Minted Cubism

As a new round of training comes along, I start to think about how well my training sessions have run in the past ,and to what extent they have achieved their desired effect. A particular request for training that I felt had been covered by timetabled delivery plus the availability of instructional videos caused me to get thinking though. One of the reporting options I have is being able to see utilisation, and in this particular case this did not appear to be so good, so why? Not an easy question, or one that I suspect has a single answer, but from my web design knowledge I am aware of the issues surrounding click-depth, and in this case it was 4. If it turns on depth, then I perceive further accessibility issues developing as the click-depth to our new toolkit resource bank is also 4. So is the solution to raise the level of materials on the site, as with Google, everyone would like to be on the front page. At this point I decide to consider what I would actually like to happen here. Well basically, the materials having a highly persistent visibility. And it was thinking about this last point that led me to consider that maybe I need to have a physical presence, and from that came the idea of what I discovered are called Minted Cubes. Minted cubes are small plastic boxes, filled with mints (the clue is in the name I found), and how does this help me, it helps because each of the six surfaces of the cube has an image, in my case, an image of a resource, please see accompanying image, plus some links below.

Total Merchanise

Probospromotions

Sweetconcepts

So the plan is I hand these out at training sessions and they find their way onto desktops, shelves, computer tops, filing cabinet tops and window ledges, in fact any flat surface hopefully in arms reach. First off I downloaded a cube cut-out template and constructed a model, then copied a random sample of six images from our toolkit pages; see accompanying screenshot. My wider plan is to create cubes for combinations of toolkit resource such as media, presentation tools, gamification etc, in the hope that this may further buy into the psychology of collecting, though I may be a little to ambitious on that one. Anyway, the good news is that following a short presentation, the idea has the green light, and this week we will be putting together the proposals for the first batch. If you have any ideas or experience in supplementing training with merchandise then please feel free to comment or tell us about it.

Bye for now Skipper