Interactive Digital Product Development for a Leading Publishing House
About The Client
The client is the publishing business of one of the world’s largest universities. Both into academic and educational publishing, it is the oldest publishing house and the second-largest university press in the world. With a global sales presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 countries, it publishes over 50,000 titles by authors from over 100 countries. Its work includes academic journals, monographs, reference works, textbooks, and English-language teaching and learning publications.
Business Requirement
The client was looking to develop multiple digital learning objects (DLOs) that were platform and device agnostic, on a monthly basis. The development environment was to be customized to ensure that there was a collaborative and continuous workflow between the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at the client end and the development team. The development team also needed to provide a dashboard view on the progress of the activities. This environment also had to address two other key requirements, limited dependency on the in-house development team and a scalable model to handle volumes.
How Harbinger Helped?
This was a high stake, high visibility project for the client as is it was tied with a global rollout of their English language teaching product. After a rigorous evaluation, Harbinger was chosen as the partner to design and develop the digital learning objects. When the Harbinger team started working, they took care of all the earlier mentioned requirements. Apart from that the team also took certain steps to ensure successful development and delivery of the DLOs. They were
- Designing a standardized storyboard in document format for SMEs to share content
- Designing and developing 36 templates for DLOs
- Creating and hosting a tool on cloud to convert a word document to DLO
- Segregating content and design layers to make the DLOs technology-neutral
Harbinger utilized Articulate Storyline as the development tool to ensure easy maintenance and updation of the courses.
Post Development Support
The digital product has been successfully rolled by the client. Since the shelf life of the product is between three to four years, Harbinger still provides support in terms of hosting and maintaining the tool, and user support, whenever required. This is primarily to meet the needs of tweaking the DLOs to make them accessible through any new browser or operating system.
Business Benefits
Through this partnership, Harbinger was able to handle most of the client’s development requirements. Some of the key business benefits resulting from this partnership were:
- Delivery of DLOs in a standardized yet scalable manner enabling faster rollouts and higher volume management respectively
- Completion of this project at a highly competitive price due to Harbinger’s cost-effective and rapid delivery
