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Education Services Trims
Your Learning Curve
The training catalog’s new interface helps reduce your time to knowledge.
by Cindy Andruss
Instructional Designer
Xilinx, Inc.
cindy.andruss@xilinx.com
Designers have a need for speed – not only
in their designs but also in their learning
curves. Keeping up with the latest information
about Xilinx products and services
is a critical part of getting your product
out of design and into the market.
“Knowing what and how you need to
learn in order to increase performance is
vital in today’s global economy, where lack
of knowledge can spoil your competitive
edge,” said Patrice Anderson, Xilinx ®
Education Services manager. “It’s no secret
that specialized training on Xilinx software
tools can help you reduce your time to
knowledge and gain an advantage over
your competitors.”
Education Services understands that
effective training is critical to a designer’s
improved productivity and performance.
Although our website already addressed
many customer training needs, we realized
that we could make improvements.
Xilinx formed a team of experts to analyze
the website and as a result determined
that a self-service portal was the
best solution. The “extreme makeover”
included features to reduce your time to
knowledge more than ever.
The new training catalog on the
Education Services website gives you a
speedy, personalized, low-cost, flexible,
and quality training solution at your fingertips
anytime, anywhere.*
Improved Navigation
The makeover team, which included web
developers and designers, programmers,
system administrators, usability experts,
instructional designers, and technical writers,
put their heads together to increase the
usability of the aging and content-heavy
Education Services website. Since its last
redesign three years ago, the site was
beginning to show wrinkles, and the navigation
had become complicated.
The team wanted to create a quicker
route to course descriptions and registration.
They also wanted to augment training
services and course offerings to help
decrease knowledge gaps among Xilinx
designers.
In addition to streamlining the navigation,
the team also set out to redesign
the online enrollment process, changing
keywords in the search menus to provide
a more intuitive registration experience.
Now you can find instructor-led, live,
and recorded e-Learning courses more
easily by curriculum paths based on your
design specialty. From course description
to enrollment, fewer clicks get you where
you need to go faster (see Figure 1).
“Our usability studies showed us
where we could make a significant
impact on our customers’ training experience,”
said Rohan Thompson, web
redesign project manager. “The subsequent
overhaul to the Education Services
website reflects what our customers told
us they wanted.”
96 Xcell Journal Winter 2004