Adobe Learning Research Blog

We recently asked Create with Context (CWC), an independent research and design company, to conduct lab studies of four important user workflows involving Adobe products. We wanted to understand the effectiveness of the learning experience around these workflows, and figure out how to improve them.

We learned three important lessons that we think will apply across every workflow and learning experience using Adobe products and learning resources:

* Users would prefer _not_ to learn something new in the middle of their work. Rich learning experiences like this one for Flex are good for advancing your skills -- you need something different when you just want to get something done. We need to find ways to deliver appropriate content quickly, while still offering rich resources when people have time for them.

* Users are in a big hurry and read as little as possible. This matches what we know from prior research. The tricky part is that some of the time, users need to read in order to get what they're looking for. How far can we boil down our content? How can we help users understand when it's actually worth reading?

* Users may not know the technical language for the techniques they want to learn. This is a big obstacle to effective searching! We need to figure out how to connect the words people use to describe what they are looking for with the words used in learning materials.

Coming soon: The methodology behind these lessons

Our team is responsible for much of the research used in the Learning Resources Group. Our colleagues in Learning Resources not only develop learning content for all Adobe products, but also administrate the communities, and maintain the navigation and search mechanisms involved in the learning experience on Adobe.com. They seek out and share community-created content, support the community moderators who help manage community participation, and produce the product Help. In order to do this effectively, they conduct extensive investigations into the needs and preferences of the Adobe community.

The research team’s work boils down to three kinds:

Summative – we are the scorekeepers for the Learning Resources group. We’re especially interested in user success, user contributions (comments that add value to our learning resources), search success metrics (abandonment, clickthrough, and search modification), and calls to the Support call center.

Formative – we compile data that our colleagues, Adobe’s corps of content leads, can use to improve the above scores. For example, we report open-ended survey responses, contributions by product, search success by product and query, and calls by call category. We also work with them on studies of user behavior, to find out exactly what gets in users’ way when they are trying to learn Adobe software.

Decision-support – we help our colleagues articulate their design decisions, questions whose answers will inform those decisions, and strategies for answering those questions.

Going forward, we'll write more about each aspect of the work, and report on some of our findings.

In this blog, members of the Learning Research team at Adobe will post about a variety of topics. The main purpose of the blog is to inform customers about how we use data to improve our learning resource offerings. We'll post about our methods, about current projects, and about decisions made by the Learning Resources group based on our findings. We really do use what we learn from you, and we hope you'll continue to tell us what we need to know!

Our team is:
Meg Gordon, Learning Researcher
Diana Joseph, Learning Research Manager
Rob Liebscher, Senior Research Analyst
Lindsay Oishi, Learning Research Intern
Ya Ting Teng, Learning Research Intern