Watch this short video of what the experience is like for someone to go through the quiz and get their results. This video has no sound.

There are a few different ways you can implement a quiz. The most popular is a personality test (aka correlated results), weighted score (where answers are assigned point values), and an assessment quiz (correct/incorrect).  You can also use branching logic, where it takes people down a certain path of questions based on a prior response.  In the sample quiz, I used the weighted score so that I could still segment people into one of three skill levels. 

Once the  quiz is built, you can embed it in a webpage so that traffic is drawn to your page versus the quiz platform used. You can also build pages for each result so that you can easily customize the page. This is where recommendations and resources can live. 

Here's a visual workflow of how a quiz works. 

Once someone takes the quiz, they can get their results (either through skipping an opt-in or by providing their email address). When they provide their email, you can segment them to send them information that is pertinent to their results.  No need to send a beginner some information on LOD calcs and crazy hacks.  You can also analyze the data you get from the quiz platform to learn more and inform your training and enablement strategy because it's a treasure trove of data. 

First, I'll say, I'm biased because I used Interact quiz platform* when I had my quiz side biz for online coaches, so that's what I used in the example quiz.  There are other platforms out there, so it may just be a matter of ease of use, cost, and infosec approval. Other platforms include Quiz-Maker, and more. 

To leverage sending communications relevant to someone skill level (or how they answered key questions), you'll need an email service provider (like Mailer-Lite, MailChimp, etc). 

Depending on your company, this set up can cost about $1000/year.  To help justify the cost, here's a  rough analysis you can perform to justify it. 

1. What is $1k of an average salary?
2. Calculate $1k in terms of hours
3. How much time (in hours) per year do you spend answering emails to provide training recommendations (include the disruption/time to get back to what you were working on as part of this calculation)
4. Calculate the Annual ROI

Here's an example:

The worksheet that includes the formulas can be found here.

You can also look at the opportunity cost of the hours spent on serving your community by comparing it to your backlog.  What else can you do if you had those 25 hours back? 

Time is finite and this is one way that a skills quiz can help you and your community use their time effectively.   If you dive deep into how quizzes can help you be more efficient and effective in your enablement, message me on LinkedIn. 

I think there's this myth that the dashboard a developer builds will be so good that people will naturally gravitate towards it and it will be a smashing success.  You can't just build it and expect people to use it. 

I'll dive into adoption more in future posts. But for now, let me know how these five steps help you! 

This is a section of a talk that I've given at user groups and conferences to help people make more accessible data experiences.  It is based on my knowledge and experiences that I feel compelled to share with others.  

These days, I don't get into my favorite BI tool that much, but this past Friday, I spent some time playing with parameters. And this case, it was swapping parameters for dimensions and measures to create what I call the multiple choice chart. 

And the reason why I wanted to play around with this chart was because of something dashboard developers can suffer from...jampacked-itis.  Their customers want allllll these charts or the dev wants to provide alllll these options and what happens?  Too many charts and not enough focus and then reader suffers from idontknowwhatimlookingat-itis.

What I learned a long time ago is that space is really helpful when it comes to dashboard design.  I found an article that lists five benefits to using white space in design if you want to check it out for yourself.  

I've also been doing some work around the value of dashboards. No one needs a copy of a dashboard that's basically the same as the other one...that takes up resources (your time and space on the server).  

Here's a potential picture of the before swapping parameters. 

The above chart does have space between charts, so I gave the charts room to breathe, but I did so at the expense of chart readability, making this dashboard ineffective.

By using swapping parameters, I can create something like this: 

While swapping parameters aren't new, they are a pretty powerful way to give your audience what they want without overwhelming them or overcrowding the dashboard.  

If you want to see the calculations and parameters used to make this happen, read on.