Week 970

Matt Kirkland

It's week 970!

This week the most exciting thing I had my hands into was wrapping up some exploratory designs for project codename Postecoglou - this is a mix of first round things that are for web, mobile, and a few different layouts for real print. This included cracking open Indesign for the first time in a while.

But teamwide, we had a big milestone launching a new set of features that supports The Institute. This is the professional development / learning platform that supports Home Visitors and the 'Family Support' field more broadly. This has had an event function for a few few years, but it was pretty barebones. This week we launched a slew of new features, making it something that's a lot more powerful and flexible for in-person and remote training. This includes:

• Users can register for a whole series of events all at once. This is a common scenario that took individual registrations before.
• Waitlists! Many of their events sell out or fill up; now there's a seamless waitlist function that lets waitlisted users fill into open spots when they become available.
• Ad hoc emails - a nice one-click option for event hosts to send out emails to their registrants from the system
• Discount Codes for paid events!
• And a long list of quality-of-life improvements - more detailed receipts, better ical invites, etc.

We also rolled out a new Quiz feature, which is really fun. There are two ways that you get assessed in your learning in the Institute: small quizzes after each learning module, and huge Exams. Previously, both of these happenned in a monster assessment platform that lives outside the Institute. This is a giant system that's built for school standardized tests - and it's not always a great fit for the kind of light-touch quizzes here. Plus, it's confusing for the learner to have to jump back and forth from the Instittue to this third-party plaftorm, which looks and feels very different.

So! We built an interface where the Institute can build their own quizzes, and host directly within the same platform. It's a fluid experience, and helps the learned stay in the same place, without adding a big cognitive load. That brain space should be reserved for the actual content they're here at the Institute to learn! :)