Three Universal Truths About Blank Slate
This month marks two years that I’ve been the Chief Scientific Officer at Blank Slate. You could say I’ve spent a lot of time with our clients’ data. Though I spend most of my days in the weeds of it, when I take a moment to look over the full data landscape, there are a few remarkably persistent trends.
From my birdseye view, here are three universal truths about Blank Slate that I’ve learned after spending two years getting to know the data from dozens of our clients:
- Blank Slate helps people
- Blank Slate works quickly
- Blank Slate helps people work quickly
Truth 1: Blank Slate helps people
The coolest thing about making a product that supports cognitive performance is that it is useful for everyone. It has been awesome in the literal sense to see Blank Slate support knowledge for frontline workers like nurses and paramedics, for security guards and police officers, for maintenance workers in corporate buildings, for aviation staff, for our armed service members, and for people with Alzheimer’s disease. While I often watch from behind the scenes as people use Blank Slate to regain and maintain their expertise, I also occasionally poll them to see if they are feeling the same benefits that I’m seeing.
- When I polled 63 facilities maintenance staff in March of 2023, 56% of them said they were learning more with Blank Slate than with previous learning platforms.
- When I polled 15 nurses in November of 2023, they had been using Blank Slate for six weeks and were already 19% more confident in their ability to prevent patient falls than when they started using the app.
- When I polled 75 aviation staff in July of 2024, 80% of them said that using Blank Slate was helping “a lot” or “a ton” with helping them prepare for a promotion exam.
In addition to people self-reporting their love of Blank Slate, I’ve seen a number of clients show measurable improvements as a result of using the platform.
- The nurses who felt more confident after using Blank Slate also were more likely to adhere to the fall-prevention protocols in their wards.
- Paramedic trainees who used Blank Slate were more likely to pass a test of their applied skills.
- People diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease were more likely to remember the names of familiar faces after using Blank Slate for just one month.
In all of those examples, Blank Slate has gone beyond helping the people who use it to positively impact the people around them.
Truth 2: Blank Slate works quickly
I’ve talked about it before so I’ll be brief. When people start using Blank Slate their learning curve is steep — they master (or re-master) their knowledge very quickly.
Here’s just one fun statistic from a dataset of 880,000 user engagements across 19 clients: By the time a Blank Slate user has answered a question just three times, they average a 10 percentage-point improvement in their knowledge accuracy: from 77% to 87%. This is the equivalent of moving from a C+ to a B+ letter grade. And as you’ll see in the graph below, it only gets better from there.
Truth 3: Blank Slate helps people work quickly
This one is true in a few different ways.
First, using the Blank Slate app itself is a quick process, much faster than many traditional learning and training platforms that require extensive reading, video watching, and quizzing. Given that maintaining workplace expertise is part of one’s job, Blank Slate helps people get that part of their work done quickly. Digging into our master datafile of all user engagements, users only spent an average of 11 seconds answering each Blank Slate question and an average of 2 minutes 13 seconds on each Blank Slate session. It’s a remarkably small time investment for the wealth of knowledge that people are able to consistently maintain.
The second way that Blank Slate helps people work quickly is by training fast recall of knowledge. As you’ll see in the graph below, people who use Blank Slate become significantly faster at remembering critical information after just a few app engagements. In this sense, Blank Slate helps people work more quickly because they can recall and apply their knowledge more rapidly on the job.
Last, another trend I’ve seen when polling our users is that an overwhelming majority of people who use Blank Slate are content with the amount of time the platform requires. I occasionally poll our users with, “What are your thoughts on how much time it takes to complete a Blank Slate session?” with the option to answer Too little, About right, or Too much. Here are the results from a few of these polls:
- In March of 2023, 57 out of 63 (90%) of facilities maintenance staff chose “About right.”
- In September of 2023, 131 of 159 (82%) of police officers and building security officers chose “About right.”
- In July of 2024, 59 out of 74 (80%) of aviation staff chose “About right.”
Not only does the Blank Slate platform improve the speed with which people can recall their workplace knowledge, but our diverse user base feels like the platform is not taking up too much of their time. This is an amazing feat for any mandatory workplace training platform.
A tool for everyone
These three truths are universal in the sense that they appear in every Blank Slate dataset, but they are also universal in the sense that they seem to apply to every person across every walk of life. What do college students, tour guides, police officers, pilots, and people with Alzheimer’s disease have in common? They all benefit from using Blank Slate.
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Amy Smith, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer, Blank Slate Technologies
