Does ‘Design thinking’ lead to bad learning design?

Fads come and go, and ‘Design Thinking’ seems to be one on the rise at the moment. It’s a process with lots of variants but, in the talks I’ve seen on the subject, and the results I’ve seen emerge from the process, I’m not wholly convinced. The problem is that we may well need less ‘design’ and more ‘thinking’.  The combination is likely to dumb down the learning in favour of superficial design. Imagine applying this theory to medicine. You wouldn’t get far by simply asking patients what they need to cure their problems, you need a growing body of good research tried and tested methods, and expertise. So let’s break the Design Thinking process down to see how it works in practice and examine the steps one by one.

Empathise

Donald Norman, in Design Thinking though that empathy in design was wrong-headed, a waste of time and energy and that the designers time would be better spent understanding the task. He is right. It is a conceit.

Donald Norman says, of this call for empathy in design, that “the concept is impossible, and even if possible, wrong”. I was seeing empathy used in pieces that actually mentioned Norman as one of their heroes! Yet here he was saying it was wrong-headed. He is absolutely right. There is no way you can put yourself into the heads of the hundreds, thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of learners. As Norman says “It sounds wonderful but the search for empathy is simply misled.” Not only is it not possible to understand individuals in this way, it is just not that useful.

It is not empathy but data you need. Who are these people, what do they need to actually do and how can we help them. As people they will be hugely variable but what they need to know and do, in order to achieve a goal, is relatively stable. This has little to do with empathy and a lot to do with understanding and reason.
All too often we latch on to a noun in the learning world without thinking much about what it actually means, what experts in the field say about it and bandy it about as though it were a certain truth. This is the opposite of showing empathy. It is the rather empty use of language.

Empathy for the learner is an obvious virtue but what exactly does that mean? For years, in practice, this meant Learning Styles. For many it still is Learning Styles, being sensitive to learner’s differences, diversity and needs in terms of preferences. This, of course has been a disastrous waste of time, as research has shown. Other faddish outcomes over-sensitive to supposed learner needs have been Myers-Briggs, NLP and no end of faddish ideas about what we ‘think’ learners need, rather than what research tells us they actually benefit from.

Research in cognitive psychology has given us clear evidence that learners are often mistaken when it comes to judgements about their own learning. Bjork, along with many other high quality researchers, have shown that learning is “quite misunderstood (by learners)…. we have a flawed model of how we learn and remember”. There’s often a negative correlation between people’s judgements of their learning, what they think they have learnt, how they think they learn best - and what they’ve ‘actually’ learnt and the way they can ‘actually’ optimise their learning. In short, our own perceptions of learning are seriously delusional. This is why engagement, fun, learner surveys and happy sheets are such bad measures of what is actually learnt and the enemy of optimal learning strategies. In short, empathy and asking learners what they want can seriously damage design.
In truth replacing a good needs analysis, including a thorough understanding of your target audience is not bettered by calling it empathy. That is simply replacing analysis with an abstract word to make it sound more in tune with the times.

Define

Identifying learner needs and problems has led to a ton of wasteful energy spent on slicing them up into digital natives/immigrants and personas that often average out differentiation and personalisation. The solution is not to identify ideal learners as personas but provide sophisticated pedagogic approaches that are adaptive and provide personal feedback. Design thinking makes the mistake of thinking there is such a thing as ideal learners without realising that you need analysis of the target audience, not ‘averaged out’ personas.

Design Thinking seems to push people towards thinking that learning problems are ‘design’ problems. Many are not. You need top understand the nature of the cognitive problems and researched solutions to those problems. By all means define the problems but those problems but know what a learning problem is.

One area, however, where I think design thinking could be useful is in identifying the context, workflow and moments of need. So, understanding the learner’s world, their business environment. That’s fine. On this I agree, But I rarely hear this from practising ‘Design Thinking’ practitioners, who tend to focus on the screen design itself, rather than design of a blended learning experience, based on the types of learning to be delivered in real environments, in the workflow with performance support. You need a deep understanding of the technology and its limitations.
There is also an argument for having a compete set of skills on the team but this has nothing to do with design thinking. The delivery of online learning is a complex mix of learning, design, technical, business and fiscal challenges. What's needed is balance in the team not a process that values an abstract method with a focus on 'design' alone.

