Apple has had some memorable ads over the years, the 1984 Super Bowl ad for the original Macintosh of course being the most famous. But the Think Different ad was probably my favorite of all. Not because it pushes any particular product, but because it celebrates a particular mentality: that of using bold, unconventional, creative thinking to push the world forward while most are content to let it stay right where it is.

Are we doing this in the eLearning world? Are we questioning current convention – including popular theory and common academic argument? Are we challenging policy, even at the often very personal risk of managerial disapproval? Are we pushing against the status quo, or are we settling for the “Well, what can one person do?” attitude? Are we fighting for change? Are we thinking differently?

If not, shouldn’t we be?

I’m a gadget freak. I’ll admit it. And my favorite gadget of all time is my Apple iPhone. Period. Frankly, it’s the device I’ve been waiting for these many years (and through one tragically horrible cell phone or PDA after another (may you rot in Heck, miserable, despised little Sony-Ericsson T610, bane of my pre-iPhone life)).

Is it wrong to be deeply in love with a handful of glass, chrome, aluminum, silicon and plastic? Perhaps. But I don’t care. It’s real, baby, even if you don’t understand it. We have something…special.

OK, I’m veering off course now. Correcting…

Even if you’re not a gadget freak, you’ve probably heard that Apple recently announced its second version of the iPhone. Cheaper, faster, GPS inside, yada yada. Yes, it will be cool. Yes, I will be buying one. As will a bajillion other members of the horrible-gadget-oppressed masses.

But the bigger news to me does not involve the hardware, but the software (which applies to the current iPhone as well). A couple of months ago Apple announced the App Store, which will feature 3rd party software offerings for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The App Store will provide a convenient (if restrictive) way to browse and purchase (or download for free), directly from the iPhone/iPod itself, what I expect to be a mostly-stellar offering of touchscreen-based applications.

Will eLearning applications be among them? Heck yes they will!

Modality Learning announced (onstage at the Stevenote, no less) several apps that will be available when the App Store launches, including Brain Quest for kids, a variety of educational apps for medical students (as seen in the image at the top of this post), and Frommer’s travel guides.

Expect an avalanche of other educational software to follow from other developers.

The eLearning potential for that big, beautiful, buttery smooth touchscreen you can carry anywhere is so enormous, it makes me hyper like a 3rd grader hopped up on Sugar Smacks. Wait, I’m always that hyper. But I digress…

Will Apple be the ones to finally put legitimate eLearning in our pockets? My money says yes. Hey, it’s not a smart move to bet against El Jobso these days. And heaven knows no other pocketable device thus far has given mobile eLearning real legs.

I can’t wait to see the possibilities. And, perhaps, create some of my own.

The future of mobile eLearning truly begins July 11. Mark your calendars.

Now, who is going to step up to the plate and develop a great eLearning authoring tool for the iPhone? Since my favorite eLearning software company is beholden to Microsoft PowerPoint (the Windows version only, no less) and Adobe Flash – neither of which are currently allowed to play in the iPhone Garden – is another contender ready to bring the goods?

Then Guy Kawasaki (I’m a big fan!) has to go and argue that If You Want Customers to Be Happy, Give Them Less Product Information.

Sounds good. Whoa, wait…huh???

OK, to be fair, Guy isn’t really making this argument as much as he’s simply reporting the findings of a Tippie College of Business study that appear to indicate that ignorance is bliss when it comes to inducing consumer joy. Less information = more happy.

The results of this study make absolutely no sense to the rational mind, until you find out that Tippie conducted its study using chocolate and hand lotion as its products in question.

Chocolate and hand lotion???

Fine. Great. I don’t really want a detailed list of ingredients when I see an ad for chocolate. But do I want to know how an iPhone works? That a Chevy truck can pull an entire train? Why a Mac (and not that dull, spreadsheet-spewing PC) is the computer for me? You better believe I do!

