I found an old training slide I made years ago. On it was a ridiculous little orange character standing beside: RIP Sales The concept was “tombstoned.”
The slide was not subtle. That was the point. Technical training has a bad habit of taking something people genuinely need to remember and removing every memorable feature from it. A definition.
A bullet list. A corporate template. Next slide. Then everybody is surprised when the information does not stick.
I have never liked teaching that way. If the concept matters, give the brain something to grab. A weird character. A visual joke.
An exaggerated expression. Something stupid enough that six months later a person can still retrieve the technical concept because they remember the stupid thing attached to it.
PECCY WITH A JOB
The character in those old Amazon slides was Peccy, the internal mascot. I modified Peccy constantly. Different expressions. Different situations.
Whatever the information needed. Parent ASIN? Give the little orange creature something to react to. Tombstoned?
Apparently Peccy is now mourning sales beside a grave marker. It was employee-made training, not polished corporate learning content. That mattered. The material came from somebody doing the work.
The goal was not to produce something that looked like Learning had approved every pixel. The goal was to make the person understand the system.
SHOW THE OBJECT
My training instinct was always: Do not abstract the technical thing until it becomes meaningless. Show the actual object. Show the actual structure.
Show the actual error. Show the actual relationship. Then attach something memorable to it. That is especially important in catalog systems because the terminology becomes abstract very quickly.
Parent. Child. Identifier. Relationship.
Eligibility. Tombstone. Flat file. Error code.
If the learner has no mental object behind the word, the vocabulary becomes noise. So give them the object. Then let Peccy look devastated beside it. The joke does not replace the technical information.
The joke makes retrieval easier.
INFORMATION PEOPLE HATE READING
This pattern apparently followed me much longer than I realized. Years later, I would build customer-facing software around the same basic idea. People do not want to read most operational information. They need it.
That is different. Nobody wakes up excited to consume: policy FAQ
catalog logic error explanation operating procedure business rules
compliance instructions customer-service routing The information may be essential. The presentation is still allowed to be human.
That is where a character becomes useful. Not because a brand consultant says mascots improve engagement. Because a human brain is more willing to interact with information when the interface has some life in it.
FRANKIE HAD AN ANCESTOR
Looking at those old Peccy slides now, the lineage is funny. A deformed orange mascot explaining Parent ASIN. Years later, Frankie explaining a business to somebody at two in the morning. The technology is completely different.
The instinct is not. Take information that is annoying, confusing or boring. Preserve the actual logic. Do not dumb down the system until it becomes wrong.
Then make the interface tolerable enough that the human will stay with it. That is not decoration. That is usability.
THE HUMAN HAS TO REMEMBER
The best training is not the training that sounds smartest while it is being delivered. It is the training the person can retrieve later when the problem is happening. The warehouse is loud. The seller is frustrated.
The error code is on screen. The manager is busy. Nobody has time to replay a forty-five-minute presentation. They need the concept.
If a dumb little orange creature beside RIP SALES helps the correct concept appear in their head at the right moment, then the dumb little orange creature did real work. That is how I think about training. The logic has to be correct. The human has to remember it.
Everything else is negotiable.