SkillBars FAQ

Yes – we have two demos that are exactly the same as the real product:

• The Training Demo will allow you to take the Listening module, which provides 1 hour of training and allows you to take the self-assessment as many times as you like in order to earn your first Skill Badge.
• The Admin Demo shows a simulated organization with 250 employees, each with unique training history that you can explore. It also shows the User’s table and enables you to try out the majority of the admin experience.

The most likely cause of emails sent from SkillBars not being received is that emails from @skillbars.com are being flagged as spam or promotional emails, in which case they can be found in the spam folder or promotional emails tab.

In some cases, however, an organization might be restricting any emails that are not from pre-approved domains, in which case you will need to contact your email administrator to add skillbars.com to the list of approved domains.

Yes – before you create an account, you will be asked if you would like to create a new organization or if you would like to purchase as an individual.

Yes – simply switch from the training to admin using the profile menu, and you can add users under the ‘Users’ tab.

We use the domain of your email addresses to uniquely identify your organization, such that if you register with name@domain.com the domain of your organization will be domain.com. As free email addresses (e.g., gmail.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com) can belong to users at any organization, they cannot be used to uniquely identify your organization.

Your payment information is handled entirely by Stripe, which is the payment processor of choice for many of the world's largest companies. None of your card information is ever transmitted through or stored in our system.

Contact support@skillbars.com with your purchase order information, and we will send you an invoice. Once the invoice is paid, we will add the purchased licenses to your account.

Please contact customer support at support@skillbars.com, and we will be happy to help.

The 3-Program Bundle includes communication, teamwork, and leadership, so adding a communication, teamwork, or leadership license would be wasting those licenses. The opposite is also true: You cannot add a 3-program bundle license if you have already been assigned a communication, teamwork, or leadership license.

The most likely reasons are:

• Some of the email addresses are not of a valid format.
• Some of the emails have domains that do not match the organization’s domain.

For example, if you created your organization with name@domain.com, your organization’s domain would be domain.com. If you had users in your CSV file with their.name@anotherdomain.com, users with the email domains of anotherdomain.com would be ignored.

When you provide a URL for a user photo in the CSV user import, we use that URL directly from the browser – we do not process that photo or serve that photo from our servers. As a result, if your user photo URL points to a large image, that photo will take longer to load.

For example, if a photo was taken on a phone but has not been optimized for usage on a website, that photo will be extremely large due to its high resolution (the height and width in pixels) and high quality (the level of JPEG compression applied).

We have found that for the best mix of performance and photo clarity, user photos should be prepared as follows:

• 300 x 300 pixels
• 80% JPEG Compression
• Served from a server with a long Cache-Control header value (e.g., a week or more – unless you wish to update photos at the same URL more frequently), which will require browser cache-busting to be done whenever a photo is changed.

Note that if you edit an individual user photo, we will process the image and apply these settings, meaning it will be served from our servers with a long Cache-Control value at 300 x 300 pixels with 80% JPEG compression. However, if this route is chosen to optimize user photos, you may consider adding photos individually to each user after the CSV import.

We have done our best to make sure that it is. We have implemented support for the following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI):

• Having sufficient color contrast across our Light, Dark, and Dark “Blackout" themes.
• Supporting screen readers through semantic HTML markup and the use of alt, title, and ARIA HTML attributes, as well as alternative labeling when communicating status with color.
• Providing full support for keyboard navigation.
• Providing full zoom support on every device.
• Utilizing accessible alternatives to drag & drop interactions.
• Providing audio transcripts.
• Having the ability to disable animations.
• Having oversized buttons and link hit areas wherever possible.
• Using font sizes at or over 16px wherever possible.

If you have suggestions as to how to improve the accessibility of our application, please let us know.

The drag-and-drop interaction requires visual acuity and manual dexterity to clearly see the drop target and carefully position a user over the drop target, making it difficult or impossible to use for users who are visually or physically impaired. Instead of utilizing drag-and-drop, we chose a paradigm that is usable by everyone, which also happens to be far more efficient when moving hundreds of users at a time around organizations with thousands of users.

