Melon Learning Major Update

We try to listen. And we believe listening to your clients is the most natural way of developing. It only makes sense, right? Our Melon Learning is what it is today mostly because of what our clients needed and wished for. We do not stop this train. It’s a good journey. So what have we been up to lately? We summed up the two most requested features and made them happen. We can’t wait for you try them, but in case you still haven’t, here’s a quick overview!

For the love of the learner

We have always been slightly more sensitive and passionate about our Learner view, or the part of the system that the learner interacts with. Of course the administrator counterpart is just as vital and frankly, the one that sells better, because the decision makers in a company are usually the ones, who would use Melon Learning as administrators. They would like a system that is pleasant to use and gets the job done in a way that is intuitive and fast. But the majority of the users (sometimes up to 99% of them) would never see the bigger part of the system. They aren’t really concerned with the whole process of training a company’s employees. They only want to get better at what they do and need great content at their fingertips and nothing in between. Well, in a perfect world at least. In 2021 there still is an ‘in between’ and our job is to make it as smooth and invisible as it can be. We will not dive into the technicalities of UI & UX (probably a topic to cover in future posts - let us know), but it all boils down to respecting the user’s time. Eventually, it’s everyone’s most precious commodity. So we’re constantly on a quest to hack and slash through the ‘in between’.

Trying to keep it more or less stylistically intact so it does not clash with the Admin view we added more imagery and cleaned up the look. Striving to stick to simplicity as much as possible we kept the same details, but arranged them in a better way and shied away from the rather table outlook that our Learner view had. We fragmented the trainings filtering system to be more intuitive and usable and last but not least accommodated throughout for our second new feature: 

Instructor-led trainings

Now this one has been boiling up through the years, but it somehow never got right into the spotlight. Until now. The ubiquitous 2020 pandemic changed the business landscape to a sizable extent. And so the need for a way to incorporate previously offline training initiatives rose up big. There will always be cases where a live instructor is quite indispensable. Which paved the way for blending blended learning into our puppy too. Granted, this is only the bare bones of this new webinar functionality, but we have active plans to keep adding to it and making it every bit as integrated and usable as possible.

For a start we partnered with Zoom as a webinar platform that fits our technical and functional needs to realize what we have planned. Now a few months later we are excited to offer an integration with Microsoft Teams as well. Sessions are automatically setup when created and require very little cradle rocking to have a hot working instructor-led training. Of course it can always be paired with all the materials you might want to add to support it. We also felt it’s important to be able to offer the benefit of a second chance to learners, so each session can be recorded and available for viewing at a later time. Which of course benefits everyone, as the ones who attended might like to refresh and have access to the content in the future.

And so our new chapter begins. We sincerely hope you are as excited about the new update as we are. Let us know what you think. We try to listen.