Project: Creating an Engaging Scenario with "We Are Learning"

*Update 11/3/2025* I am honored to announce that my project was chosen as one of the winners for the October challenge!

For October's eLearning challenge in The eLearning Designer's Academy, we were introduced to "We Are," an AI-powered next-generation authoring tool that can create immersive experiences and branching scenarios using 3D Characters. Read more about the challenge.

In this blog post, I highlight some of my favorite features, solutions I found to some challenges, as well as a few features I would love to see added in the future! Select the image below to view my full training scenario, and scroll to the bottom for a video walk-through of my favorite features.

There are a myriad of great tools for building training scenarios, but I am as of yet not familiar with any that are as immersive and user-friendly as We Are. It can be cumbersome to build multiple branching scenarios and keep track of outcomes and endings within other tools. Building the immersive-ness and interactivity also takes a lot of extra steps and integrations, but not with We Are.

View of my completed story's node map.

The node map really clicked with my brain, and integrated the action mapping and design/development phases in a different way than I've experienced using other tools before. For beginners, a simple scenario can be built relatively quickly. I ended up spending a lot of time "fine-tuning" expressions and importing media to enhance the experience, but it can also be very simple depending on the project.

When choosing my project topic, I was inspired by some recent social media drama between pharmacy technicians and pharmacy customers, and decided to create my scenario at a pharmacy. A lot of customers at a pharmacy are ill or in pain, and not many understand the ins and outs of pharmacy workings, so they can be agitated when arriving at the pharmacy.

My goal for this training was to help pharmacy technicians go beyond the initial interaction with the customer and get to the root of the issue by showing empathy and understanding while working towards a resolution. In the pharmacy world, not every situation has a perfect resolution, and it's important to keep calm and professional while finding the best way forward.

I wanted this to feel like a training where the learner is shadowing the pharmacy tech and learning on the job. The learner gets to work with two customers; with the first, they receive a lot of help from the trainer, who turns around to give feedback and advice, but with the second, the learner is on their own!

"We Are" Features I Love

Setting Customization: I used We Are's "Story Background Image Creator" in Chat GPT to create my pharmacy scenes with detailed prompting. Being able to use their pre-made scenes or upload your own gives endless options for training settings, and some great options for background sounds to make the experience even more realistic.

Media Uploading: Media can be used in the dialogue nodes with a lot of customization options. I was able to add a visual for escalating anger from a customer, and some helpful tips that throw back to the Poster Node I used at the start to introduce the key concepts for the training. I was also able to create an effect where the customer is on one side of the pharmacy desk, and the pharmacy tech is on the other, which adds to the immersive-ness of the experience.

Node Map: The branching in these scenarios was the best part. The node map is visually to easy to work with and see where each decision leads. I decided to do a pseudo-bottleneck approach where nodes would come together occasionally to keep the momentum, but had enough branching that the learner wouldn't get stuck in a repeated cycle, or be too limited in their responses. The nodes can be dragged and dropped wherever they visually make sense, and it makes it easy to keep track of multiple branches without difficulty.

Dialogue Generation: After entering dialogue into the node, it took literal SECONDS for the audio to generate. The character voices can be customized as well, and there is a wide variety of realistic voices to choose from in We Are.

Expression Customization: I love the wide variety of facial expressions that can be customized to fit the dialogue, along with gesture customization. There are so many options that it's easy to find something that really fits the situation.

Skills: These are a great way to "game-ify" the training and give feedback along the way and at the end of the training.

"We Are" Features I Would Love to See Added

Replace Gestures: I would love to be able to replace gestures, rather than deleting and adding new ones that appear at the end of the timeline. The auto-generated gestures are a great start, but sometimes not spot on, and it's quite difficult to replace individual gestures.

Multiple "End Notes": Okay, so you CAN actually have multiple end nodes... at the end. Which is fantastic! You can have different endings depending on the branching scenarios. But I would love to be able to use the "Skills" to give "end" feedback in the middle of the scenario.

Transition Customization: I would really like to be able to customize how the characters move between nodes. With my desk as a media element, sometimes the characters go "ghosting" through the desk between scenes, and unless I completely change the setting, I was unable to find a way around this.

Skill Customization: I would love the opportunity to choose how many points different responses are worth with specific skills and be able to control the points in the final outcome more. This would be great where a certain "grade" is expected to pass a training, for example. The current setup is good, but I see potential for more improvement here as well.

Let me know your thoughts on We Are Learning - I would love to hear if you've found solutions to some of the issues I encountered, and what your favorite features are. In what situations do you see yourself using an authoring tool like this in the future?