Yes – our user interface is fully zoomable, so you can increase the size of the entire UI as you would any webpage. On mobile devices, you can use pinch-zooming and panning, as well as rotating the device to a landscape instead of portrait display mode. On desktops, you can use your browser’s zoom menu or keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out on browsers are usually CTRL (Windows) or CMD (Mac) together with + (the plus sign), and for zooming out, pressing CTRL or CMD together with - (the minus sign).

By zooming out in your browsers, many more users can be displayed. When combined with large high-pixel density screen displays (e.g., 8K, 5K, 4K, 1440p displays of 27 inches or more), hundreds of users can be seen simultaneously on one screen. However, the more users displayed on a screen at a time, the more computational power is required for quick rendering and smooth scrolling. Therefore, if displaying hundreds of users simultaneously on a large pixel density display, it is advisable to use a computer with a powerful GPU.

We feel that sharing what someone answered on a self-assessment would only lead to dishonest answers. For example, if someone wanted to answer “Rarely" to the question, “I show up to work on time," but their answer could be seen by their manager, they might instead answer “Sometimes." Instead, we focus on the outcome of completing the “Dependability" module, as we only want to assess their understanding of dependability, not create a situation where their honesty could have negative consequences.

We have chosen not to show listening statistics as there is no reliable way to capture the time a user spends listening to audio. For example, if a user wanted to show that they were listening to the training for many hours a day, they would only have to start playing the training before they went to bed, and in the morning, we would have recorded that they listened to the training while they slept. In other words, when audio is played into a speaker, we have no way of guaranteeing anyone is listening.

Further, if someone listens to 6 minutes of training at 2x speed, they technically only listened for 3 minutes but absorbed 6 minutes' worth of information. Taking all of this into account, we decided it was best not to record and present data that we knew would be erroneous and lead to false conclusions regarding user engagement.

• Private playlists can only be seen by the user who created them and work like traditional audio playlists in that you select which audio segments you like and then set the order you would like them played. Notes can be taken by adding a description in the rich text editor.
• Organization playlists are visible to any user at your organization and, when combined with rich text descriptions, can act as a powerful managerial tool. By combining the best aspects of an internal blog post with a custom playlist, managers can help guide their staff’s professional development individually or as a group.

When pasting content into the playlist description, we reduce that content to basic HTML to make the formatting more consistent and eliminate the potential for security exploits such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). The side effect of this process is that content pasted into a playlist description will often be formatted differently than the source document or webpage.

Generally, if your web browser has been updated in the last five years, the SkillBars app should work fine. Specifically, the following browser versions are required for SkillBars to work properly:

• Edge 16+ (released 2017)
• Chrome 49+ (released 2016)
• Safari 10+ (released 2016)
• Firefox 31+ (released 2014)

You can check your browser type and version at what’s my browser.

Please note that Internet Explorer (IE) is not supported, as Microsoft has stopped supporting IE as of June 15th, 2022, and is encouraging its customers not to use the browser due to its multiple compatibility, performance, and security issues.

Generally, the version of the browser you are using matters more than the hardware you are using, but SkillBars does require somewhat modern hardware (within the last five years or so) to perform at its best. This is especially true of our administration dashboard, which requires more RAM, CPU, and GPU as the number of users in the dashboard increases. For example, with only ten users, practically any hardware should be fine; At 100,000 or more users, a modern computer or phone will be required to have quick performance and smooth scrolling.

As “slow" is relative, it’s difficult to say. Generally, we have targeted a download speed of 10Mbps, which is about the speed of a slow mobile phone connection. Even at very slow speeds - as one might encounter on in-flight internet provided by airlines - the application will take several seconds to initialize, at which point most of its operations should be relatively fast.

Yes – we support a “blackout" dark mode, which is activated as follows:

1. Switch to dark mode using the theme toggle at the top of the page
2. Press and hold the theme button while in dark mode for 3 seconds

You should now see a much darker interface. To revert to the regular light and dark modes, you can toggle the theme button as normal.