Abcam

Published by Lily Winslow on November 1, 2022November 1, 2022

Case study: Abcam

BestAtDigital take Abcam’s learning management system experience to the next level with a centralised, digital learning space.

The customer

Abcam’s mission is ‘to serve life scientists to achieve their mission, faster.’ They identify, develop, and provide high-quality biological reagents and tools which are essential in a wide range of fields and applications including drug discovery, diagnostics and basic research. Their work has supported scientists throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Abcam have approximately 1,100 employees, who thrive on deploying their in-depth knowledge and expertise across the globe. With big plans for growth, Abcam needed a learning experience that would allow their expanding workforce to grow, learn and develop with confidence and speed.

The problem

As part of Abcam’s growth as an organisation, they were recruiting new employees, digitizing systems, and modernising processes. This meant expanding into new offices in new locations. In this new landscape, they need a sturdy, modern digital learning space to provide a foundation for their workforce.

Abcam’s new recruits needed to get up to speed, quickly. They needed a way to reliably access training from wherever they were, and they needed that training to be high quality.

While they had an existing Learning Management System (LMS), Abcam needed to take the user experience to the next level if they wanted their growing workforce to feel inspired, confident and ready for their roles.

The solution

Using our Canvas solution and expertise in digital design, we developed a homepage and branded workspaces for Abcam’s LMS, resulting in an appealing, centralised destination for formal and informal training. The new homepage and workspaces are personalised to the user, easy to navigate and provide curated content in a simple, intuitive way.

The homepage delivers a bespoke, user centric experience that promotes relevant training and provides easy access to key content.

Key features

My favourites

Users ‘pin’ their favourite content from the homepage onto a personal dashboard, enabling them to easily return to useful content whenever, wherever it suits them.

My learning

When users land on the LMS homepage, they’re presented with a snapshot view of their progress through their assigned learning. This dynamic visual reflects the status of the user’s training and updates as they complete each course. From the homepage, users can go directly to relevant training without having to navigate through the LMS to find it.

Hot topics

Users can browse hot topics from the LMS catalogue on the homepage and go directly to training that is of interest. This feature reduces the number of clicks needed to get to a training course.

Onboarding

With growth and recruitment key drivers, onboarding is an important topic for Abcam. To make sure new colleagues get off to the best start, we designed a new starter-specific homepage using Canvas. This space presents the content, training and connections every new starter at Abcam needs. After 90 days, the space presented to the new user automatically changes from the onboarding space to the homepage that everyone else sees, for a seamless transition.

Branded workspace

We empowered Abcam to create ‘learning playlists’ with a branded template. These playlists cover everything from social mobility and women’s groups to online coaching and workshops. Here, users see their learning path for a subject all in one, centralised space.

Video

With a new homepage, onboarding space and branded workspaces, one question remained: how could we get the word out? We needed to generate a compelling ‘pull’ – something that would get learners excited about the new LMS experience, spark curiosity and entice learners to find out more.

We developed a high impact teaser for Abcam to advertise the new experience to their workforce.

The results

According to Abcam users, some of the best things about the new homepage and workspaces are that they’re “easy to use” and “accessible on the go”. The impact of the new homepage and workspaces goes beyond positive user feedback, though.

Abcam have seen a rise in people doing pre-learning on the LMS in preparation for training workshops. On top of that, less ‘help tickets’ are being raised about finding and completing content on the LMS, saving time for the L&D team.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help your team with a problem solving digital solution, we’d love to hear from you.

Time to change…

Why do we behave the way we do? It can be hard to change our less desirable behaviours when they are highly ingrained and have become habits we perform automatically without thinking.

Richenda Sabine April 15, 2024