Ideate

This is the key step, where design thinkers are supposed to provide challenge and creative solutions. It is the step where it can all go wrong. Creative solutions tend to be based on media delivery, not effortful learning, chunking, interleaving, open input, spaced practice and many other deeper pedagogic issues that need to be understood before you design anything. There’s often a dearth of knowledge about the decades of research in learning and cognitive science that should inform design. It is replaced by rather superficial ideas around media production and presentation, hence the edutainment we get, all ‘tainment’ and no ‘edu’. It focuses on presentation not effortful learning.

Few design thinkers I’ve heard show much knowledge of designing for cognitive load, avoiding redundancy and have scant knowledge of the piles of brilliant work done by Nass, Reeves, Mayer, Clark, Roediger, MacDaniel and many other researchers who have worked for decades uncovering what good online learning design requires. This is also why co-design is so dangerous. It leads to easy learning, all front and no depth.

What I’ve seen is lots of ‘ideation’ around gamification (but the trivial, Pavlovian aspects of games - scoring, badges and leaderboards). Even worse is the over-designed, media rich, click-through learning, loosely punctuated by multiple-choice questions. Remember that media rich does not mean mind-rich. Even then, designers rarely know the basic research, for example, on the optimal number of options in MCQs or that open input is superior.

Protoype

It is easy to prototype surface designs and get voiced feedback on what people like but this is a tiny part of the story. It is pointless prototyping learning solutions in the hope that you’ll uncover real learning efficacy (as opposed to look and feel) without evaluating those different solutions. This means the tricky and inconvenient business of real research, with controls, reasonable sample sizes, randomly selected learners and clear measurement of retention in long-term memory, even transfer. Few with just ‘Design Thinking’ skills have the skills, time and budget to do this. This is why we must rely on past research and build on this body of knowledge, just as clinicians do in medicine. We need to be aware of the work of Bjork, Roediger, Karpicke, Heustler and Metcalfe, who show that asking learners what they think is counterproductive. And build on the research that shows what techniques work for high retention.

A problem is that prototyping is often defined by the primitive tools used by learning designers, that can only produce presentation-like, souped-up Powerpoint and MCQs, whereas real learning requires much deeper structures. Few have made the effort to explore tools that allow open input and free text input, which really does increase retention and recall. Low fidelity prototyping won’t hack it if you want open input and sophisticated adaptive and personalised learning through AI – and that’s where things are heading.

One area that Design Thinking can help is with the ‘user interface’ but this is only one part of the deliverable and often not that important. It is important to make it as frictionless as possible but this comes as much through technical advances, touchscreen, voice, open input, than design.

Test

Testing is a complex business. I used to run a large online learning test lab – the largest in the UK. We tested for usability, accessibility, quality assurance and technical conformance and, believe me, to focus just on ‘design’ is a big mistake. You need to focus not on surface design but, more importantly, on all sorts of things, such as learning efficacy. Once again, learner testimony can help but it can also hinder. Learners often report illusory learning when they are presented with high quality media – this means absolutely nothing. Testing is pointless if you’re not testing the real goal – actual retained learning. Asking people for qualitative opinions does not do that.
In truth testing is quite tricky. You have to be clear about what you are testing, cover everything and have good reporting. There are tried and tested methods, that few have ever studied, so this is a really weak link. Just shoving something under the nose of a learner is not enough. We found early on that it is a short number of iterations with an expert that really works with interface design, along with A/B testing. Not some simple suck it and see trial.

Conclusion

I've heard several presentations on this and done the reading but my reaction is still the same. Is that it? It seems like a short-circuited version of a poor, project management course. I honestly think that the danger of ‘Design Thinking’ is that it holds us back.  We’ve had this for several years now, where design trumps deep thinking, knowledge of how we learn, knowledge of cognitive overload and knowledge of optimal learning strategies. It gives us the illusion of creativity but at the expense of sound learning. Walk around any large online learning exhibition and observe the output – over-engineered design that lacks depth. Design thinking lures us into thinking that we have solved learning problems when all we have done is polish presentation. The real innovations I’ve seen come from a deep understanding of the research, technology and innovative solutions based on that research, like nudge learning and WildFire. Delivery, I think, is better rooted in strong practices, such as ISO standards and practices guided by evidence, which have evolved over time and not simplistic processes that are often simplified further and sold as bromides. As one commentator, who tried Design Thinking, said "we ended up doing nothing more than polishing turds!".

Emotion in Learning Experience Design - Norman's 3 facets; Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective...

