The Articulate Rise web-based authoring tool has been a boon to course creators looking to build interactive, mobile-friendly online courses without deep technical skills.

Rise already does so many things well—from allowing for responsive design to incorporating interactive content blocks—but there are clear opportunities to improve accessibility, flexibility, and engagement. We’ve taken Rise to the next level by creating an add-on that lets users listen to the content immersively as they engage with media and interactive content, while allowing course managers to easily update content on an ongoing basis.

Trust us, it’s cool. Get a feel for Rise & Shine.

Let’s explore what Shine is and how it can provide a better user experience for your learners.

Shine makes every Rise course more engaging and accessible

No question, Rise is a great tool for course creators, but there are a number of out-of-the-box constraints for learners. The model of Rise courses is a slide-show style standard that’s augmented by an overreliance on animation that isn’t as immersive, flexible, or comfortable for every learner as it should be.

To address this, we created an immersive read-along narration that works with all standard Rise elements across a course. Easy to setup and seamless to update, courses become more immersive, flexible, and accessible for every learner.

Here’s how it works.

Automatic integration into existing content

Shine automatically syncs its narration—not only with text-based content, but with interactive Rise blocks too—as learners are guided through the course. This includes headings, quotes, images, lists, and more. The add-on requires no additional technical set-up—making enhancing existing courses quick and simple, and easy to update if you need to make any changes to course content.

Customization options

Learners have different preferences as to how they engage with course content. Shine empowers every learner to choose the path that best suits them. Each learner can control and adjust the speed of spoken content, while automatically scrolling through the text to create an immersive, hands-free learner experience.

You get to choose from multiple voices to match the tone of the course and adjust settings for more accessible text sizes, voice integration, and animations.

Enhanced interactivity

Shine makes spoken playback more engaging by automatically incorporating visual elements like tabs, accordions, and flash cards provided by standard Rise blocks.

Learners can also follow the narrated content while simultaneously interacting with multimedia elements, such as videos, quizzes, and clickable scenarios.

And audio prompts remind learners when their input is needed for assessments or other types of engagements, ensuring everyone gets to experience the full, expanded, and immersive learning experience of Rise & Shine.

Try out the latest demo at https://shine.sayyeah.courses

Compatibility

Shine is compatible across all devices and platforms. Whether learners access a course on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device, the narration will function smoothly, providing a consistent and seamless learning experience. Simply put: Shine works where Rise works, augmenting your Rise courses wherever they’re accessed.

Let’s highlight Shine’s benefits for learners

Improved accessibility

Shine makes Rise courses even more accessible by allowing learners with visual impairments, reading difficulties, or other specific learning needs more options for how they access and engage with the course content.

Increased engagement

Shine not only adds greater interactivity to courses, it also creates a multi-sensory experience that can help clarify complex ideas and reinforce key points.

A more flexible learning experience

Shine makes it easy for learners to access their online courses on any device, whether at home, work, class, or on a commute, while tailoring the learning experience to their preferences.

How does Rise & Shine work?

Unlocking these benefits couldn’t be easier.

You simply take your Rise course package, drop it into Shine, choose a voice, and let the magic happen. You then take your Shined Rise package, publish it as you usually do, and you’re done!

Need to make changes?

No trouble! Update your course content in Rise and drop the latest version back into Shine. Shine will automatically update all the audio based on the latest course content and you’ll get your latest Shined Rise package back.

Shine for Rise courses is available now!

Get in touch today to get started or for a personalized Shine demo.

Get in touch for a custom demo

See Shine in action

The post Introducing Rise & Shine, an automated and immersive voice add-on for Rise courses appeared first on Say Yeah!.

On May 10th, 2018, FITC’s Spotlight UX/UI event returned to Toronto to educate and equip designers with the latest tips and techniques for projects that are transforming our world today.

The event featured talks and panel discussions from top North American designers and developers in the field of user experience and interaction design.

Say Yeah was thrilled to capture talks and interviews
at FITC’s Spotlight UX/UI event.

Here are our major takeaways from each of the speakers:

Starting the day off, Zuzana Sekerova, from Atlassian, spoke about qualitative data as a key element that can improve product experience, and how this translates to Atlassian’s efforts.

She used the example of Atlassian’s free startup trials. It was found that users often signed up to multiple trials to get a feel for the product and then would finally commit quickly on a last new trial after they had finally made the decision to proceed. The consensus from looking at the trial user data was that some customers were quick to commit, while others never did. It wasn’t until taking a deeper dive with new customers that it was understood they had used multiple ways to earn numerous free trials until they were comfortable enough to commit, which completely changed the team’s perspective on how to operate and measure trials.

