When the change enablement team at Whole Foods needed to quickly and easily produce operations and special project trainings for its more than 500 locations, it turned to Vyond, an AI-powered video creation platform.
Jason Ferguson, principal learning and development (L&D) analyst at Whole Foods, told HR Brew that his team wanted a product that was simple and easy to use, and wherein content could be repurposed quickly because no two stores are the same.
“We needed a tool that [would] give us the ability to be versatile,” he said. “In order to capture all of those audiences, we definitely need something that is able to show maybe a smaller footprint store and then quickly switch to a medium, to then a large one. So with the templates in Vyond and various other tools, it’s easy to gear the training towards that specific audience and make it a little more customized.”
Vyond, founded in 2007 as a consumer-focused video creation platform for the “social video enthusiast,” expanded its reach to B2B customers in 2013.
L&D pros identified the value of a platform like Vyond early, having used similar “point-and-click, drag-and-drop, no-harder-to-use-than-PowerPoint” software for years via their learning management systems.
They have been among the company’s first enterprise customers, according to Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. Whole Foods partnered with the company in 2017.
Ease of use. Ferguson pointed out that many instructional designers at Whole Foods did not have extensive training or credentials in using popular professional video editing and animation software like Adobe. Vyond’s easy-to-use workflow helped the team more quickly turn around work, he said.
“It gives them a quick ability to knock that out where it’s not a huge process,” he said. “You can also make it as intricate as you want depending on your skill level, but our ability for novice instructional designers to come in, watch an eight-hour video, and start creating a video from that, it has definitely helped.”
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The ease of repurposing was a priority for Ferguson’s team, as it facilitated quick reproduction of training videos with changes based on the store or information included in the video.
Focus on content. Another draw for Ferguson was the style of the animation—not too detailed, “more lighthearted,” and allowing for some level of entertainment in the instructional videos.
“What we liked about Vyond…was it gave us that kind of contemporary, more simplistic style,” he said.
The animations the Whole Foods team is using are “easy to digest,” Ferguson said. Vyond also features a video-to-action tool, so a designer can upload a video of themselves bending over correctly to avoid an on-the-job injury when lifting, for example, and the platform can create an animation based on the action in the video.
Lipkowitz said the symbolic, caricature nature of animations in video content can help improve engagement and retention. “If we’re looking at a little animated character…you’re not going to get stuck in their hair or their clothes, or if they’re attractive or not attractive, or whatever people think about when they look at real humans…They stand in the right amount, realistic but not containing all that level of detail.”
From a DE&I perspective, Lipowitz contends, this also alleviates issues with representation in L&D videos, because the designer can diversify the animations by skin tone, size and body types, and gender without going to a degree of specificity that could create plurality issues.
“You can make two people look different without assigning those two people to specific racial or ethnic groups or a specific body type or even a specific gender,” he said.