Our lives would be impoverished without positive emotions such as fun, pleasure, joy, excitement; but also middling emotions of satisfaction, calmness, boredom; even negative emotions such as anger, sadness, melancholy and fear. They are ever-present and part of what it is to be human.

One facet of Learning Experience Design is to make the effort to engage the learner by injecting emotion into the experience. This does not mean blind emotion. Over-stimulation can be a bad thing in learning. The right kind of emotion is what helps learning, as this affective dimension can motivate the learner and aid retention. It is a matter of designing for both head and heart. It would be fair to say that most of what is written about learning design has a focus on cognition and understanding, whereas much of what drives us is feeling and emotion.

Some, like Jack Quatrell, at Learning Pool, literally say that Experience Design differs from more traditional design in being Emotional Design. He invokes Donald Norman, which is a good starting point, who in Emotional Design, broke emotional design down into three components:

Visceral (appearance)

Behavioural (performance)

Reflective (memories and experience)

Visceral (appearance)

This is the automatic, unconscious reaction we have to experiences. It is what Kahneman refers to as System 1 thinking in Thinking Fast and Slow. These reactions are fast, immediate without reflection. 

Branding and general art direction speak directly to these feelings. One practical shortcut is to copy and mimic the organisations branding guidelines, in terms of palette, font, general art direction and practices. Some organisations are very keen to get their branding and values reinforced in training. For Virgin, we implemented very strong branding across course from Values to Aircraft Maintenance, with their exact tones of red and fonts. This gives the training a visual and emotional organisational context.

An alternative is to match the branding and art direction to the topic being taught. It may be that a course on interpersonal skills will have to feel warm and friendly, whereas a course on process and procedures may need to be cool, crisp and procedural. If it is a serious scientific, financial or healthcare organisation, dealing with serious issue such as laboratory procedures, money laundering or cancer therapy, then casual cartoons may not be appropriate. Real world imagery and photography may create the right first impressions for such learning. 

Gestalt theorists have also identified this as the instant reaction to an interface or experience, rather than its components or mechanics. Gestalt principles are similar to many of the findings of researchers like Mayer in online learning; proximity, similarity, figure-ground, continuity, closure, and connection. The Gestalt Law of Proximity is often quoted in interface design and states that items close to each other are perceived as groups. This matters when you want to group navigation items (forward, back etc) separately from functional items (print, zoom etc). The Gestalt Law of Similarity states that items similar to each other will be grouped by the user. This can be used generally in interface and visual design. The Law of Figure-Ground is also important, where we see figure-ground effects

Much of this can be tested with real users in getting voiced reactions to specific questions on designs. So, keep in mind the visceral reaction of your target audience, not you the designer.

Behavioural (performance)

This is about emotion and feelings around actual use or usability. How easy is it to use in terms of speed of recognition, understanding and not making errors. Are navigational items in the optimal order? Are the icons clear? Are they big enough for smartphone touchscreens? Do they react when pressed to give feedback? Are they placed consistently in the same place on the screen? There is a massive amount of good practice in interface design around usability. It is vital that the interface is a simple, consistent, predictable and easy to use as possible, as time and cognitive effort spent on the interface detracts from the cognitive effort needed to learn.

There is also a large amount of established good practice around visual design of text, graphics, animation, audio and video. We know a lot about the different affordances of different media, and how to mix them, without inducing cognitive overload. The trick is to get the best out of each medium and media mix. 

Just as importantly, is the good practice around learning, which is often very different from other forms of screen presentation, such as the need for chunking, cues, repetition, summaries and so on. Cognitive overload is common in badly designed learning content, so a knowledge of good learning theory informs the behavioural side of design.

What you get learners to DO is also really important, as that is likely to be more powerful than what they see or hear. This is where experience design needs to include interaction with the mind, beyond just clicking on items to navigate or see pop-ups. Cognitive effort matters - a lot!  We must be very careful here. It is all too easy to make learning too easy. Without challenge, difficulty and cognitive effort, you will not have the deep processing necessary for learnt knowledge, skills and behaviour to stick. The learner will skate over the surface, thinking they have been learning, when, in fact, those experiences have been transitory. This illusory sense of learning is common and is reinforced when things feel easy. It is easy to watch a video and not realise that much of what you have just watched has left your memory before you have finished watching the entire video. It stays in working memory but never gets processed into long-term memory, so disappears. Interestingly what makes you feel as though you have learnt things is just those ‘feelings and emotions’. In this case emotion is our enemy, our greatest danger. This transitory effect is well-researched, real, common and measurable. Learning needs to be effortful.

