Cattery Volunteers

Organization

The State Humane Society (SHS) is the oldest and largest animal shelter in its state. It is a non-profit organization with a mission to advocate for animal welfare, care for animals, protect animals from neglect and cruelty, and promote education, awareness, and compassion from humans. Part of SHS' vision is to find adoptive homes for animals in the community, and keep healthy, adoptable animals from being euthanized, as they are a no-kill shelter. In addition, they find pet adoption to be vital to their life-saving mission. At the time of the project conducted by former OPWL graduate students to close an adoption performance gap, SHS had 1,200 volunteers and handled 14,000 pets annually, including many species besides cats.

Challenge

This learning experience design (LXD) project for Advanced Instructional Design began in an effort to address an adoption performance gap at the cattery section of IHS operations. The current rate of adoption at the beginning of the project stood at 73% and the cattery's desired performance from the volunteers was to increase this rate to 85% (Lutz, Fink, Novak, & Muranaka, 2013). This included a percentage of cats that were returned to the shelter shortly after adoption. The Advance Instructional Design project team was tasked with using the previous team's extant data, interviews, survey, research, and performance gap data from their Cat Adoption Maximization project (Lutz et. al., 2013) to design a solution to close the gap.

Goals

The team's goals were to develop solutions to help IHS and the cattery volunteers increase adoption, including to reduce the number of cats returned to the shelter after adoption. We intended to educate the volunteers about the cats and matching cats to owners, including knowledge of specific cats and how to assess an adopter's needs to make successful recommendations. Our mission statement, based on IHS' performance gap, was to increase the adoption rate from 73% to 85% (Lutz et. al., 2013) and our vision statement was "We believe that assessing the personalities of cats and prospective owners is the most critical step in the adoption process. Kitty Tinder is our guarantee to making your match last!"

Solutions

With the information from the original project, my team proposed a solution of a cattery kiosk, called Kitty Tinder, where volunteers could guide a prospective adopter through the available cats.

Approach

The Learning Experience Design approach has five phases (Kilgore, 2016):

  • Empathize - Learn about your audience for the course

  • Define - Construct a point of view (POV) based upon the user needs

  • Ideate - Brainstorm engaging course interactions, personas, and course narratives

  • Prototype - Develop a representation of the course in the LMS

  • Test - Review and test Designs from learner perspective and edit into ideal final format

Design thinking is described as "a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success" (Brown, n.d.).

Applying design thinking to learning experience design transfers the same principles Brown describes to human performance improvement in order to design and develop solutions to effectively close performance gaps based on the learner's experience.

We used brainstorming and the instructional design project information throughout this process. The images provided illustrate our brainstorming process in Mural, an online visual collaboration tool.

Approach

The Learning Experience Design approach has five phases (Kilgore, 2016):

  • Empathize - Learn about your audience for the course

  • Define - Construct a point of view (POV) based upon the user needs

  • Ideate - Brainstorm engaging course interactions, personas, and course narratives

  • Prototype - Develop a representation of the course in the LMS

  • Test - Review and test Designs from learner perspective and edit into ideal final format

Design thinking is described as "a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success" (Brown, n.d.).

Applying design thinking to learning experience design transfers the same principles Brown describes to human performance improvement in order to design and develop solutions to effectively close performance gaps based on the learner's experience.

We used brainstorming and the instructional design project information throughout this process. The images provided illustrate our brainstorming process in Mural, an online visual collaboration tool.

Figure 1. Empathy Map Canvas. (adapted from Lockett Zubak, Cheryl (2020).

Please note that images are provided only to show visualization of how the team worked through the LXD process.

Define

We defined the learners' needs from their point of view. This was the beginning of the design of our learner prototypes. We used the How Might We (HMW) question design to come up with several statements grouped into categories such as Matching, Access to Information, and Working with Adopters (Chao, Johnson, Stewart, & Travis, 2020). Given the structure of the HMW statement for the project, some statements were:

How might we…

Action

reduce

make

help

Subject

the volunteers' knowledge & experience requirements

cat information

volunteers

Outcome

by automating the matching process?

more accessible to volunteers & adopters?

properly advise adopters?

We also created user needs statements.

Ideate

The ideate activity uses a lot of brainstorming. The team developed two personas (Fig. 2-Fig. 4) based off extant data from the instructional design project, such as only 4% of the cattery volunteer respondents were men, 30% were over age 50, and 30% were between ages 18-29. Personas can be challenging because it is important to use facts to develop a persona but avoid stereotypes. For example, the team originally decided on using a male and a female persona. We did not want to use a stereotype of women liking cats whereas most men do not like cats. However, after reviewing the data of the high percentage of women volunteers at the cattery, it made sense that both personas would be women.

