Adobe Success Story

Market-leading interactive training developer creates and delivers engaging eLearning experiences using Adobe eLearning Suite, including Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro software

Optimizing training opportunities
Today’s web design and development professionals need to constantly build and enhance their skills to keep up with essential, ever-evolving trends and tools. For more than a decade, WebAssist has provided more than 250,000 developers, designers, and e-commerce professionals inside enterprise, government, and educational organizations with market-leading, interactive, online training materials. Now, the California-based firm is reinventing its business model with a new series of training packages that help individuals and businesses use web software to improve productivity, increase potential, and extend opportunities that deliver on the promise of Web 2.0 and beyond.

Benefits

• Increased software extension revenue by 44%
• Accelerated production cycle by 25%
• Expanded product line and customer base
• Reduced the time required to edit video content by 85%

Project Details

WebAssist is using Adobe eLearning Suite, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro software to produce and deliver an entirely new line of training packages—called Starter Kits—that not only draw in new customers, but dramatically increase revenue for the firm. The new training packages have opened up an entirely new product line for WebAssist, addressing timely topics key to workplace success, including search engine optimization and marketing, building and integrating databases, and maximizing use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) inside Adobe software.

WebAssist has dozens of interactive training modules and simulations available online. Created using Adobe Captivate software, they cover topics across a burgeoning product line and vary in complexity from simple tutorials on how to add tags to a page, to richly-layered, complex modules about integrating a wide array of Adobe software products to complete projects. The development team uses components of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection on a daily basis to produce vector and raster images that integrate seamlessly into Captivate 4.

Rapid, seamless production of intuitive eLearning
According to Joseph Lowery, vice president of product development at WebAssist, “Adobe Captivate 4, part of the Adobe eLearning Suite, is the best tool on the market for rapidly developing interactive, intuitive, highly functional training materials.” WebAssist’s eLearning content empowers users at all skill levels to quickly increase proficiencies in a wide range of business processes, such as communicating procedures, meeting compliance standards, training co-workers, and maximizing web and mobile presence.

“With Adobe Captivate 4, we can generate more sophisticated training content more quickly, with greater customer ease of use—resulting in exciting and highly effective levels of interactivity. In fact, we are broadening an entire product line focused on training with Captivate. We expect our new product line to increase our overall business by 8 to 10%,” says Lowery.

A case in point is WebAssist’s newly formed strategic partnership with TreeHouse SEM, a search engine marketing and interactive design firm. The two teams collaborated to launch a series of fully interactive training modules about search engine optimization (SEO) that cover all aspects of SEO, from keyword analysis to inbound linking and onsite optimization.

As an early adopter of the Adobe eLearning Suite, Mark Fletcher, WebAssist’s training manager, is astounded by the powerful functionality inside the suite’s components. “With the Adobe eLearning Suite, Adobe didn’t just bundle products together for use in a specific discipline. It delivered a complete, integrated workflow for eLearning content creation and delivery. For example, now with Adobe Captivate 4, we can easily incorporate mobile-based content by taking advantage of Adobe Device Central CS4.”

The rapid production environment in Adobe Captivate 4 provides Fletcher and his team streamlined, flexible workflows to meet tight deadlines and bring products to market faster. Fletcher estimates that improvements in the software—including the live view feature and the ability to integrate Adobe ActionScript coding into Captivate—result in a 25% faster production cycle than previous versions. “Keeping Captivate fresh enables developers to create richer learning experiences faster, without having to re-engineer entire projects,” says Fletcher.

Smooth collaboration among the WebAssist team members is essential to rapidly bringing products to market. With Mark Fletcher based in the United Kingdom, and other core team members headquartered in California, Fletcher states that the reviewing feature in Adobe Captivate—an Adobe AIR application—is an absolutely phenomenal time-saver. “I wake up in the morning and find the comments made by the California team during the night stored in one neat folder that I can view and act on directly inside the Adobe Captivate project. It’s a godsend,” adds Fletcher.

Increasing net results
From the broader perspective, Adobe Captivate 4 has transformed the way the organization produces eLearning content in contrast to the video-editing methodology it previously used. “We estimate that our development team saves about 85% of the time that was spent previously making revisions to video presentations,” says Fletcher.

According to Michael Lekse, vice president of sales and marketing, “WebAssist has realized a 44% increase in revenue during the first 12-month period after leveraging Adobe Captivate solutions on our site. On top of that, the new training packages, such as the CSS Designer Starter Kit and Dynamic Web Charts, all featuring simulations built with Adobe Captivate 4, add entirely new streams of revenue.”

“Our Starter Kits explain how to create sophisticated web applications, create databases, and integrate work in Adobe software products step-by-step. Customer response has been fantastic,” says Fletcher.

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