Inducing emotion may be ideal when you want attitudinal shift in diversity, equality and other belief shift or self-awareness training but can be dangerous in non-affective training, where it can induce the illusion of learning. So, keep in mind the behavioural reaction of your target audience, not just what you the designer likes or may be familiar with.

Reflective (memories and experience)

This is an important set of feelings in learning, that you can rationalise, reflect, reinforce, recall and apply your learning. This is what Kahneman called System 2 thinking, the rational, reasoning side of the brain. We have feelings of achievement, success, confidence or having overcome difficulties in a learning experience that really do matter. It can be those feelings around having got there, not because you found it easy but realising that it was hard.

This is complex and involves much more than just getting a score on the assessment, although that can be an important feeling of success. Hence the frequent request to provide printed certificates for learners, even though they have no serious accreditation body behind them. It is similar to the status people attach to watches, handbags and branded clothes. You can be made to feel better by going through learning experiences that give you feelings of success and status.

Challenging cognitive effort can propel the learner forward and make them feel as though they really are making progress. Feedback is also a powerful accelerator of learning, so personalising learning and feedback can move things forward making the learner feel good about themselves.

One important facet of reflective feeling comes through the follow-up, actually doing something. This can be triggered by nudge learning, so that the learner gets their kicks through going back to their job and actually implementing a challenge, such as mentoring a younger employee or using those features in a spreadsheet. Satisfaction with real-world application of learning can bring high levels of satisfaction and accomplishment.

It is easy to forget that one learns for a reason, ultimately to apply that knowledge, so the transfer through to action really does matter. This is often quietly forgotten in online learning but as technology increasingly allows us to learn in the workflow, it is becoming more of a reality.

This can be tested through stickability of the learning experiences but also real assessment, not only of short-term accomplishment but long-term retention.

Conclusion

Interestingly, Norman thought Americans value Behavioural more than the Visceral & Reflective, whereas Europeans, tend to value the Visceral and Behavioural. This is fascinating. He claims that different people buy things with different fuel mixtures of the three types of emotions. This may well be true in learning and having delivered online learning in many different geographies and cultures, I think it is. These differences are real but the differences are getting less, as there is a global spread of online services, such as Google, social media, Wikipedia and Netflix which are now universal, but it is important to be aware of cultural differentials. 

So there are three levels of emotional or affective experience design. The visceral is that first impression, the overall and holistic feel of the experience. The behavioural comes from using the product both in navigation but also functionality and, importantly, in actual effortful, learning experiences. The reflective are those more rational and conscious feelings around achievement and success in learning. Beyond Norman, there are also other cognitive feelings around aesthetics, beauty, layout, space, colour and simplicity in design, that also count.

It is vital that we don’t just invoke emotions and feelings just for the sake of doing so. They matter in terms of engagement, stickiness but they must also be compatible with the actual acquisition of knowledge, skills and behaviour. Retention does matter, not just the feeling you have learned but the fact that you really did learn. Kahneman is right to remind us of the existence of fast and slow ways of thinking but he also warns us against the bias and mistakes that emotional and instinctive thinking brings in its wake. 

Bibliography

Norman, D.A., 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Civitas Books.

Kahneman, D. and Patrick, E., 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. Allen Lane.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/gestalt-principles-of-form-perception

Miller, G., 2009. Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior. Penguin.

Shackleton-Jones - Resources not courses

Attended a Quaker school, studied Philosophy & Psychology, studied in the US for a year and did a masters in Continental Philosophy. He has worked for several consultancies, the BBC, BP and PA Consulting. His background is in philosophy, which has heavily influenced his views of thinking and learning. Rejecting the Platonic and Cartesian reason vs emotion dualism and their view of rationality as connecting us to the divine, he sees philosophers such as Heidegger and Nietzsche as providing a more authentic basis for understanding thinking and learning.

Learning as an affective process

Running counter to academic and traditional views of learning How People Learn (2019) presents ‘affective context’ theory of learning as a first general theory of learning, i.e. one that applies equally to human and non-human learning, encompassing behaviourist, cognitive and contemporary neuroscientific accounts (e.g. Damasio, Immordino-Yang, Panksepp). He defines learning as a ‘change in behaviour or capability as a result of memory’ and ‘memory as ‘a stored affective response to an experience, sufficient for it to be reconstructed’.

