Xyleme

Xyleme's single-sourcing capability is an absolute gamechanger for any organization. It takes any and all content that exists within your organization and instantly transforms it into exponential amounts of potential. For any organization that is serious about eliminating a one-size-fits-all and/or fixed deliverable approach to learning and is committed to reaching people with a multitude of experiences, languages, and brands, Xyleme is the absolute best thing out there.

Xyleme requires a substantial mind-shift - it is not difficult to use, but is most effective when emerging skillsets in instructional design are applied (e.g. design thinking, object-oriented design, data analysis). It can be quite a transition for individuals that do not yet fully possess these skillsets, so does require upskilling and ongoing development for learning professionals (but, hey, we're learning people, so we should love to learn, right?)

The concept behind Xyleme is good. The idea of creating re-usable learning objects can, in theory, save you a lot of time in developing content.

Xyleme is riddled with bugs to the point that you waste much more time than you might save with any content re-use. The interface is also not at all user-friendly. Even simple tasks, like editing a bulleted list causes confusion. Creating a bullets is not complicated, but with Xyleme it actually is.

You can often spend hours trying to get an image overlay to look right, only for it come out misaligned once you publish. There are many features that are broken and some that can even corrupt your content. (For example, do NOT resize an image with the buttons and be VERY careful with the undo button)

The features are also very limited. For example, the overlay editor allows you to annotate images, but only gives options of very basic shapes: rectangles, circles, and text. I'm pretty sure my old Macintosh from the 90's could do more than that.

The quality of the interface seems like Xyleme is only aiming for mediocrity. Many features seem half baked, as if the developers made a bare-minimum effort to meet a user requirement without trying to make it function smoothly or usefully. For example, the spellcheck feature doesn't let you suggest a word, so if the word you want is not in Xyleme's dictionary, there's nothing you can do. Another example: you can align objects in the overlay editor to the left, or top, but not to the right or center. Both of these seem like the developers only did the bare minimum so that they could say that the feature exists.

My experience with Xyleme's support team/employees has been very positive. They are very professional, friendly and helpful.

The single sourcing concept is good and in theory it could save us a lot of time but the editor is so slow/ unreliable it takes us twice the time to produce content.

Our content team actually use a different tool to write our drafts because Xyleme's UX/performance is so poor and we migrate our content in manually (thus doubling our workload).

The UX design. It's very clunky and not very intuitive to use. There aren't enough of the shortcuts that you find with most modern authoring/CMS software. It just feels very dated... even the UI design isn't great. The image quality of some of the icons on the toolbar in the web editor is so poor and fuzzy you really make out what some of the icon images are.

The performance. Both web and desktop editors are incredibly slow to load in comparison to most modern pieces of software. Even when it has loaded, I feel like I spend a lot of time watching loading spinners whether it is loading a project, checking it out or opening a topic. Everything just takes time which completely defeats the purpose of a single-source tool that is supposed to save you time.

The modular approach to learning objects is, in theory, a great idea. I liked that idea, but the implementation is just clumsy and painful.

This system is buggy, poorly designed, and VERY slow.