"Smoking is [wags finger] not allowed on any delta flight."

Like a lot of people, sometime in the last couple of years, I was sitting on a Delta flight, bouncing out to the runway, when the heretofore totally ignorable safety video came on. But this time, it was different. Jazzy music. I looked up. Zippy editing. I kept watching. Amplified, stylized sound effects. Catchy. Then came the moment where all other safety videos got classified as boring and lame -- the finger wag, which you just simply have to see for yourself.

I laughed out loud. On it went with slick graphics, interesting camera angles and focus pulls, and even a post-production twinkle and audible "ding" on the life preserver demonstrator's smile.

This Delta safety video, in my opinion, is a great example of putting the engagement back into instructional design. While there has been a lot of talk about the attractiveness of the main actress (for the record, she is not an actress but an actual Delta flight attendant) as the reason people watch, I think it is more than that. Yes, she is striking, and that does increase engagement, but it is the sum of all the little touches mentioned above that raise the overall engagement level. One of those strategies (sound effect, focus change, unusual camera angle, etc.) is used about once every ten seconds or so. They are sprinkled throughout to (pleasantly) surprise you in every part of the video. If you doubt that this video is substantially different that other airline safety videos in terms of engagement, show me another safety video with over 1.2 million voluntary views on YouTube.

Now, we must remember that the content of the video did not substantially change from the previous safety video. In most cases, the exact same wording is used. The exact same action. It is all about the presentation, the pacing, the music, the little touches that draw the audience in. These "touches" are not touches at all. They are engagement strategies and should not be considered optional afterthoughts to the overall design. We tend to use pejoratives to describe them: window dressing or eye candy or Easter eggs. We think of the designers as being mischievous or even frivolous, of messing around after the serious work was done, by adding them. But they are the difference between whether people choose to watch the video or not. For many travelers, I would submit, they are the deciding factor in whether or not people read, sleep, or otherwise ignore the safety video or watch it.

As long as instructional design models continue to be derived from research in settings in which the audience is required to participate, our models will continue to exclude these pivotal factors in determining whether or not there is an audience at all. And it is a mistake to think that just because you have a bunch of people trapped in a classroom, or a training site, or an airplane, that you have an audience.

"Engagement [wags finger] is not optional in effective instructional design."

Fire that (Fictitious) Employee! Unanticipated Consequences of Using Narrative in Instructional Design

I went to an interesting presentation at my local chapter of ISPI by Andrew Wolff of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He talked about how they had recently begun using the simplest, cheapest versions of narrative and humor in their training. For example, to help their people understand the technical side of one of their businesses, they show a series of photos with audio where a guy gets a call at the end of the week that he needs to do a report on the chipset the company is selling. He is about to ignore the request and go home when his cell phone starts to talk to him. They have still drawings of a little talking cellphone, that change every ten seconds or so in an "animation," and this cell phone has a cartoon-y character voice. The talking cellphone tells the guy about the importance of the chips inside it to the business's bottom line and takes him on a tour of the factory. Or they had a confidentiality training where a story plays out where a character makes simple mistakes that leads to a major breach of security for the company. These innovations were not very expensive and didn't take much longer than a vanilla course to produce. Among the effects, the ones that stood out to me the most were:

1. With no promotion whatsoever of the new course other than word of mouth, training completion timeframes for the company went from something like 90% in the last three days before the deadline for training completion to 90%+ in the first three days the course was available.

2. In the case of the security training, partners in the firm were calling the training department in the first few days after the training was released, trying to get the (fictional) character in the training fired for her negligence.

Now you tell me some other strategy that would have led to similar outcomes. And think of what the company stands to gain by shaving three months off of the amount of time it takes for all of their people to complete required training. And imagine the employees of your company talking to each other in the halls about the great confidentiality training they just completed and how you don't want to miss it. Sounds like some kind of training department fantasy. One that I think many of us would like to be in.