When we learn we are storing a complex pattern of emotional responses to our experience, which in turn modify our behaviour. As we grow, we develop idiosyncratic ways of reacting to the world, depending on those things that matter to us (e.g. architecture vs flora) and these concerns in turn determine how we react and define us as individuals. In designing learning, if we fail to relate the content to what actually matters to people, as opposed to what we assume matters, learning interventions will fail. One must care to learn and surface the cares of learners when designing learning, so Shackleton Jones recommends that we first map the concerns of the audience, arguing that learning design should be user-centred in this sense.

His view of learning is that since all content is filtered and subsequently encoded via the individual’s emotional reaction to it, it is essential to understand what matters to them in predicting what will be stored. This is not merely a question of motivation, since there are many things that humans tend to react to (e.g. having a marshmallow thrown at them) that are not a matter of motivation in the usual sense.

This relentless focus on the reactions and motivations (different things) of the learner matters. What is it that really matters to them?

To find out what they do and just as importantly their interests, problems and concerns, one must speak to actual learners. This user analysis is not only useful, it is essential.

Affective Context Model

He thinks that it is almost impossible to understand learning as a purely affective process, so deeply are we wedded to the thinking/feeling (or reason/emotion) dualism that we have inherited from Plato and Descartes, and which we now see reflected in the work of Kahneman, Haidt and Dennett. In sharp contrast his view is that ‘thinking is fancy feeling’, echoing Nietzsche’s ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings’. In other words all cognition is affective in nature, and as Darwin argued there is no qualitative distinction between human and non-human cognition.

Building on a rejection of rational philosophy and pointing to new directions in psychology, such as Damasio’s ideas of emotion underlying thinking, effective learning must be affective learning. Like Marsick, Gery, Cross and those who researched and explored informal learning, he recognises that what we call learning is what people get every day when they are challenged or moved. It is propelled by cares, feelings, passions and emotions.

Yet the language of learning seems uncomfortable with the language of emotion and feelings. The language of learning objectives values words like outcomes, competencies, knowing and understanding with measurable SMART objectives. Affective words are most often absent. He argues that we conflate ‘education’ with learning, the former applying to an artificial memorisation ritual that disregards learning as it takes place normally and to a large extent suppresses it.

Resources not courses

This Shackleton-Jones mantra focuses on avoiding a process that automatically includes rather abstract instructional design leading automatically towards courses. His suspicion of instructional design comes from its historical tendency to treat people as ‘blank slates’ and draw heavily on experiments involving factual recall, which in turn side-lines cares, emotions and individual differences. He sees much of it as obtuse, unhelpful, even harmful. He points to Bower & Clark’s (1969) study of the effectiveness as stories in improving recall as an example of how the affective dimension of learning is largely overlooked.

Rather than state learning objectives and work through a process of instructional design towards the creation of courses, Shackleton-Jones recommends either that we address those things that individuals already care about through the creation of resources and performance support, or that we create new cares through the process of experience design. By resources, he means the sort of approach taken in Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (2011), used to great advantage and success in aviation and medicine.

In the former we shift towards performance outcomes, systematically understanding those concerns that people have as well as the tasks and challenges they face. In creating performance support we can help people to perform by externalising knowledge and guidance. This will oftentimes reduce learning, rather than leading to it. He uses the example of the London Underground map to illustrate this point and to draw a distinction with learning content.

In the latter (experience design) we alter the individual by changing the things that they care about in order to change their behaviour and capability. Typically this is achieved by understanding what they currently care about (e.g. family) and relating this to a new set of cares (e.g. safety). This is accomplished through experience design, where the experience serves to change the individual. Examples of experience design include simulations such as those used by Nasa to train astronauts, and stories which if sufficiently moving can alter what matters to the individual.

He sees similarities between learning and marketing, for example ‘attention grabbing’ marketing campaigns that use common human motivations and personalised marketing that attempts to effect consumer behaviour through use of data about their preferences.

Learning technology

Technology can certainly reduce the need to learn. Learning in the flow of work does work, as most learning takes place as we are doing our jobs. In fact, what we actually learn is through challenges – these are the naturally occurring experiences that call for learning. Above all we must avoid dropping micro-learning into the workflow. He describes this approach as ‘content dumping’. Instead, we should design checklists and job aids that help people with the challenges they have, or present new challenges such as stretch assignments if we wish people to develop, not explicit teaching experiences.

