Happyworm

Happyworm

web media development, consultancy and research

NEL Nexus e-Learning screenshot

NeL Nexus e-Learning

Bank of Scotland / HBOS (2005-2008)

Happyworm has created a web-based e-learning system to guide employees through an essential bank lending system.

NeL educates employees on how to use Nexus - an internal Bank Lending System. Learning is broken down into a series of manageable scenarios.

What we did :

  • E-learning system design and development
  • Graphic design and GUI
  • Scripts review
  • Voice-overs management and sync.

Technologies used :

  • Flash
  • XML
  • HTML

Bad News for Trainers

Upon its release NeL became one of the top three achievements for Bank of Scotland Corporate Division's Training Department. NeL has had a huge impact and single handedly reduced the need for more traditional stand-up and one-to-one training. Existing users (who had attended a stand-up lesson) were encouraged to use NeL as their 1st port of call for support. Support resources were drastically reduced, freeing up time for the trainers to get on with other things. Well crafted e-learning systems such as NeL make learning an enjoyable process that users can experience at their own pace and in their own time.

Streamlined and Easy to Use

From the outset, this system was designed with web use in mind. For flexibility and efficiency, XML files were used to configure the tutorial's display. Text and actions are stored in an XML file which can easily be adapted. Another benefit of this approach is that it avoids the need for 'motion capture' thus keeping the file size to a minimum.

To enrich the user experience, we added voice-overs. Voice-overs allow the student to concentrate on the screen and associated actions while absorbing the relevant information. To make the experience all the more compelling we used a voice-over actress with a soft Scottish brogue.

The tutorials were broken into sections and subsections, designed to be played consecutively. By using smaller subsection 'chunks' it allowed the different tutorials to share common steps, while also improving the download response time by enabling the e-Learning to load and start more quickly.

As Nexus is continually evolving as a system, updates to NeL have been continually commissioned over a the last five years and in parallel the framework to NeL as a learning system has evolved.