“What’s the learning curve?”

That is one of the hardest-to-answer questions we get from prospective and new CommunityViz users.

It’s on my mind because we’re preparing for our next public training session in a couple of weeks.  “Public” trainings are for anyone, and the format we use, at least, pretty well covers the CommunityViz waterfront in 3 intense days.  On the other hand, we have literally watched as some completely new users worked their way through the tutorials (which come with the package) in about 3 hours, all on their own.  We’ve started offering interactive web-training in increments as short as 4 hours, and our on-line demos only take about 5 minutes each!  So from all this we can definitively state that the learning curve is… how long?

Experience shows (no surprise) that you don’t really learn CommunityViz until you use it yourself, on a project, at least once or twice.  Software tools (and maybe golf, and driving a car) are like that:  practice makes perfect.  But not really “perfect,” because a.) there is so much to know, and b.) the target keeps moving, because the software keeps evolving.   I know a person with a Ph.D. and 20 years of experience in ESRI GIS who says that about Year 15 he finally gave up on ever “knowing it all.”  CommunityViz isn’t nearly as encyclopedic as ArcGIS, but the same idea holds:  there is probably more there than most of us mere mortals will ever know.

But that doesn’t stop anyone (or at least it shouldn’t).  As we’ve built out CommunityViz functionality, we’ve done more and more to present features in layers of successive sophistication and complexity.  You can do a basic land use plan now with a handful of clicks, and then you can go deeper and deeper from there until you’re writing complex models and calling custom Python scripts from inside CommunityViz formulas.   At some point, not too far into your acclimatization, you probably reach a point where finding features and mastering their individual use comes quite naturally.  The interface is reasonably well designed; it’s not that hard to find your way around.

The deeper art of CommunityViz is not finding features and figuring out wizards.  It’s connecting all that capability to real-world projects.  It’s thinking about what decision-makers need to consider or need to know, and then using CommunityViz to show it to them.  It’s finding the perfect balance of rigor and speed to reach that magic state that we call “enough, good information.”  All that is beyond anything we can teach in a 3-day class (though we give is a start!), and so far there is no known learning curve for art.

Posted by Doug on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
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