He sees devices such as the smartphone as providing the sort of ‘at hand’ resources one actually needs in situ when learning. Sentiment analysis, a fruitful area of AI can now, to a degree, map what you care about. This is what big tech thrives upon but it can also be useful in learning.

Influence

Shackleton-Jones has long been influencing L&D through his work as a consultant, conference talks and book. Now that technology can deliver the resources (not courses) that he has always advocated, his work is being seen as an important contribution to contemporary L&D.

Bibliography

Shackleton-Jones, N., 2019. How people learn: Designing education and training that works to improve performance. Kogan Page

Gawande A. 2011., The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

Harrison N. 2008., How to be a True Business Partner by Performance Consulting

 

Krug Don’t make online learners think

Steve Krug has a background in writing computer manuals. He saw that this was not the solution to most problems and moved on into usability design. He has had a huge influence on web design through his best-selling book Don’t Make Me Think (2000). He also provided a method for quick and effective testing in his second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2009). The huge success of these books meant that user interface design was taken more seriously in terms of good practice and the need for testing with real users. Interface design, or UX design, has gained importance as part of general online learning design.

Interface design

Krug asks a simple question, ‘How do we really use the web?’ We glance, scan and muddle through. We don’t read pages, we scan them, choose the first reasonable option, and because we’re lazy, we meander through content. This is important and, if excesses in design are to be avoided, it has to be understood when designing web sites and online learning. His theory is based on real practice and positive results on real web sites. Krug’s first law of usability is to strive to make things self-evident or self-explanatory, hence the title ‘Don’t Make Me Think’.

Users and learners want the interface to be an unthinking act, easy and unobtrusive. The more they think, the more likely they are to stop and go elsewhere. Forget instructions. People don’t read them and don’t want them. He recommends that we design out the need for a tutorial or instructions.

Design recommendations

Sensitive to the needs of the internet as a medium in itself, he emphasises the importance of the Home page. This leads to reflection on the importance of the ‘Big Picture’, namely the essential purpose of the site or online learning programme. He recommends tag lines that capture the essence of a site or web experience. Mission statements he hates, as they rarely tell you the real story and usually miss the Big Picture. 

Navigation hierarchies

Taking his lead from newspapers, always an interesting source for screen design, he recommends carefully designed hierarchies. He hates navigation that breaks down when you get past the second level. The solution, he thinks, is persistent global navigation at the same position on every page with a home button and tracking. He loves fixed menus. He also makes the useful distinction between navigation, utilities (print, search and so on) and content. It is always a payoff between ‘wide and deep’ hierarchies. 

Be conventional

Following on from Norman and Nielsen, he stresses conventions. Don’t play fast and loose, make things easy and consistent. Use conventions, such as shopping carts, standard video controls and icons. This is sound advice. Conventions are more than just objects of convenience, they are part of the grammar of interface design. Designers often refuse to use conventions as they crave creativity and innovation – this, in his view, is rarely useful. Pages should also be broken up into carefully defined areas, clickable areas should be obvious and every attempt made to minimise ‘noise’, again a Mayer and Clark principle in online learning.

Half the number of words and half again

True to his belief that screen readers are different from readers of print, he has strong views on writing for the screen. Less is more and so he exhorts designers and writers to omit needless words. In his own words, “Half the number of words and half again”. 

Search

Krug was among the earliest evangelists for search on websites. Search is a window into the collective mind of your users. It tells you what people really want, look for and what is most likely missing.

Interface design in online learning

In interface design, as Steve Krug says in the title, the point is NOT to make people think. In learning, the whole point is to make people think. Yet many of his recommendations are applicable across learning experiences. His advice on drastically reducing text has been confirmed in research by Mayer and others in online learning design. The importance of search has also come to the fore in Learning Experience Platforms used for learning in the workflow.

Krug’s prescriptions are even more important in online learning than in web design, as learning’s great enemy is cognitive overload and dissonance. If learners have to work hard to understand, navigate and read online learning, they have less sustained attention for retentive learning. Most online learning, like most offline learning, is too long winded and needs to be seriously edited to avoid cognitive overload. Keep navigation simple and consistent, use de facto conventions, avoid deep hierarchies and write for the screen not the page. And don’t forget to test – a few iterations with experts.

