Bloomfire Social Learning Platform
Bloomfire
Bloomfire creates a company-wide social learning network where employees can store and share knowledge. Atomic helped founder Josh Little select his market, create a user-focused product, and launch on time and on budget at South by Southwest.
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Josh Little, founder of Maestro eLearning, noticed a common challenge in many organizations: formal training just can't keep up with demand. In fact, most employees don't learn what they need to know through company training — they learn it from coworkers. And these isolated lessons can't be captured, harvested, or shared within an organization.
Josh wanted to create a social learning network for businesses, a place where employees could ask questions and share knowledge and expertise easily. He asked Atomic to help him strategize and create the platform, which he called Bloomfire.
Teach and Learn
Bloomfire allows everyone to be both learner and teacher. Employees can create “courses" of uploaded content, including slides, text, video, and screencasts. Bloomfire even has built-in browser webcam integration to make screencasts and video easy.
Employees can then review the lessons their co-worker have created, follow favorite teachers, and leave comments on course materials. Behind the scenes, the app allows admins to manage users and content, while also collecting valuable analytics on how the site is being used.
Josh Little, Founder of Bloomfire.com
Coordinating Stakeholders
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
- Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
- Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product.
Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Fine Tuning Every Step of the Way
The original vision for Bloomfire was much broader than a social learning platform. But Josh asked Atomic to help him focus and funnel that vision into a unique, viable product.
Based on Josh's subject matter expertise in corporate learning, the Bloomfire/Atomic team developed provisional personas and used them to create a story map of high-level features. Atomic also did preliminary design for a set of interfaces, which allowed us to fine-tune the scope and budget before development began.
Josh wanted to present Bloomfire at a series of industry trade shows, so we had to meet a series of hard deadlines. By using a test-driven approach, the team was able to confidently add features right up to each major release point. We had a cohesive feature set for each milestone up to the ultimate unveiling at South by Southwest.
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
• Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
• Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product. Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Nate Butki, Root VP
Taste-testing the Product in the Field
Delivering A Great Product and An Empowered Team
By getting to share their decades’ experience with agile practices, Atomic’s team got to watch the counterparts at Root develop new skills over the course of the second engagement.
Soto says he loved watching Root’s inherently collaborative culture adopt the agible practices they were learning.
“After a few months, they loved how easy and smooth it was to make last-minute changes, to pivot in another direction, and use feedback to spend their time where it was most impactful,” he said.
Root’s Jared Page says the agile approach to product design, development, and management he saw during the engagement had a profound impact.
“One of my favorite things about this project is that everyone got better—better at our jobs and better with communication; it just feels cool,” he said. “Sometimes you work for a year and don’t know if you’ve improved but everyone could look back on this project and say they’ve improved. This project changed the way I will work forever.”
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”
The Atomic Team
Here are some of our current Atoms who worked on this project. Click their photo to read their bios!
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