Adapting to Adapt

The brief

The ask was an e-learning on health awareness for SAP’s leadership audience — videos, job aids, scenarios — designed to let learners safely experience health-related choices and see the after-effects of those choices.

Two constraints came with it. First, I was asked to be an early adopter of Adapt, our team’s new open-source authoring tool, rather than Storyline (which I’d typically reach for). Adapt was mobile-friendly, responsive, allowed real team collaboration on shared branded themes, and — most importantly — met full accessibility standards for our differently-abled learners. That last point was non-negotiable.

Second, Adapt had a limitation: out of the box, it doesn’t do branching scenarios easily. Storyline does. Doing it in Adapt would have meant buying a third-party plugin or stepping outside the team’s chosen toolchain.

The constraint

The natural design for this content was branching scenario: a learner makes a choice, the story branches, consequences compound, and they live with what they decided. Adapt couldn’t do that cleanly. So I needed a different mechanic — one that delivered the experience of choice and consequence without requiring a real branching engine underneath.

Keep it simple

Rather than fight the tool, I designed around its strengths.

A before-and-after frame.The course opens with a humorous video parody of a team meeting — an oblivious manager unintentionally crushing her team’s wellbeing (think The Office). It closes with a matching after-video where, with the learner’s help, the team is doing much better. That frame gives the experience an emotional arc without needing a branching engine.

Five mini-scenarios in the middle.Between the bookend videos, the learner moves through five graphic multiple-choice components, each one a relatable mini-scenario. Each answer carried its own custom response — the consequence the learner needed to see — and then the Trickle plugin gently guided them toward the ideal behavior, surfaced the key concepts, and shared a short testimonial from a senior leader putting the principle into practice. Then they scrolled on to the next scenario.

What this gave the learner was the feelingof branching choice — agency, autonomy, real consequences — without me having to build (or buy) a branching framework. The course was responsive, accessible, and ran in 30 minutes or less.

What I learned

The constraint forced a clarity I might not have arrived at with branching tooling available. Keep it simpleturned out to be the right design for the actual audience: busy senior leaders who needed something quick, relatable, and self-directed — not an elaborate simulation.

The principles I landed on here — exploration and autonomy, design for the audience you have rather than the tool you wish you had, ship something useful in a busy person’s day — are the same principles that show up in every program I’ve designed since. The Equipped to Thrive toolkit at Amazon and the EMpact simulation at Salesforce both grew from the design instincts I sharpened here.