Educational Book Series: Play with Words

• Company: Chengdu Chaoyouai Education Co., Ltd.

• Time Period: 11. 2013 - 11. 2014

• Role: Content lead & Learning designer

• Responsibility: Establish and train content team / Create and supervise instructional design specifications / Manage content production

Background

When Chinese children learn English vocabulary, it is difficult for them to connect the words with meanings. Because children are not capable of abstract reasoning. We were Inspired by the Chinese characters (Pictogram) that the meaning of the characters were carried visually by their forms. Those concrete representations help children learn the Chinese characters, not to mention that it‘s fun for them to decode the meaning.

Based on the feasibility studies of this project, we decided to craft a book series, which can better support children to learn English vocabularies by transforming English words into pictogram.

Challenge

I was elected as a content manger of this project and was responsible for content development (from design to production). For me, the challenges were:

1. How to build an outsourcing team with qualified designers?

2. How to support designers to produce high-quality content?

3. How to support designers to enhance their productivity?

Solution

It was rather difficult to recruit and train designers than copywriters, because the amount of designers was less than that of copywriters in outsourcing platforms. Also our criteria for design tasks was more complex than that for written tasks. Therefore I needed to upgrade previous recruitment and training system so that I could tackle those challenges.

Challenge 1 was solved by making good use of different outsourcing platforms as well as internal referral mechanism.

After recruiting some designers from different outsourcing platforms, we initiated a bonus mechanism for internal referral to speed up our recruitment, which includes:

• The designer referral bonus: The designers will be awarded if we hire their referrals

• The team bonus: The designers will be rewarded if he or she manages to build a team to complete outsourcing tasks

With the bonus mechanism, we successfully recruited 32 designers from 20 countries.

Challenge 2 and 3 were solved by improving collaborative way with designers' feedback.

When I took on this project, I considered the collaborative way as a product and designers were the product users. My role was to design and optimize the collaborative way as to facilitate designers' work, therefore, it was important for me to constantly learn from their feedback (Figure 1).

Figure1. The strategy to optimize the collaborative way

After three month efforts, we managed to develop an effective collaborative way, which promoted the quantity and quality of design works (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Evolutionary history of content

Results

With the solutions mentioned above, the content team became skilled in producing high-quality word illustrations efficiently (Figure 3). Finally we managed to craft a book series with engaging and well-designed content (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Highlights of this project

Figure 4. The book series Play with Words

After two projects, I helped our company establish the standards for recruiting and training outsourcing team, which has facilitated the company's content development since then.

Wall of Gratitude

I would like to express my gratitude for the people involved in this project.

• My teammate Fei Tang, who offered great help in recruiting and training designers.

• My teammates Lang Bai and Zhe Cui, who did impressive job in supervising content production.

• All the designers, copywriters and voice actors, who constantly produced high-quality content and gave us helpful feedback.

This project would never be complete with a bunch of talented teammates like you. My heartiest thanks to each one of you for your contribution