Microsoft Dynamics Guides: Best Practices

Training with Microsoft’s Dynamics Guides

Microsoft’s Dynamics Guides is a useful tool to provide visual and audio aides for step-by-step instructions and hands-on training.  Using the Hololens 2, Guides displays holograms, images, text, and video to achieve effective, interactive training manuals.

 

Creating a Guide is easy and intuitive. Below, we talk about some of the best practices to help you create Guides that are easy to understand and maintain. In general you want to keep your Guides concise, intuitive and up to date.

Outlining your Guide

 

The Guides Desktop application makes creating intuitive guides quick and easy. When designing your Guide, start with a rough outline. Think about how you might break down the process into easy to understand sections. Each section should then contain more detailed steps to completing the task within it. An example of tasks for a generic machine operation guide could be:

Ways to Work With Your Subject Matter Experts

 

Any guide you create should be made in collaboration with your subject matter expert (SME). An SME is often a senior technician/worker who has a lot of experience with the process you are creating the guide for. There are two different methods that we’ve seen work well for this collaborative process.

 

1. Create Your Outline, then loop in the SME

 

Once you have created your outline, schedule a time to review with your SME. Verify the tasks you laid out, determine what steps you want to include in each task and start to make a list of all the supplemental materials you want to present in your guide. Then work with your SME to gather all the materials needed and flesh out the steps in each task.

Once you have completed your Guide, both you and the SME should test the Guide to verify everything works as you envisioned.

 

 

2. Work with your SME before creating your Outline

 

Schedule time with your SME to review the process for which you are creating a Guide. Take your time and take careful notes throughout the process. Many of our clients find it especially helpful to take video during this time, to use as a reference or starting point for video components in their Guide. After the SME has finished explaining the process, review your notes with them and start working on your outline.

 

We’ve seen both of these methods work successfully for our clients. What works best for you will depend on your internal workflows and personal preference. Regardless of which approach you choose, working directly with your Subject Matter Experts is an important requirement of any successful Guide.

Add Additional Materials to make your Guide more effective

Guides provides a variety of options to assist with the training of your workforce. The basic text card is a part of every step and lays out the instructions for a given step. Often the text card won’t be enough, so Guides offers the option to add video(s), 3D holograms, 2D documents and animations to assist with the training process.

Keep Videos Concise

You can only provide one image or video per step and you should work to keep your videos and images concise. Ideally, videos for each step should be two minutes or less to minimize the complexity of each step. Keep in mind that videos and images can be used to provide supplemental information and not just instructions for the given step.

Be aware of using too many holograms

Each step allows you to use up to 8 unique holograms to assist users. These holograms could be arrows, icons, hands in various poses or models of equipment.  They could also be animations to explain more complex portions of a step. Additionally, you can import your own holograms for use. If you need more holograms than what is available for a single step (8), you likely are trying to do too much. Spreading that task across multiple steps will fix this issue.

Use Web Links for Additional Information

If you have a step that requires more than one video or image you can use the web-linking capability to link to an external website that contains your additional materials. Remember that you should consider if it is required and try to split these materials across different steps.

Conclusion