For each persona, we applied facts, defensible assumptions, and reasonable logic to their personalities and lifestyle. We developed a description of each persona, for example, 'Emily is young, shy, has had minimal training, and likes cats," (Fig. 2). We also created each persona's background, goals, skills they do well, tasks they need help with, and other relevant characteristics. In the persona, however, it is important to use "I" statements to help empathize with the persona. Rather than "skills they do well," we thought in terms of "skills I do well." Finally, each persona was given a key quote and a photo, found from stock photos on the web.

After developing two personas, the team chose the one, Emily, that we felt would benefit most from our solution at the cattery. We did include our second persona, Norma (Fig. 4), in Emily's learning experience design as she is a more experienced volunteer, whereas Emily was more of a newbie, being that she did not have a lot of time to volunteer often.

Fig. 2 Inexperienced Volunteer Persona 1st Draft: Emily. (adapted from Lockett Zubak, Cheryl (2018).

Please note that images are provided only to show visualization of how the team worked through the LXD process.

Hover and select the arrows to advance through persona progression.

The team then developed a story arc for Emily using story models. Each team member first created their own story arc and then the team collaborated to combine ideas and produce the final story arc, which explains how the personas approach the performance problem.

Please note that images are provided only to show visualization of how the team worked through the LXD process.

Prototype

Critical Scenario with Learning Experience

The team's Learning Experience Deliverable prototype is an ideation of our learning solution, the kiosk, which we needed to relate to specified learning theories. We developed the SMART Matching Questionnaire the volunteers would use to help them walk potential adopters through the kiosk experience.

Emily's Learning Experience day (Fig. 5 - Fig. 7) is a prototype of what her typical training experience would be like once the cattery has implemented the Kitty Tinder Kiosk.

It walks through her entire training day, including the types of adopters she might encounter, and some training from Norma.

Fig. 5 Chao, C., et. al. (2020). Week7_Round1StoryArc

Please note that images are provided only to show visualization of how the team worked through the LXD process.

Test

Journey Map (Fig. 8)

The journey map is the test of how the main persona, Emily, will move from a "green," fairly inexperienced cattery volunteer to an experienced cat/adopter matchmaker.

The team used her personal statement, a scenario describing her experience at the cattery, and her goals and expectations.

We described six phases Emily would experience from the beginning of her volunteer journey through the end after our solution has been implemented:

  • Emily is a reluctant volunteer

  • Norma, a more experienced volunteer, steps in to help Emily

  • Emily's first introduction to the matching kiosk

  • Emily struggles to help an adopter

  • Emily's comfort grows with adoption-related skills

  • Emily wants to volunteer more

The team described the elements of each phase based on:

  • Actions

  • Learning Support

  • Emotional Experience

  • Opportunities to Improve Outcome

  • Internal Ownership

Figure 8. Experience/Journey Map. (adapted from Lockett Zubak, Cheryl (2018).

Please note that images are provided only to show visualization of how the team worked through the LXD process.

Conclusion

This Learning Design Experience project focused on the real needs of learners and the organization to construct realistic personas of cattery volunteers. We designed a solution, the cat/adopter matching kiosk, and a training solution to use the kiosk to help close the gap between 73% of adopted cats returned to the shelter to just 85% of the cats returned. LXD helped the team create plausible and effective solutions to help the cattery's organizational mission of facilitate as many life-saving adoptions as possible and helped the volunteers be successful in accomplishing this mission with the cattery.

References

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week3_EmpathyMap [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week4_Persona [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week5_Persona2 [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week6_LearnerPOV [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week7_Round1StoryArc [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week8_Round2StoryArc [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week9_JourneyMapRound1 [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Chao, C., Johnson, T., Stewart, M., & Travis, S. (2020). Week10_JourneyMapRound2 [PDF document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

IDEO. (n.d.) IDEO Design Thinking. Ideo.com.

Kilgore, W. (2016, March 7). LX design: Remix your learning experience design process. Human and digitally present. http://whitneykilgore.com/lx-design-remix-your-learning-experience-design-process/

Lutz, H., Zink, D., Novak, K., & Muranaka, K. (2013). Performance and cause analysis: Cat adoption maximization project. [Word document]. Retrieved from OPWL 547 Blackboard course site https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu