Here is my short answer! I gave up on categories, it became too complicated for us and we didn’t have good results/usage. We have gone to a catalog system and it seems to work well for our users!
We have the following catalogs:
- Products and Services
- Leadership
- Volunteers (What we call our Board members, this one is limited and only displays for those individuals)
- Personal Growth
- Operations
- Safety, Security, Compliance
- Technology
These Categories have us for employees wanting to transition to a new position, they are able to see what any department has available to them and often times we have employees start content in a subject they are interested in down the road.
When we went this way we also customized our thumbnails for quick view. I have a services of images/colors that correspond with the course type (eLearning, Webinar, etc) this helps them “filter” without actually filtering!
@Stephanie Dreiling You made me laugh out loud! Thank you for sharing how your company structured the catalog. I do have some follow-up questions (if you don’t mind):
- How do you manage visibility to the catalogs? For instance, what if you have a course that should only be taken by certain branches under the Operations category? Or, are your categories just visible to everyone?
- Since you don’t use categories, how do you control the courses your power users have access to under Course Management? Do you just assign them individually?
@Stephanie Dreiling You made me laugh out loud! Thank you for sharing how your company structured the catalog. I do have some follow-up questions (if you don’t mind):
- How do you manage visibility to the catalogs? For instance, what if you have a course that should only be taken by certain branches under the Operations category? Or, are your categories just visible to everyone?
- Since you don’t use categories, how do you control the courses your power users have access to under Course Management? Do you just assign them individually?
Of course, ask away!
Visibility - We manage views for the catalogs based on our Branching structure. We do probably leave our catalogs more visible than many though. Our staff don’t tend to get into other things they should (cause let’s be real, it would mean more work for them, and sometimes if they do, they learn something 
)!
Categories - When I finally threw in the towel on the categories, I created matching categories for each catalog. If I need to limit something I have the ability, but will say it’s rare that I do. I also heavily use Groups for course assignments and notifications. And we use Coach and Share for Department Specific items I want to draw attention to. So for instance if Operations has 100 courses over several departments. I have a Channel for Loan Processing, this includes the courses from Operations for just this department (maybe cuts is down from 100 to 15), then I have a Channel for Branch Operations that has their Operations courses and so on.
It’s way easier for me to manage this way! Hope that helps answer your questions, but let me know if that creates more!
Thank you for all of the additional information! This is so helpful. I think I will also create matching categories for the catalogs.
For your Products and Services catalog, what do you do if you have a course where only one branch should be able to self-enroll, instead of all the branches who have visibility to the catalog?
I think I need to break the catalogs out by audience AND subject, since the courses for each subject should not be visible to all branches for enrollment.
For example, I am thinking of doing either:
Sales (Branch) - Products and Services
Sales - Leadership
OR….
Products and Services - Sales (Branch)
Products and Services - Manufacturing (Branch)
etc.
Thoughts?
Jessica,
Good evening. This may sound fairly theoretical, but bear with me.
If it helps to get some perspective? I believe that lumping and splitting is always gonna “haunt”:
- some abnormally deep catalogs (categories of content/catalogs that are nested within each other, or catalog to sub catalog) - which people will want to know why you are not splitting more.
- or catalogs that are ultimately very shallow that probably - because you will hear that they should be lumped together more.
I think the wisest way of working with eLearning content is to be ready to align content to something in these three domains.
If you achieve those slices, then you can target just about anything across a catalog space for larger organizations. They really can be high enough level buckets.
That said, you may also want to find the “natural functional slices” across your organization and find yourself dumping content into them as the top or root level of your categories….and then use like subject matter/location/role to slice out one level below.
An exercise that makes alot of sense today? For those that are categorizing content? Is try to map it to a (older concept?) site map. Find those “structures” of categories that are forcing navigating a catalog that is too wide or too deep...compared to the 80% experience for most of your content.
What I have found - maybe because I am a bit old fashioned? is that I know the following:
- Folks that will want to search? It is up top. They will search. And they should.
- There are people that want to navigate to content because they wont know what to search for without some ideas and they get frustrated with searching.
Keeping that in mind? We are supporting setting up many catalog pages. Ultimately to have some tighter control over visibility to the appropriate branch/group/role for the right level of a catalog experience.
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NOTE: More pages dedicated to “catalog pages” = more maintenance. This is purely my perspective and this may not be ideal for you or your organization.
Hope the rant helps a little…..
Lots of great perspective in this thread! Thank you!
The main reason for categories being limited/not-useful is the fact that one can assign only one category to a course. An IT industry standard design would be to have one-to-many relationship between courses and categories so that a course would come up as needed in the assigned categories based on the catalog filter selection. At the same time, the course would appear only once if you select the entire catalog without specifying a category.
This way, there would be no question regarding what combinations for a category name would make sense e.g. Audience & Subject vs. Subject & Audience based on the examples provided above. You would just create two separate categories as “Audience” and “Subject”. Then you would assign the course to both so it appears under Audience AND under Subject when filtered.
This should be an easy fix and a no-brainer from entity relationship design at first place.
The whole design around Catalogs and Categories is quite awkward and against the best practices of IT software development & universal laws of logic. But the categories are worst as per current design and I understand many are throwing the towel after many trials.
I was too lazy to submit things into the Docebo ideas portal and will do for that one, as every workaround such as switching to Catalogs creates more side effects. Why not fix it the right way. If you agree, please support the entry in the ideas portal. I will share a link once I did the entry.
ok, here is the link to the idea:
Please support with upvote!
We just launched and likewise decided to not expose categories to learners. We’ve set a bunch of them somewhat aligned with some branches. At my last company (Zillow), I wasn’t in on this decision but they too decided I believe no categories and no channels either. Probably overkill but nice options to consider.
Altering the topic a bit though, what best practices do people suggest with catalogs generally? For example, are most ILTs not available for self-enrollment? Ours aren’t; I’m assuming this is what most people are doing? I don’t like that courses not avail for SE are locked in catalogs. I feel they should be able to open it (course page) to at least view the description and think hey I’d love to take a session of this when it becomes available, or whatever. The locked cards are a poor UX.
We have at launch 4 catalogs visible to all employees:
Flyhomes All - courses applicable to anyone at the company
Brokerage - courses with a brokerage topic
Brokerage Compliance - you get the drift
Mortgage - you get the drift
(The Archive catalog is a 5th, visible only to our L&D team).
All employees can see all catalogs (except Archive), no artificial walls around access to content.
What else is funky about catalogs/tips for a better UX? We don’t use hard deadlines/validity days much (least I hope we won’t) so wondering if ‘expired’ courses still appear in the catalog. That might also be wonky for learners…
Lastly, I think we’ve hidden learning plans from catalogs - most of you too? My thought was that might only confuse learners as at least for now most of our LPs will likely be planned enrollments vs. “electives” people can take for self-development…
Thanks for your feedback, Chris R - Flyhomes