I stand by my argument that product selling (and maintaining satisfaction after the sale) in the future is going to involve a lot more teaching. And that the line between marketing and eLearning is increasingly going to blur. We’re seeing a lot of that already.

And if I were a betting man, I would wager that Guy Kawasaki would agree.

Chocolate and lotion being the obvious exceptions.

As for the Tippie College of Business – I think you folks and your chocolaty lotion study need a do-over. Seriously. Try picking something a little more…relevant?

In a previous post, I talked about the increasing push by companies to use eLearning to teach their customers how to use their products (An Educated Customer Is a Happy (and Loyal) Customer) via online tutorials, thus increasing sales and customer loyalty while reducing support costs.

In another post, I argued that eLearning is really no more than the art of selling (Deliver eLearning Like Steve Jobs). Or at least it should be.

Apple illustrates both these points with their iPhone television commercials, which sell the customer on the virtues of the product by actually teaching them how to use the thing. All in impossibly-short 30-second segments.

So while Apple continues to educate its customers (and potential customers) via online tutorials, like its Top Finger Tips series:

it’s also taking its eLearning assault to prime-time television. So you didn’t only watch Lost tonight, you also learned how to do car buying research on your iPhone.

Or on the iPhone you don’t have but suddenly really, really want.

Brilliant.

Addendum: check Michelle Gallen’s post on Howcast.com – a new online instructional video channel.

eLearning, E-Learning, ELearning, e-learning, e-Learning, elearning (did I miss any?) – when will we all come to a consensus? We need a First Council of Nicaea for eLearning where we vote once and for all on a spelling we can all live with. Trying to load a page with the appropriate keywords for the search engine crawlers is a royal pain. And I can’t even seem to stay consistent in my own writing.

Jay Cross thought the term, regardless of how you spell it, had picked up too much bad baggage and had become dated. And that was in 2002!

I agree with Jay that we’ve probably permanently damaged the brand due to many years of horrible eLearning (which, sadly, continues today), but let’s face it, the term itself is probably here to stay. Do you think the word email is going to go away anytime soon?

Speaking of which, many used to call it e-mail. And some still do (dinosaurs!). Drat, so much for finding a solution in precedent.

And what would work better anyway? Learning 2.0? Ugh.

Learning in the electronic age is becoming so hard to define.

Or why try labeling 21st century learning at all when you can just take the scattergun approach? The department I work in is officially called Learning & Education. I’m not kidding. Talk about covering all your bases.

We’re directly under the Department of Redundancy Department on the corporate org chart.

But I digress. Since Jay was allegedly the first to use it on the Web, I’m going with eLearning. No hyphen = faster to type. Small e + large L = a little bit of flair. Makes for nicer logos.

You say tomayto, I’ll say tomahto. Until the Council gathers, anyway.

Addendum: apparently I’m not alone in my confusion. The eLearning Guild spells it e-Learning exclusively on their website, despite their brand name. And why does the eLearning Guild use the term eBooks and not e-Books when they use e-Learning and not eLearning?

Oh, the chaos…

I am, you could say, a bit of a Steve Jobs fan. Yes, the guy is infamously arrogant and well-known to be a real tyrant to work for. No, I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with him for a weekend (lunch maybe). And I certainly don’t have thick enough skin to work for him. The man has his flaws (as do we all).

But if anyone knows the importance of visual design, of a flair for the dramatic, of deep, human emotional appeal in a product, it’s Steve Jobs. He takes what traditionally are drab, soulless tools (the computer, the MP3 player, software) and turns them into something you desperately want. And something you desperately love once you get them.

Steve “gets it.”

And not only is Steve Jobs renowned for the products his company creates, but for his mesmerizing presentation skills as well. Watching a Bill Gates presentation is painful, awkward, slightly embarrassing (and that’s not even factoring in his hideously-designed slides). Watching Steve Jobs present is watching a true showman who has mastered the art of crowd pleasing. As many of you may know, Steve’s effect is so powerful, it has been given its own name: The Reality Distortion Field (RDF).

