A wise man once said that change is the only constant. Throughout the unfortunately memorable year that has been 2020, we have been largely working from home to revamp Layup. After months and months of pyjama-clad Zoom meetings, and coffee-stained notes, we’re finally ready to hold this baby high above the Pride Rock and show it to the world!
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in Layup version 2.0
The Basics
In 2020, people were (probably) more glued to their devices than ever. Parents who habitually screamed at their children to put their phones aside, spent the year staring at multiple screens. This ever-changing relationship with our phones — unlike your middle-aged best friend’s relationship with his ex from high-school, is why we made Layup fully mobile responsive so that more people can learn on the go. To ensure that the learning experience remains smooth, we’ve added infinite scrolling as well.
The Layup Dashboard has been given a new coat of paint. Users can now keep track of all events, course reminders, and game requests. Yes, we said games. But don’t worry though, nobody ain’t gonna send you requests to play FarmVille. We’ve also taken up a few suggestions we’d received and added new colour-coded header pop-ups, and a ‘What’s New’ scrollable text bar to make things easier for the end user. The text bar lives up to its name and does what you expect it to, no sweat.
Reactions
Because we realized that learning is fun when you do it with your friends, we’ve given users the ability to filter posts visible on their dashboard using several parameters, and added ‘Reactions’ so that you can see what your favorite co-workers are doing and Like, LOL or go ROFL. Once you sign in to your Layup account, you will also notice a new sidebar that shows new activities, highest-ranked users, and trending discussions a.k.a the ‘goss’ *wink wink*. You can see what’s hot, what’s not, and what everyone is talking about, and jump in to crack a pun or two if that’s your thing. These features are all meant to create a sense of community and togetherness so that users don’t feel like they’re stuck inside a digital maze of sorts.
Games and Rewards
Remember how we told you that Layup has games now? Layup 2.0 has a new game mode called ‘QuizUp’ where users can choose different games from a host of categories (e.g. Action, Adventure, Strategy, Sports etc.), and participate in a player-vs-player quiz. Course administrators and designers can make use of these quizzes to drive learning outcomes without boring people to death (which is why nobody likes tests, unless you’re Amy Santiago from #BrooklynNineNine), while driving healthy competition and better engagement.
Gamification of eLearning has been something we’ve championed since Day One, and we’ve made a few cosmetic changes to the reward system used in Layup. For instance, deadlines are now in a “To Go” format instead of showing a due date and giving people panic attacks (i.e. instead of ‘Due on 21/02/2021’, Layup will now tell you that you have ’12 days to go’ till the end of a course). But one of the more significant changes under the hood is the revamp of the Rank Lobby, which now shows the point requirement for each subsequent rank, and tells you which of your colleagues have already unlocked that particular rank. So if nice-bloke-but-sometimes-annoying Greg and his team of bean counters from Accounting decide they’re in the mood to overachieve and make your department look bad, you’ll know.
And some other stuff…
Somewhere along the way, our UI team found themselves with some time on their hands and revamped the design of the Discussions section. Fuelled by copious amounts of Red Bull, they came up with a chat-style design that makes things so much easier for the user. We liked the design a lot, so we implemented them in this version. Why waste a good idea, amirite?
And finally, we’ve made a slight tweak to the events calendar so that it now shows all past and upcoming events. It’s so good that in time to come, we suspect someone will start using it to keep track of birthdays and Pizza Fridays. If you figure out how to do that, let us know. And in the meantime, go try out the new version of Layup!
