Interactive Video: Drive Learning Retention and Measurable Business Value

As an eLearning professional, you strive tofind better ways to drive learning retention—teaching audiences so they’llabsorb and remember information. But eLearning practitioners are evolving fromteaching by talking at their audience to teaching by involving their audience.And what better way to involve your audience than by offering them an experiencethey can interact with?

Interactive content can take manyforms—quizzes, infographics, white papers, eBooks, and the list goes on—but I’mgoing to focus on interactive video and how you can use this technology to notonly drive learning retention but also drive measurable business value.

Before we begin, it’s important to understandthat not all interactive video solutions in the marketplace today are createdequal. And that’s especially true when we look at their ability to make newknowledge stick and calculate performance analytics. Let’s start by firstestablishing why you should care about interactive video in the first place.

Why interactive video?

Innovation is disrupting how we work,communicate, consume, and play. The disruption is experiential, as we are nolonger a passive audience that sits back to consume content pushed to us. Weare now a population of interactive users—touching, swiping, and tapping ourway into discovering the information we need to do a better job or live a betterlife.

What matters is that the viewer is in control.Control creates relevance for the audience, which results in highly impactfulcontent for the enterprise.

To prove our theory that people want controlof their content, Rapt Media surveyed 500 consumers to better understand theironline consumption of content. We validated our assumption: 64 percent saidthey’re more likely to spend time watching video if given more options tointeract with it.

Companies need to reimagine the way theydigitally interact by putting the individual in the driver’s seat. One way todo this is to marry user experience with the power of video.

Not all interactivevideo technologies are created equal

Interactive videohas been around for some time, but not all interactive video solutions arecreated equal regarding their ability to connect, engage, and delivermeasurable return on investment. Here’s how the different types of interactivevideo break down and how to think about them:

Linear video withinteractive hotspots (annotations)

Most interactive video technologies canoverlay hotspots on linear videos. Hotspots enable the viewer to click out tomore information about the topic they are watching.

Pros:

• Provides the user with moreinformation
• The user is interacting more thanjust hitting play and pause

Cons:

• This form is still aone-size-fits-all video
• Linking out to more informationdoesn’t provide in-depth data and insights around content preferences, nor doesit let the user choose a specific content path

Personalized video(data)

Personalized video pulls in data in advance(name, location, time, etc.), presenting the user with a video unique to them (“Hi,Alexander!”). With content specific to them, users feel like they’re seeing aone-to-one video.

Pros:

• Great for grabbing attention
• Useful for walking users throughcomplex information specific to them
• Makes the content relevant to theuser

Cons:

• Though personalized specificallyfor the individual, it is still a passive, linear experience, and the userdoesn’t have control of the content they see
• As a result, it doesn’t capitalizeon the opportunity to derive real-time data and insights from the user behaviorwithin the video

User-experience video(branching)

User-experience video, or branchinginteractive video, is all about user control, enabling users to drive their ownexperience, skip irrelevant content, and gather information at aself-determined pace.

User-experience video provides the equivalentvalue of a two-way conversation. The company delivers its information to theuser, who makes choices within the video, customizing the experience. The user’sactions then allow the company to derive data and insights.

Pros:

• By providing users with control,you invite your employees and learners to lean forward and take part. The useris more invested in the content due to their participation, which leads todeeper engagement, enhanced learning, and accelerated behavior change.
• You can measure and optimizechoice-based behavioral insights to extract business value.
• Companies that invest in tech thatallows them to build immersive user experiences reap the rewards of ongoingsuccessful employee learning, growth, and development.

Cons:

• Investing in this format requiresa change to your strategy and workflow.
• You need to think user experiencefirst and video second, more than in the other two forms of interactive videoabove.

Let’s look at an example fromDeloitte. The experience, Will You FitInto Deloitte, is a point-of-view, interactive recruitment and onboardingvideo that takes users inside the company’s culture while also educating themon Deloitte’s various service lines. The user is in the driver’s seat and hasthe power to choose their own path, allowing users to learn more and continueto the application process.

Driving learningretention

As you can see, user experience video versuslinear video allows the user to simplify a complex subject by choosing whatinformation is most relevant and meaningful to them. With interactive video,eLearning practitioners can build one experience that speaks to multiplesegments or target personas with different levels of information. This leads tolearning retention and the ability to build in measurable calls to actions—allof which accelerates behavior change.

As I previously wrote here for Learning Solutions Magazine in “The Impact of Interactivity and Video on Learning,” in addition to enhancedengagement, interactive video content is also more likely to sink in. In fact,we’ve found that users retain data more readily (and remember it for longer)when it’s relayed through interactive video versus traditional video. They’repaying more attention to the content because it’s more engaging and relevant.It’s as simple as that.

By adding choices and interactivity to yourvideo, you invite individuals to lean forward and participate.

The benefits of being able to access ordiscover information are significant. As author Paul Clothier writes in this Learning Solutions article,interacting with videos that offer branching and options can aid discovery. “Thispromotes learning and increases information retention,” Clothier said.

Andwhile video-based learning typically takes cues from traditional classroomlectures, only branching interactive video allows for an experience more akinto a discussion where the learner chooses the lesson’s pace, repetition, anddirection. With interactive video, you can present your content in morecompelling, learner-friendly ways to boost lasting learning and behavior changewhile improving user satisfaction for powerful gains on your eLearninginvestment.

Driving measurablebusiness value

By providing users with control, youultimately drive desired behaviors because the user is more invested in thecontent due to their participation. Building your experiences with data, behaviors, and insights in mindmeans each interaction is an opportunity to provide meaningful data andinsights. The insights also have business value, as they can help you bemore effective and efficient by optimizing both the experience and channel foryour different users.

By understanding your audience preferences,you can iterate and optimize your video experience and communicate with yourlearners based on their preferences. You can apply cost savings or new valuecalculations to find the rate of your return.

However, most people have a hard timetransforming their thinking around video as a linear medium designed to deliverkey messages. Changing your thinking and approach as it relates to userexperience video requires new expertise, workflows, and metrics. To helplearning practitioners interested in user-experience video calculate thepotential business value of their interactive learning experience, we designeda step-by-step guide in our ROI Workbook(link below).

Summary

So, while there’s no denying thatinteractivity can help your eLearning content in terms of learning retentionand being able to prove its ROI, it’s important to remember to choose yourinteractive tools wisely. As you’ve seen with the three main types ofinteractive video technologies, not all are created equal.

Readyto reimagine and build video experiences that are relevant to the individual,drive desired behaviors, and deliver meaningful data, insights, and return oninvestment? Download Rapt Media’s new Strategic Guide and ROI Workbook tostart building user experiences with videos that drive valuable results.