Sparked interest?
Interview
Mr Schauer, would you like to begin by briefly describing your role at Austrian Federal Railways?
Gladly. I have worked for Österreichische Bundesbahnen Personenverkehr AG (ÖBB - Austrian Federal Railways) since 1988. In 2004, I moved to our head office in Innsbruck, where I am responsible for knowledge management. My main role is as editor-in-chief of our sales information system - the VIS.
The VIS. What is behind it?
VIS is an internal ÖBB information portal aimed at our colleagues in stationary sales, ÖBB customer service and train attendants. In VIS, they can find all relevant timetable and fare information updated daily. We have been managing the entire VIS content with SCHEMA ST4 since 2004.
Today, I am primarily responsible for the smooth flow of information and the targeted further development of the VIS
Targeted further development is a good keyword. You have developed a quiz for your sales information system. How did the idea come about?
You know, at ÖBB we offer a wide range of products, services and fares. This also changes frequently and then there are also offers from partners, for example railroad companies from other countries. That's good for our customers. For our colleagues, however, this means a considerable amount of learning and information in a sometimes rather dry subject.
We have now thought about how we can support our colleagues. How can we ensure that they have more fun, that they get the most important information along the way? That you notice when you have gaps somewhere and can then close them easily.
Gamification was the starting point for us - in other words, a more playful approach to learning. In the end, we came up with the idea of building a quiz around our sales information system.
You did it in SCHEMA ST4. Were other tools discussed?
Yes, of course, we looked at other solutions as well. There are loads of specialist solutions on the market. But we decided they weren’t really what we were looking for, because it would have been more difficult to integrate our existing content. It was also important for us that any format or media could be integrated into the quiz, such as videos. Another factor, of course, was that we didn’t have the time or energy to put into getting used to a new software solution.
That’s why the thoughts in the room quickly turned to the idea of using SCHEMA ST4 as the source for the quiz. However, we were not sure whether this could be done with the standard system. We then spoke to our service provider doctima, who showed us a very convincing solution for how this could be achieved
So, what does it look like now?
It was important for us that the quiz should seamlessly integrate into the VIS and into our CI. People should not have to put a lot of effort in to learn how it works before doing the quiz. That’s why good usability was very important to us. On the other hand, the whole thing should be enjoyable too, user experience is what it’s all about. Together with doctima, we have given these two aspects a lot of hard thought.
What we have ended up with is a really useful system - for our colleagues as users and for us as editors. As the editors, we can freely formulate the questions and relevant answers in ST4 itself in the form of classified components. We will then use this to put together a quiz using drag and drop. Clearly, we can also manage and populate several quizzes at the same time.
For the quiz participants, it goes like this: you start by opening the quiz in the VIS. For each question, you decide what you think is the answer and then you get instant feedback on whether the answer is correct. At the end of the quiz you are shown an analysis of your results that contains links. If you got some answers wrong, you can open the relevant information pages in the VIS by clicking or tapping on the link with your finger.
One small detail that derives from the gamification approach: as you progress through the quiz, a status indicator in the form of a red ÖBB train shows you how many questions you have answered. The train tracks across the top of the page from left to right - all against an Alpine backdrop, of course.
What was the biggest challenge for this project?
Technically speaking, I can only comment to a limited extent, since our service provider doctima took care of that for us. We made good headway on the project and it mostly went to plan. Creating a quiz is quite easy when you know how to work with ST4.
The biggest challenge was an organizational one - for data protection reasons and also because of the wishes of the Works Council, we wanted to ensure the quiz was completely anonymous. This had some technical implications, which added a certain degree of complexity to the project, that was nonetheless manageable. For example, instead of deploying a solution with a server, which would have been easier, we decided to work with static HTML and JavaScript. But, even this was well within our grasp.
And what do the users have to say about your quiz?
We’ve already introduced the quiz internally - and the feedback has been very positive. Now we are on the verge of rolling it out, following which 2,000+ employees will be able to use it to help them stay up to date with relevant facts and information. That’s 600 people on the ticket desks in our train stations, 200 at the ÖBB Customer Service call centre and another 1,300 ticket collectors on the trains. We are really excited to see how it’s received.