'tricks' he played on the audience's minds - such as making the majority of the audience think that he had list the word that he had not listed - reminded me of a recent article in Wired on the way our minds, specifically memory, works. Wired's The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever, outlines how "our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant", based on brain chemistry and neighboring receptors within our grey matter. Dr. Kohn's talk on the difference between encoding information the brain and retrieval of knowledge supported this notion...at least in my brain.
• Apparently, there are several celebrity sightings in SLC
• One of the several friends I made - from both presenting and via social networks (i.e., Twitter) - encountered not one, but two celebrities during ELDC2012. The first, Jay Mohr, was in our hotel at the university for some odd reason; next my Twitter friend spotted Katherine Heigl at the airport. Lucky...

In all, ELDC2012 was a wonderful experience and I'm proud to have been a part of it and look forward to seeing what eLearning DevCon has to offer in the near future.

Ready for eLearnDevCon

I'm sitting in my hotel the day before the eLearnDevCon conference starts.  I've checked in, received my materials, verified all the sponsor materials have arrived and identified the rooms my team and I will be presenting in.  We are giving 11 presentations over the next three days on topics ranging from augmented reality to getting ISD and technology teams communicating better. Check our our sessions. It should be exciting to speak with the eLearning community and share ideas about how to improve eLearning products.

In addition to presenting, I'm planning on attending numerous presentations.  How do you decide which to participate in and which to read through the materials later - since you can't go to all of them?  The line up is very strong, containing topics each of my team members can attend, learn and implement through the coming year's worth of work.

Preparation for the conference has been exhausting - getting regular work done while getting sponsorship packages created, working with our corporate social networking people to figure out how best to use this medium while at the conference, oh yeah, and getting the sessions ready to present.

I trust all attendees are as excited about the conference as I am.  Let me know your thoughts.

Lectora: Creating Dynamic Navigation for Back Buttons

Goal

A student can navigate to a page from multiple other pages, including from the Table of Contents (TOC). Create a solution of actions, which is easy to implement and re-use,  for the back button to send the student either to the page they came from or if navigation was from the TOC then define a specific page for the back button to navigate to.

Directions from the Instructional Designer (ISD) to the programmer come in the form of a detailed storyboard. A flow chart identifies each topic’s flow within a lesson.

The flow chart segment below (figure 1) shows page L22T01075 can be navigated to directly from three pages: L22T01060, L22T01065, and L22T01070.  Since this course has a TOC, L22T01075 can also be navigated to from any other page using the TOC.

Figure 1

Our storyboard captures the logic to be used for the back button (table 1).

Button	Go to Actions
Back	L22T01060, L22T01065, or L22T01070, or (if coming from the TOC) L22T01055

Table 1

A naming convention identifies each page and element on that page.  LxxTyyzzz where “L” and “T” stand for Lesson and Topic respectively and the xx,yy, and zzz values identify the lesson, topic and page numbers.  For ease of rework and possible additional pages being required during the review cycle, page numbers are incremented by a value of five.  L22T01075 then is Lesson 22, Topic 01, page 075.

Listing of actions, action groups, user defined variables and system variables used (table 2).

Action name	Action Group Name	User Defined Variable	System Variable
setL22T01075_visited	Back button actions	theReferrerPage	CurrentPageName
set sendBackToPage var		sendBackToPage
set theReffererPage var

Table 2

Overview of Steps

1)      Collect, identify and store, in a variable the page you are coming from

2)      Set back button onClick to “Back Button actions” action group.

3)      Evaluate the variable and set actions accordingly.

Step 1

A) Set variable “theReferrerPage” with a delay of two seconds to the value VAR(CurrentPageName).  This resets this variable to the name of the page you are currently at. The delay ensures Step 1B happens first and the page you came from is set before being overwritten.  While this action must happen on each page it should not be a global action.  The reason for this is the delay.  The delay is ONLY needed in this scenario when you need to set the sendBackToPage variable.

Figure 2

No conditions set in this action.

B) Create action “set theReferrerPage”.  Set  variable “sendBackToPage” to the variable “theReferrerPage”.  Note that this variable is set on every content page upon “Showing” that page.  The variable “sendBackToPage” now holds the name of the page you come from. This is shown in figure 3.

 Figure 3

No conditions set in this action.

The value of the variables once these two actions have completed if the user navigated to L22T01075 from L22T01060 is as follows:

sendBackToPage = L22T01060

theReferrerPage = L22T01075

The Back Button “on Click” action should be set to run the action group ‘back button actions” as shown in figure 4.

 Figure 4

The action group “back button actions” should have four unique actions to handle the four different actions associated with this specific scenario.

The four actions for this scenario are shown in table 3.

If coming from	Then go back to
L22T01060	L22T01060
L22T01065	L22T01065
L22T01070	L22T01070
TOC Ie not coming from L22T01060, L22T01065, or L22T01070	L22T01055

Table 3

Figure 5

If coming from the TOC (I.e. not coming from L22T01060, L22T01065, or L22T01070)

Action: Go To

Target: Chapter, Section, or Page

Name: L22T01055

Condition

Perform action ONLY if the following is true (Checked)

Any of the Following (selected)   Set up the three conditions as shown in table 4.

Variable	Relationship	Value
sendBackToPage	Not Equal To	L22T01060
sendBackToPage	Not Equal To	L22T01065
sendBackToPage	Not Equal To	L22T01070

Table 4

Figure 6

Condition

Figure 7

Each of the specific pages do the following for L22T01060, L22T01065, and L2201070 changing the Name and condition value as appropriate

Figure 8

Condition

Figure 9

Why not the JavaScript history: back() method? The logic of identifying one specific page to navigate to in the scenario when coming from the TOC negates using this.