This concept project aims to help the Golden Chopsticks restaurant chain rebuild its reputation by filling in employees’ customer service skill gap.
Audience: New hires and current waitstaff of Golden Chopsticks restaurants around the world
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, Action Mapping, Scriptwriting, Storyboarding, Visual Mockup, Animation, eLearning Development
Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Vyond, MindMeister, Figma, Google Docs
Golden Chopsticks, a fictional restaurant chain, has seen its reputation crumble in recent months due to a sharp increase in customer complaints about the restaurant’s poor service. This has resulted in customers leaving and reduced sales.
After consulting the client and staff, and carefully analyzing restaurant chain feedback, I identified the chain’s key issues: a customer service skill gap and service quality inconsistencies. To tackle these root causes, I proposed a scenario-based eLearning program to equip staff with essential skills. Why eLearning? The staff of Golden Chopsticks are globally dispersed and work in different shifts. An eLearning experience gives them flexibility in time and space, making learning fun. This solution can be combined with having senior staff training for the new hires, but eLearning helps to ensure consistent service quality across branches.
To design the learning experience, I followed the agile ADDIE process. I created an MVP version for each step and sought feedback from various stakeholders. This approach steers the learning experience in the right direction and saves both time and money for the client.
Guided by Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping process, I collaborated with the client and we agreed on the business goal: to increase the number of positive reviews on customer service quality by 30% within six months.
This goal is feasible and viable for the business. It also ensures the learning content contributes directly towards the goal, instead of being merely good-to-know information.
Next is one of the steps I enjoyed most - creating a text-based storyboard. The storyboard helps clients see exactly what will be presented in the eLearning experience, envision the flow of the content, and provide feedback where needed.
Some notable aspects of my storyboard:
Applying Mayer’s coherence principle, I made sure that only the most important texts and visuals were included and trimmed down all unnecessary details. This increased the content clarity, thus retaining learners’s focus on the important points.
I created an immersive, relatable story that mimics an employee’s daily shift. Throughout the learning experience, learners will be navigating common situations that present an opportunity to create a golden service for customers, or completely ruin it.
Both the correct and incorrect choices have weight, ensuring that learners have to consider each option carefully before making a decision. Each choice has a lifelike consequence to help learners see how their actions contribute to the restaurant’s reputation as well as their own job prospects, helping learning stick.
Since some learners are new waiters without any prior restaurant customer service skills, I introduced a mentor character for them to seek help on-demand. The character doesn’t point them directly to the right answer, but only reveals the principle of what a good decision looks like. This gives learners a deeper understanding of what makes a quality service and still provides enough of a challenge for them to make going through the experience interesting.
After reaching a consensus on the storyboard, I moved on to creating the visual mockups using Figma. I started this iterative process with the style guide, determining visual elements like the color scheme, button shapes, text styles, and spacing based on the client’s brand guidelines.
I then created a wireframe for every different scene to make sure their layouts were all balanced, before moving on to low-fidelity mockups. I repeated the process a couple of times until I was happy with the layout, then started the high-fidelity mockup. After several rounds of feedback with the client, we reached a consensus on the project visuals.
After the visual mockups were finalized, I created an interactive prototype to collect feedback on its functionality. I used Vyond to create the background videos for the project, and Storyline for the interactive elements like buttons and name entry field.
After agreeing with the client about the interactive prototype and ensuring that all functionality ran smoothly, I moved on to full development.
I used advanced features in Vyond like combining the camera angle, and the timeline coupled with character actions to create natural movements and seamless scene transitions.
These elements help make the story more immersive and realistic to learners.
I also integrated sound effects for customer reviews, helping to add a moment of delight for the learners.
The project was well-received by the instructional design and L&D community. Here are some of the feedback.
"From my experience as a learning designer in a corporate environment, I can confidently say that this scenario-based eLearning project is very high-quality and effective. The visuals are attractive, the story is engaging, and the consequences that were chosen effectively change the behavior of users. I personally learned from this training after selecting incorrect answers, and now I think of what I learned whenever I go to a restaurant! I think it’s impressive that I keep thinking about what I learned well after I completed this training.“
-Wendy Van Norden, Learning Experience Designer, TEKsystems
"The color scheme is warm and the bell ringing I have seen them in Asian restaurants. I especially found the addition of ambient noise in the restaurant to be so apt."
-Susmy Nair, L&D professional
"The project was very user-friendly. The color schemes, fonts, and overall design were welcoming and efficient.”
-Amber Fox, Educator