“It’s not all about the technical; it’s about understanding human behaviour to come up with interesting experiences.” ~Zuzana Sekerova

UX/UI panel discussion

At the UX/UI panel discussion, articulating what it means to be a designer was at the forefront of the conversation.

Moderated by our very own CEO, Lee Dale, the panel shared professional experiences, including those successful and poor decisions that led them to their current place in the industry. Matt Hryhorsky shared a great point on how the role of design is more methodological than artistic, suggesting that the industry should shift from referring to designers as rock star solutionists, and instead call them methodology experts.

“Our job is to primarily listen and synthesize before problem solving.” ~Matt Hryhorsky

Leslie Predy of Autodesk shared first-hand insight on machine learning practices and how her team looks to augment human activity to improve efficiency and capability. Working with companies in manufacturing, she and her team have learned the importance of constant iteration and validation while creating digital products in order to apply learning from industry subject matter experts and users.

“Test early, because the more mature your product is, the harder it is to change.” ~Leslie Predy

Dayton Pereira taught attendees about “designing to ship,” a staple within his practice.

To Dayton, designing to ship is a mentality around using agile and lean UX processes to reduce the waste that often happens between design and development teams.

For a designer, this means doing whatever it takes to move the product further along the production line—from inception, to prototyping, to development—in order to see the design through to the finished product. This means working more collaboratively with developers, having a hand in front end code, and ultimately taking responsibility for what users see and interact with.

“More designers need to feel responsible for shipping a product.” ~Dayton Pereira

Spotlight UX/UI has proven how great design and technology can work together to create valuable products and experiences. If you’re a designer, innovator, developer, or a student studying in these fields, we encourage you to attend Spotlight UX/UI next year!

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental experience design methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post Spotlight UX/UI Recap: exploring user experience and interaction design appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Most organizations we meet encounter challenges across the wide breadth of skillsets and expertise that are required to successfully execute digital projects. Sometimes this can have a compounding effect that radically undermines team efforts, as teams move across a series of project phases that each require uniques skillsets to execute. In other cases, achieving digital excellence may just be a path to becoming more efficient and effective in meeting organizational goals and ensuring even greater success in your role.

Let’s take a look at where this complexity comes from and why we’ve designed our services around closing gaps between phases and enhancing your team’s processes and skills during each phase.

Knowledge and capability needs to run wide and deep

Digital is complicated. Many steps and many different levels of expertise are needed in order to execute effectively. Each failure or issue in process, methodology, or outcome across your efforts increasingly undermines every effort that follows.

Core areas of expertise required to successfully meet digital objectives include:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

Exploring these areas in more detail

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice.

1. Research

• Internal (organizational)
• External (customers)

2. Product strategy

• Jobs-to-be-done and outcomes for personas
• Cohorts and behavioural groups
• Device and platform support (hardware vs software; mobile, desktop, other)
• Internal systems and staff interactions
• Content requirements
• Promotion and communications (including marketing, advertising, social, and SEO)
• Passive vs interactive
• KPI definition
• Resourcing
• Risks

3. Interaction design

• Information architecture
• Interface design
• Usability and accessibility
• Automation and interactions
• Context of use (adaptive and contextual IA and content)
• Onboarding, progress and frequency
• States

4. System architecture

• Privacy
• Security
• Data management
• Technology platform
• KPIs and Behavioural tracking

5. Build

• Backend
• APIs
• Front-end
• QA

6. Launch and promotion

• Awareness
• Growth
• Validation

7. Continuous improvement

• Behavioural tracking
• KPI tracking
• Review (KPI review, behavioural tracking review, user testing, etc)
• Iterate/Experiment
• Repeat (review, iterate, experiment)

It’s difficult for any one team to bring this level of expertise to the table. That’s why we’ve built our consulting practice on helping you learn and execute in these areas.

Determinants of organizational success

Ultimately, success is determined by your organization’s ability to:

1. Define an effective roadmap, meeting organizational and market needs.
2. Execute at a high level across all stages of product and service delivery.
3. Plan, scope, and evaluate systems that can make a measurable impact.
4. Continuously improve across customer experience and service delivery efforts.

Continue to part 2 Get in touch

The post Why digital excellence is so difficult to achieve appeared first on Say Yeah!.

