Great eLearning and a Great Steak

January 14, 2008

There are many in the eLearning development community who feel that good visual design is immaterial to eLearning design. How do I know this? Because I’ve experienced so much eLearning with horrific visual design.

Now I can guess what many of you are thinking – that I’ve been suckered by the Delicious Generation, where style trumps substance and glitz compensates for vapidity. This is not the case. We all know content is king, and I am in no way arguing that a shiny package and a beautiful bow can turn a box of rocks into a gift worth giving. What I am arguing is that art and intellect are not mutually exclusive but are in fact two halves of the same whole. And by “art” don’t think I simply mean “pretty.” There are many facets of good visual design, attractiveness being just one. What about intuitiveness?

Take the following navigational schemes. One from an Articulate Presenter-authored course, and the other created using our corporate Learning Content Management System:

I would argue that the Articulate controls are not only vastly more appealing to the eye, but more intuitive as well – both easier to understand and more visually distinctive from the other navigational elements on the screen. What adult learner doesn’t understand the play, forward, and reverse buttons and their corresponding symbols? Yet we treat these details as inconsequential as we design our eLearning content. This should not be.

The biggest challenge we face as eLearning developers is converting learners to our new religion, which proclaims that elearning really is just as good as classroom learning. And as eLearning developers, we really do believe it. So all we have to do is make the sale. To a very skeptical, stubborn, and resistant customer. And a tough sell it is, to be sure.

So if content is king (which it is), can’t we just deliver the content to them and call it a day? Why waste time (and money!) trying to pretty it up? As long as we’re presenting the content, strictly adhering to our adult learning methodologies, they should eat this stuff up, right?

Um, no.

Let’s illustrate the importance of visual design with a Lame Analogy. Let’s say you have a protein-deprived lifelong vegetarian friend you are trying to introduce to the joy of a good steak. Obviously, steak is about meat. Pure, juicy, red-blooded beast-stuff. Simple enough. Yet completely foreign (and repellant) to your vegetarian friend. You have quite a challenge ahead of you.

Now which of the two steaks below would you use to try to entice your friend?

I assume the preference will be overwhelmingly for the latter. But why? Aren’t they both just steak? I mean, who cares what it looks like as long as you’re getting the meat, right? Isn’t the lovingly cooked and prepared, beautifully presented steak composed of the same basic element as the raw slab? Of course. But presentation makes all the difference. One who thinks this principle doesn’t apply to eLearning is doomed to a very hard sell indeed.

As a learner, which of these courses do you want to check out?

With a little thought, a little love, a little creativity, we can create eLearning that not only educates, but delights as well. Learning, you see, is not just in the content, but in the presentation as well.

Visual design matters. In eLearning. In everything.

Posted in Evangelism, eLearning Design