Project Background
Email Encryption is a 15-min narrative and interactive online course that I created for our company’s internal employees who need to send confidential informations to external respondents via emails (such as Legal, Finance, IT department etc).
Although the IT department made a job aid for these employees, some confidential emails were sent without encryption, and the audience kept making mistakes in this process. What could go wrong? How could the training in email encryption be improved?
Email Encryption
My Role
Learning experience design, instructional design, visual design, eLearning development
Tools
Articulate Storyline 360, Adobe Illustrator, Camtasia, After Effects
Details of my process
I collaborated with an IT manager to analyze the needs: investigating the problem and why it happened, our audience’s skill level, current performance gap, and design constraints like time and tools. I discovered that the job aid didn’t cover some critical encryption rules, which were complicated and confused our audience, such as sending encrypted email to shared mailboxes.
I later worked with our scriptwriter to develop new content to meet their needs and fill in the knowledge gap.
During the design phase, I used Adobe Xd to create a hi-fi mockup and Storyline 360 to develop the course. I independently designed and developed stories, interactions, assets including videos, animations, software simulations, screencasts, and graphics), and the whole interface of the course, using Storyline 360, Camtasia, Adobe Illustrator, and After Effects.
Since this was the first interactive course that our company made in-house and our LMS had many limitations, I also conducted usability testings and user interviews, iterated the course design, and refined the content based on testing results.
Results
Based on the survey results, user interviews, letters from our learners, and IT data about email encryption usage in the company, the course was a success. Both our customers and our learners were excited about the engaging interactions, helpful scenarios and software simulations, clear explanations and screencasts, the appealing visual, and the smooth learning experience. It was the first interactive course made in-house at the company, and our audience loved it.
Sample screenshots and screencasts of the course
Learners choose their avatars and enter their names to start the storytelling part of the course, which was designed to clarify why we shouldn’t send encrypted email to shared mailboxes.
In the user testing, I noticed that our learners were afraid of messing up with the quizzes during training, so to avoid them taking this as a serious compliance training, I also put a message under the text-entry box “No worries, you won’t be scored“!
This is the Quick Guess interaction. Through this format, It aimed to let our learners understand when sending emails to the divisions of our company, the emails didn’t need to be encrypted.
These are sample screenshots of the narrated story. It uses the learner’s first name and the avatar they just chose to generate a plot explaining what would happen if they send confidential information to shared mailboxes.
This storytelling technique not only is fun but also addresses the most common problems that our employees had with email encryption and fills in the knowledge gap.
This is an optional practice appearing near the end of the course that reinforces what the audience learns about email encryption. It contains 3 rounds, combining 3 typical scenarios and software simulations of Outlook Desktop and Outlook Web App (OWA).
It makes learner remember how to encrypt email, the differences between the “Encrypt only“ and “Do not forward“ encrypting options, and when to choose which.