From the initial iOS 7 beta:

As reported by MacRumors, today’s iOS 7 Beta 4 corrects these issues, with an updated lock screen sporting a right facing arrow.

Better still, Apple has prioritized the key function of sliding to unlock and prevented arrow fatigue by doing away with the up arrow in exchange for a flat bar to indicate access to the settings panel which slides up from below. Now, the only arrow on the lock screen is next to the action which gets you into your phone.

Finally, to make these interactions even easier for fumbling hands, the slide to unlock text now sits further away from the bottom of the screen, preventing any accidental activation of the settings panel or the camera when you’re moving your thumb to unlock the phone.

Here’s how these welcome improvements look:

The post Slide To Unlock, Obvious Once Again appeared first on Say Yeah!.

This has been a long time coming for Chris and the rest of the Unata team and we want to congratulate them on all the hard work that went into this launch.

Just over two years ago we were designing mockups for Unata which included Longo’s content and marketing as an aspirational goal. And now that goal has been realized. Amazing!

Available on Google Play and the App Store.

The post Unata and Longo’s launch their new personalized shopping app. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Ben Kamens of Khan Academy has posted a lovely review of Amazon’s user-friendly and fast mega dropdown.

Ben’s article includes comparisons to standard dropdowns and Amazon’s ‘cheat’ (pictured above) which is to include a triangle beginning with the mouse pointer and continuing to the top and bottom of the dropdown menu where you can run your mouse without having the menu switch.

Interestingly, the further you are to the left of the main menu selector, the larger your triangle and the less likely you’ll trigger a menu change as you scroll to the right to make your selection from the submenu.

It’s so nice when some code hacking makes a simple, long-standing web device work better for the end user.

As Ben says:

I’m not ashamed to copy Amazon. I’m sure this problem was solved years and years ago, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again.

And here’s his jQuery plugin to help keep it solved.

Update

Kevin Ballard adds:

The part that gets me is this is how the Mac menubars have worked since, well, forever.

Update 2

Actually, OSX’s behaviour is different than Amazon, as it uses a combination of intent and speed to maintain your submenu selection. You have to generally begin moving horizontally towards the submenu (though taller submenus make this less of a requirement. ie, a long list of Bookmarks in Safari), and you must maintain a certain mouse speed or the selection will change and the submenu will close.

Amazon’s ‘triangle’ is more forgiving in these ways.

While both Amazon and Apple reset to selecting from the primary menu if you move your mouse backwards, which I’d imagine is nice for most people, provided you don’t have a jittery mouse hand.

And now we’re getting concerned about how much time we’ve been playing with submenu interactions this afternoon…

The post Breaking down Amazon’s smartly designed mega dropdown appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Helen Walters shared some of those words, along with the video above:

Bill Moggridge was one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met, and it saddens me greatly to mourn his loss. Here was a man who retained his love of learning, and who only quietly displayed his wisdom and insight while always listening to and processing the opinions of all around him. Bill was a powerhouse of courtesy and magnanimity and it was always such an honor to spend time with him.

The post Bill Moggridge passed away this weekend: the public’s response appeared first on Say Yeah!.

If the $19.99 price tag isn’t enough of a reason to just dive in, these three items alone are well worth avoiding the needless aggravation of sticking with Snow Leopard.

1. Finder dragging.

2. Calendars.

3. Address book groups vs contacts.

Have you spotted any other hurrah moments or hiccups in OSX Mountain Lion?

The post Small fixes. OSX Mountain Lion mercilessly resolves some awful OSX Lion design decisions. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Case in point, EA’s current home page for The Sims:

With this design they’ve managed to turn a a language selector into a debate about nation. Canadians and Mexicans are not represented by these flags. What do the Spanish speaking contingent of North, Central, and South America click on? The flag of Spain? Customers in Quebec are to look for the flag of France? In the best case, this design is tedious. In the worst case, it’s offensive.

An incredibly poor design decision that would have been more inclusive, but still unclear, with the use of a globe, and solved completely with a language selector (barring any sales based regional requirements, which opens up a whole other issue of whether or not they support North American Spanish or French, etc).

Update, Jun 4:

Just few days later, and I’m at the American Apparel online store. Now this is how you do it right with flags if you’re focusing on region, but not language:

Update, Jun 22:

And here’s yet another reason not to use flags as a landing page language selector: imagine if this was Apple’s landing page.

The post How to turn a linguistic convenience into a nationalist uproar appeared first on Say Yeah!.