Two years ago I was with Lumina Learning's partners and investors in the most beautiful setting you can imagine - Bali, Indonesia!

I had just spent the past year and a half developing Lumina Splash for iOS, Android and Web. It was now time to unveil the soft launch of the product and share it with Lumina Learning's global network of practitioners. We were puting something out there nobody else in the industry had done, we were taking static psychometric reports off the page and bringing them to life with an interactive dynamic mobile app!

Now, two years later (in the world of AI assistants, driverless taxis and cryptocurrencies soaring) there's still no competitor which has managed to compete with a digital solution of their own - despite the world quickly shifting beneath them! In contrast, for me it's really awesome to see that doing a twitter or google search for Lumina Splash App now brings up a variety of news articles and photos of people in business across the globe loving using the product. It has become the new normal for practitioners to use Lumina's tech in their workshops and it is winning them big business.

In this post I share how Lumina Learning took personality reports off the page and brought them to life by augmenting its flagship PDF paper based report with mobile apps for both iOS and Android.

Background

The Occupational and Business Psychology industry runs workshops to make organisations and their people more effective. As part of each workshop, participants are usually handed a paper based report personalised to them based on their answers to a questionnaire filled in beforehand. These reports try to cover as much detail as they can but are ultimately limited by the static nature of a piece of paper and the need to turn pages back and forth, this makes it hard to dive into a specific personality trait without referring to the contents page. At the end of the course this report likely ends up in a drawer and the knowledge gained forgotten.

Surprisingly up to now the industry has failed to take advantage of the fact participants attending workshops now all carry around more computing power via mobile devices in their pockets than the technology which man took to the moon. Lumina spotted this gap in the market and has noted most participants are happy to install an app, most do not uninstall it after the course, and having a dynamic app makes it easier for participants to dive into specific traits and compare with others, improving the overall quality of the course.

Project Timeline

Project Timeline (June 2014 - June 2016)

Requirement gathering (June 2014)
Specification and storyboarding (Summer 2014)
Development of iOS and Android Prototype (Autumn 2014)
Development and deployment of microservices infrastructure (Winter 2014)
Private beta testing of app and infrastructure with 23 MDs and 50 specially selected practitioners (Spring 2015)
Re-design and re-development of app based on extensive feedback from beta test with new functionality added for practitioners (Summer and Autumn 2015)
1,600 app installations globally by learners/practitioners for soft launch (Winter 2015)
130 practitioners testing Spark QR code and URL integration. 70% of installations on iPhones/iPads and 30% on Android. (October 2015 - June 2016)
Public beta test of app with bug fixes and improved statistically selected questions. App also translated into Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese. Beta testing is publicly opened (Spring 2016)
Full Launch of Lumina Splash App with integration with Lumina cloud system (June 2016)

August 2017: 16k downloads

Goals

I worked with Lumina Learning to allow participants attending workshops to transfer their personality securely from their static paper based reports to their mobile devices - representing it digitally and making it interactive, we had the following goals:

Augment the existing report - Too risky to remove the paper report that people are used to entirely, and not beneficial to simply mirror the paper report on the device, instead it needed to seamlessly add additional value on top of the existing flagship product without compromising it
Frictionless - Practitioners on workshops cannot spend their time fixing WiFi and resetting passwords for participants, therefore it needs to allow participants to view and compare in an offline setting
Private - Allow participants to retain control over their privacy and who they share their report with, sharing should work privately offline within the workshop by scanning each others reports and only later using the optional public share feature for those wanting to share externally on social media and more once accepting this will make their report public
Randomly Obscured - Data should be randomly obscured so it is not easily readable without the app and to ensure every splash is uniquely encoded and signed even with the exact same source data so you can't claim to steal or make up a report
Authenticity and Integrity - Using digital signatures Lumina Spark Data should be verified as authentic from Lumina Learning's own servers, and proven to not have been altered
Intuitive Interactions - Participants need to understand how to use the app without any kind of lessons or tutorials the first time they use it in a workshop setting, we needed to make it easy to drill down into a specific area to read more by pressing directly on pulsating parts of the Lumina Splash graphic
Sticky product and knowledge - Lumina wanted to make the product and knowledge more sticky and less likely to be forgotten after the course by using unique colourful graphics and animations to visualise data
Dynamic scenarios - Allow participants to visualise how their personality changes in different situations by allowing them to dynamically morph visualisations before their eyes between how they act everyday vs being overextended under pressure vs their underlying preferences
Share to Compare - Improve how teams understand themselves and each other by comparing with others on workshops, but only with who they wish to share with
Speed Reading - Add the ability to share with family and friends online and offline after the course has finished by allowing them to do a lower accuracy speed reading as a short taster of the full Spark experience, this opens the door for them to get in touch with a Lumina Practitioner for more information about using Lumina's products and services
Practitioner Tools - In addition, this app rather than just being used by participants needs to contain additional tools for practitioners authenticated via login, such as being able to view any splash rather than just their own so they can coach any participant