(”What does this have to do with eLearning,” you cry? Why, everything. Which I’ll get to in a moment. Bear with me.)

Carmine Gallo of BusinessWeek recognizes the power of the RDF, and coaches us on “wowing your audience” in his recent article, Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs.

Garr Reynolds, purveyor extraordinaire of one of my favorite blogs, Presentation Zen, examines the power of the Steve Jobs presentation in Gates, Jobs, & the Zen Aesthetic.

Tom Kuhlmann, from my favorite eLearning blog The Rapid E-Learning Blog, takes Garr’s praise of a Steve Jobs presentation and applies it to eLearning design in What Steve Jobs Can Teach You About Designing E-Learning.

Now, I won’t get into detail about the virtues of Steve Jobs’ presentation style and how you can apply it to eLearning, as Carmine, Garr and Tom do a perfectly fine job of that (so please read the above-linked articles!), but ultimately the point I want to make is this:eLearning is selling.

You’re selling ideas – information – applied knowledge to your learner. And your learner can buy what it is you’re selling (thus learn from it), or reject it, defeating the purpose of your eLearning course entirely. An eLearning course, like a presentation, is ultimately a sales pitch, is it not?

Visual design and emotional appeal are the critical elements to helping you make that sale. As a learner, I can often tell by the first screen or two of an eLearning course that “I ain’t buying.” And once I’ve made that subconscious decision, I’ve begun the beat-the-clock exercise of clicking the Next Page button until I reach the course completion screen. (And don’t tell me you haven’t been there too.)

Can you sell your eLearning to your learner? If you can’t, you might as well just give up and move on to a different line of work. Because there isn’t going to be much learning going on.

But hold on, don’t start typing your letter of resignation yet: all hope is not lost. You can change. You can make your eLearning into something your learners embrace, truly enjoy, buy into, learn from.

So what are you waiting for? Get going! A good place to start: the articles mentioned in this post.

About the photo: Steve Jobs doing what he does best during the Macworld keynote address (January 2008), this time introducing the new MacBook Air, a laptop so thin you can slip it into a manilla envelope. Of course at this point in the presentation, you don’t really know what’s in the manilla envelope. You just know you want it. Badly.

And guess what Steve has in the manilla envelope he’s holding…

In my earlier post Adobe Video Workshop: Adobe Teaches You Adobe, I said I believed the next big wave of eLearning would be companies teaching their customers how to use their products.

I was wrong.

The current big wave of eLearning involves companies teaching their customers how to use their products.

And companies who aren’t teaching their customers how to use their products are losing sales, customer loyalty, money needlessly spent on excessive customer support, and respectability.

The day will come when you will be able to hop online and watch a video tutorial on how to do everything from changing the filter on your vacuum cleaner to installing a new headlamp in your car to navigating the menu system on your fancy new plasma television. And not low-quality YouTube videos hacked together by enthusiastic (and altruistic) customers for the lack of anything better, but professionally-created multimedia learning materials provided on the manufacturer’s website.

Forget cryptic, badly-translated user manuals that do little more than befuddle and frustrate. We want video demonstrations. We want animated diagrams. We want narrated step-by-step instructions. With photos.

Anything less just won’t be good enough. And companies who can’t provide this, just like companies who can’t be bothered with creating a decent website to represent their business, just won’t be taken seriously.

Panic, much-loved Mac software developers (and visual design geniuses), get this. They’ve provided video tutorials for their new Web development app, Coda.

Adobe gets this.

Many other companies get this. Or are starting to get this.

Does your company get this? How about the companies you buy products from?

Isn’t it time they do?

Addendum:

Apple continues the customer/learner lovin’ with its Find Out How tutorials:

Good stuff for all you eLearning developers out there thinking about a switch to Mac (or a switch to Mac + Virtualized Windows, like I run).

I know you’re out there…

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.