A large NYC agency hired us to help design, create, and program an interactive sales training DVD for Roche, with narration, animation, interactive quizzes, and gigabytes of uncompressed video.

The Roche Sales Training DVD was created to introduce a new sales model to their sales force, The ACCESS Selling Model, which even had its own graphic. To introduce their sales people to these changes, Roche created numerous screens with both text and narration. Additionally, Roche created hours of video documenting potential sales scenarios, with interactive quizzes to test sales reps’ retention of the information.

We were tasked with taking the original design sketches from our agency client, and building the entire interactive DVD. We first improved the interface design to work better with the vast amount of screens and video. We then started programming the interactive structure that would navigate 114 screens, 80 separate videos, and over 20 individual quizzes.

Once the new interface design and the screen-to-screen animations were approved by the client, and the client’s client, we started editing hours of video. We did a few tests and finally settled on the proper video compression that would allow great quality video, but also allow the files to fit on a 4.7GB DVD. We set up a separate machine to churn through the processor intensive task of compressing the video as it was edited. With this ongoing process started, we then turned to programming the interface to allow the user to pause, rewind, or fast forward each video in real time.

Once the processes to deal with the video was taken care of, we started creating the animation and narration for each of the 114 screens. The narration was interactive allowing the user to click and drag a slider to navigate to any part of the narration. The challenge was to have the screen animation follow the timing of the voice over narration. You can see the narration interface at the bottom of screens 2, 3, and 5. Once this task had a proven solution, we started developing the interactive quizzes.

The interactive quizzes were always based on a video. The user would watch the video and then go to a separate screen to answer questions based on that video. The quiz screen had a smaller version of that video for reference and voice over narration. We were tasked with creating a sequence of events for every quiz. The reference video was inoperable until the narration would read the question. After the question was narrated, the video became operational. When the user clicked to answer a question, the narration would read the appropriate voice over (right or wrong answer) with the video being inoperable until the narration was complete. You can see the video and quiz interface on screen 6, 7, and 8.

The last task was to build a library of all the videos for the sales team to reference. This was the easiest part of the project, we simply designed another screen type and just linked to the videos we already produced. You can see the video library on screens 9, 10, and 11. And finally, we display how a user would exit the presentation on screen 12.

The Roche Sales Training DVD was easily one of the largest projects we produced, and we’re proud to be a major part of its creation and celebration.