Snap Inc. Creating an AR training platform for an audience of 8 billion.
At a glance.
Key benefits.
This project has realised Snap’s dream of engaging a global community of users and enabling them to bring ideas to life, in Snap’s AR creation platform, Lens Studio.
Read time.
4 mins.
Awards.
Products & Services.
Learning consultancy, micro-site design, bespoke digital learning, social learning.
Outcomes.
An easily accessible hub, for a community of 350,000+, with practical learning, how-to guides and videos and defined learning paths, all about creating Augmented Reality Lenses.
For a snapshot of how we worked with Snap to make Lens Studio, take a look at our quick partnership overview video.
Goals.
Snap tasked us with this mission; to engage and grow their community of 350,000 AR developers, by creating a world-first public-facing AR training platform, complete with accessible, practical AR training content, social learning and resources.
In summary, Snap’s key goals included:
Empowering a larger audience to become Augmented Reality (AR) developers.
Making the use of AR and Lens Studio easier to adopt, learn and master.
Inspiring the use of AR as a training and education resource, for all disciplines at all levels.
Surfacing accurate and personalised materials to aid all creators on their AR journey.
Enabling the creation of creative and technical AR content at scale.
Further organisational goals that were centrally important to this project included:
Awareness – platform support for users in a range of territories.
Engagement – ensuring platform suitability for various learner personas and UX that's both ‘on-brand’ and easy to navigate.
Appropriate learning – content presented in robust, but adaptable, learning paths for the different learning complexity curves and skills outcomes.
Logistics and events – touchpoints in the developer process where they could surface, and use existing events to promote, the learning E.g., Lens Fest.
Evaluation – a structured plan for capture, assessment, and use of data to inform learning improvements.
Social/ Support – using the existing Snap community to explore opportunities for peer-to-peer support, existing live streaming approaches, and create a framework for feedback and insight.
AR lenses from Lens Studio have had over 3 trillion views. It’s important to recognise that this is your workforce in the next 10 years. And the need to learn more about AR technology is growing every day.
Stacey Long-Genovese
Global Head of Education, Learning, and Training at Snap Inc
Our solution.
Sponge helped Snap to make their ambitions a reality by providing our Experience Definition service to architect the content and design of the platform, along with the learning journeys that it contains.
From there, the Sponge team set up Snap’s platform, designing the interface, layout, content, visuals, and user experience, while integrating learning with community tutorials, social media, and further resources and external content. The Sponge team were also instrumental in setting up the foundational ‘Lens Studio’ training path and supporting micro-courses consisting of 13+ Evolve modules and tutorial animations.
My team, along with the help of Sponge, has built incredible learning tutorials to enable an online community where you can collaborate and build new AR experiences.
Stacey Long-Genovese
Global Head of Education, Learning, and Training at Snap Inc
Have you ever seen an LMS that looks like this?
The website that we helped Snap create for this initiative is an easy to navigate, engaging entry point to this learning. Through an impactful welcome video, learners are guided towards the best place to begin: the foundations learning path.
Alongside this learning, the platform provides intuitive access to the Snap AR community Discord, community tutorial videos, Snap resources, livestreams and more, all in a few clicks from the homepage. Using the powerful learning management functionality of the platform, content is organised into logical, structured collections, making it easy for learners of any level of expertise to find relevant content.
Diving deeper, our micro-learning modules are designed to be digestible, practical and memorable. Every module is presented in an editorial, easy-to-use style, written clearly for audiences from any background, and all brought to life with striking Snap AR imagery. Despite the technical nature of the content itself, everything is presented in an incredibly concise, visually appealing, bold, and distinctly ‘Snap’ way, ensuring that the user-experience is just as good as the content.
To build real technical skills, each module builds up knowledge and ability in a structured way, from presenting clear foundation information to providing guided practice activities and finally full walkthroughs of more advanced processes. These walkthroughs are further supported by bite-sized video tutorials – simple but extremely effective screen recordings, highlighting exactly how to do tasks in Lens Studio, in a way that would be impossible with words alone.
For the developers in the audiences, we included a bespoke ‘quality of life’ feature that was requested for the learning – Dark Mode – which changes all of the content presented to a darker, more easy-on-the-eye alternative. Finally, all of our modules finish by providing learners with access to further resources too, if needed. Once again, because of the wide variety of learner expertise levels, this is incredibly important in allowing that deeper dive for those who are so inclined.
Sponge has been a fantastic partner for us to build a new learning management system that helps us achieve this vision. Our collaboration has resulted in not only an innovative approach to learning but also a brilliant and easy-to-navigate platform for AR creators across the globe to hone their skills with.
Stacey Long-Genovese
Global Head of Education, Learning, and Training at Snap Inc.
96%
of participants recommend the Learn AR courses to others.
79%
of participants expressed confidence in their ability to apply what they learned in the Learn AR courses to their work.
What’s next?
The learning platform and content that we have created with Snap supports a growing, global community of AR Lens developers, having engaged this community with the Lens Studio platform and enabling them to consume learning content as they build their lenses.
We’re providing both foundational guidance and support in that moment of need, through short, bite-sized, micro-learning, which is applicable to what learners need, when they need it and what they're trying to achieve.
Learn more on The Unforgettable Learning Podcast
AR, “blank canvas creators”, and experiential learning at Snap Inc - with Stacey Long-Genovese.
Dig deeper into Snap Inc's ambitious project bringing AR to the masses in the first episode of The Unforgettable Learning Podcast. Here, we catch up with Stacey Long-Genovese, Global Head of Education, Learning, and Training at Snap Inc, to discuss all things augmented reality and human-centered design.
