From Gilles Gerlinger, Head of Learning Store, Nokia
Simplifying the access to a huge set of heterogenous data spread over various platforms including SharePoint, YouTube and Learning Management Systems has become one of today's most common challenges.
Nokia faced such a challenge a few years ago when it launched its fourth Learning platform addressing the following questions:
- How was the learner going to find any specific content?
- Should the learner go to each platform and browse its content?
- How to search efficiently over disparate platforms?
The idea came to aggregate all the content into a single place so that visitors could discover the content in a simple and intuitive manner. This article describes the genesis of the project and highlights the major innovations to solve this problem.
How did the story start?
At first, we considered a classical approach based on a SQL database and a PHP web front-end that would fetch the data in the database when needed. But we quickly found the limits of such an approach as it required:
- a server to host the database.
- a rigid SQL schema to describe the data, when we know the schema could easily change according to the type of data to aggregate. Furthermore, any change in the schema means data migration to cope with the schema update.
- a lot of network communications between the web browser (the frontend) and the database, thus introducing latency.
- a heavy development process including database installation, configuration and testing.
With such an approach, a user would type his key word in the search input field then press enter. This would issue a request to the database that would return all or part of the answer, then the user would click on one of the answers to get more information. This would again issue a request to the server to get the data, and so on.
What we wanted instead is that as soon as the user types a search string, the results are displayed... So, we decided to go for a more disruptive approach.
The major innovation we introduced was to adopt an approach where no database is involved and all the data are loaded in the browser. This builds a very responsive user interface, particularly when browsing and searching data. This also decreases the number of software and hardware elements of the solution, something which counts when the service must be operated 24/7. In fact, the application behaves like a static web page. It can be easily moved or duplicated onto another web server (so having a backup server for example is something easy to set up).
The second innovation lies in the user interface. We needed a simple and intuitive user interface; an interface that can be used without any user manual nor prior training. We also wanted a marketing area to advertise, promote and highlight the latest and trending content.
The third innovation concerns the way data are updated. Since all the data are in the browser, why not use the same user interface to edit those data? All edition operations can be performed locally within the user browser and uploaded later to make the updates available to all.
The Learning Store was born!
What does it look like from the inside?
Data are loaded in the browser as a Javascript resource. One of the benefits is that Javascript resources are cached by the browser meaning that the second time the user goes to the store, there is no need for the browser to reload the data if the data did not change.
To keep it simple, the data are organized over two types of elements:
- Single item: this represents the metadata of the resource referenced.
- Collection: a set of single items.
A single item is described by the following attributes:
- Title
- Description
- URL of the resource
- Icon
This list can be extended to any additional attribute, for example for learning items:
- Target audience
- Duration
- Prerequisite
- etc.
The Employee Learning Store, one of the most popular learning stores in Nokia, currently contains 2,400 objects, regrouped in a single Javascript file. The file size is around 4MB uncompressed and 450 KB compressed (less than 10% of a High Definition picture).
What does it look like from the outside?
The user interface follows the well-known design pattern of the App Store and the Google Play Store. It uses intuitive virtual objects (navigation menu, carousel, icons) that people are familiar with and which facilitate understanding. During the design phase, clarity and consistency were a recurrent concern to guarantee an outstanding user experience.
The figure above shows the home page of the Learning Store for employees.
The top area contains the search field because searching the store is the easiest and quickest way to find what you are looking for.
The navigation menu gives shortcuts to the store with sections such as ‘What’s New’ which shows the most recent additions and ‘Categories’ which lists the content according to a predefined structure, for example: Professional Development, Nokia Products, Technology, Organizations, and so on.
The carousel shows rotating banners which change regularly with new and featured content. Below the carousel is another space to add recommendations and collections of interest.
The home page structure is also described in a Javascript file so that it can be easily updated, whenever a change in the recommendations or the carousel is required.
The text below shows an example of such file:
"carousel": [
{
"img": "img/carousel-video-demo.jpg",
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/uSTzkzBNkXE"
},
{
"img": "img/carousel-sr-prod-overviews.jpg",
"id": "n.1477658737129"
}],
"homepage": [
{
"title": "Featured Learning",
"items": ["n.1472887445473", "n.1472887514849", "n.1472887540319"]
}]
How popular is our Learning Store?
The Learning Store was launched on June 7, 2015 and traffic has been regularly increasing since that date. The figure below gives the traffic data for August to October 2017. We recorded an average of 5,000 sessions per day and 90,000 unique visitors over three months.
Since the launch we received very positive feedback, mostly about the responsiveness of the user interface. Other positive feedback concerned the usefulness of this solution to aggregate transparently the learning content of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent when the two companies merged.
Interested? Give it a try, it’s free and open...
The innovations described here can be reused easily for any type of data, for example to set up a knowledge base or a document library. This is the reason why Nokia decided to contribute to Open Source by making the source code of the learning store publicly available under a BSD license.
Anyone can now start their own store and contribute as well to improve this concept!
The source code of the learning store, both for web and mobile applications, is available on Github at https://github.com/nokia/LearningStore