Building a successful Playbook requires more than just gathering up a lot of content – it’s also important that it be easy for your learner to navigate and use the platform consistently. To do that you need to consider structure and the way your content looks. Often the best Playbooks are the simplest. We’ll show you some best practices for making Playbooks that get the best results.
The Big Idea: Overcrowded Playbooks are a rookie mistake but they aren’t just ugly, they create a barrier for your learner to quickly consume content and navigate. Keep them light and tight and when in doubt, cluster, divide, and attach. We’ll explain below:
Adding Processes
While PlaybookBuilder doesn’t restrict the number of processes you may add to a Playbook, you will find that once you get past a dozen or so, it starts to look overwhelming and messy.
First, let’s cover a basic idea: What’s a Process? A Process is a topic like a chapter in a book. So, if you have too many Processes it may be because you’re not clustering topics under a master heading like the chapter of a book would do.
Two things you can consider: First, is it possible to collapse some processes together? It’s a common mistake to break ideas down TOO FAR as individual Processes instead of Steps inside of a Process. Second, are you cramming too many ideas into a single Playbook? You have 25 Playbooks that are available with your account. If you are building a Playbook for multiple audiences and it’s looking too massive, consider making a duplicate (Clone Feature) and focus one Playbook for one audience only.
Adding Video and Images
PlaybookBuilder was designed to be effective not simply because you can put all your training content onto one platform but also because you can make the interface look appealing to your learner using video and imagery.
Don’t forget to add landing area videos or images. Adding those assets creates context for the user and also some visual pop to your Playbook.
- Consider adding images to steps too. These can be icons, explanatory graphics and photos of people or events. You can even upload animated GIFs.
Using Text and Attachments
One of the most common mistakes we see is to add too much text to steps. Doing so makes for a challenging user experience. If you have more than a couple of paragraphs, just turn the text into an attachment and upload it.
PLEASE don’t do this…
Instead, keep it like this…
Making successful Playbook means that your learner isn’t overwhelmed by too much of anything – too many processes, too much text, too many attachments. When in doubt cluster content, divide it, and attach it instead of just pasting it in.
Enjoy!