Usability testing

His second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, shows how to do modest, low budget testing. His starting point is that designers can’t see the mistakes they make as they get too close to the design and as the navigation has come from their own heads, they lack objectivity. You need other fingers and eyeballs, guided by experts, using voiced testimonies. 

Krug, like Norman and Nielsen, is a strong believer in a specific form of usability testing. Following Nielsen and Landauer he takes the view that a few good, experienced testers and a few iterations are all you need. Forget the large-scale focus groups and massive testing, which suffer from the law of diminishing returns. His practical experience shows that just one, or a few testers early on are more effective than a large number at the end. 

He recommends evidence gathering with a camcorder and facilitator who asks questions and gives tasks, especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you probe the user for their understanding of the point of the experience, how it works and how it is organised. The point of the facilitator is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at but what they’re thinking. Listen, keep an open mind and take lots of notes.

An underlying point, made many years before by Dewey and Heidegger is that technologies work best when they hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology is at its best when it is invisible. This is the consistent theme in all good usability theorists and practitioners. The task of the designer, to make the delivery mechanism as invisible as possible.

Krug understands the different roles of specialists in design teams and the tensions that arise between them. His solution is to objectify the debate through testing, not with the mythical average user, but with real users. His is a useful, practical and prescriptive approach to good usability through good design.

Influence

Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think has sold over 600,000 copies. Rather than depend on academic literature, this popular book, in a sense he practices what he preaches. It is readable and does exactly what the user expects, give concrete advice on design and testing. As user design has grown as a practice Krug’s work is still relevant for its lasting recommendations.

Bibliography

Krug, S., 2009. Rocket surgery made easy: The do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. New Riders.

Krug, S., 2000. Don't make me think!: a common sense approach to Web usability. New Riders.

Krug Don't make us think

Steve Krug has a background in writing computer manuals. He saw that this was not the solution to most problems and moved on into usability design. He has had a huge influence on web design through his best-selling book Don’t Make Me Think (2000). He also provided a method for quick and effective testing in his second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2009). The huge success of these books meant that user interface design was taken more seriously in terms of good practice and the need for testing with real users. Interface design, or UX design, has gained importance as part of general online learning design.

Interface design

Krug asks a simple question, ‘How do we really use the web?’ We glance, scan and muddle through. We don’t read pages, we scan them, choose the first reasonable option, and because we’re lazy, we meander through content. This is important and, if excesses in design are to be avoided, it has to be understood when designing web sites and online learning. His theory is based on real practice and positive results on real web sites. Krug’s first law of usability is to strive to make things self-evident or self-explanatory, hence the title ‘Don’t Make Me Think’.

Users and learners want the interface to be an unthinking act, easy and unobtrusive. The more they think, the more likely they are to stop and go elsewhere. Forget instructions. People don’t read them and don’t want them. He recommends that we design out the need for a tutorial or instructions.

Design recommendations

Sensitive to the needs of the internet as a medium in itself, he emphasises the importance of the Home page. This leads to reflection on the importance of the ‘Big Picture’, namely the essential purpose of the site or online learning programme. He recommends tag lines that capture the essence of a site or web experience. Mission statements he hates, as they rarely tell you the real story and usually miss the Big Picture. 

Navigation hierarchies

Taking his lead from newspapers, always an interesting source for screen design, he recommends carefully designed hierarchies. He hates navigation that breaks down when you get past the second level. The solution, he thinks, is persistent global navigation at the same position on every page with a home button and tracking. He loves fixed menus. He also makes the useful distinction between navigation, utilities (print, search and so on) and content. It is always a payoff between ‘wide and deep’ hierarchies. 

Be conventional

Following on from Norman and Nielsen, he stresses conventions. Don’t play fast and loose, make things easy and consistent. Use conventions, such as shopping carts, standard video controls and icons. This is sound advice. Conventions are more than just objects of convenience, they are part of the grammar of interface design. Designers often refuse to use conventions as they crave creativity and innovation – this, in his view, is rarely useful. Pages should also be broken up into carefully defined areas, clickable areas should be obvious and every attempt made to minimise ‘noise’, again a Mayer and Clark principle in online learning.

Half the number of words and half again

True to his belief that screen readers are different from readers of print, he has strong views on writing for the screen. Less is more and so he exhorts designers and writers to omit needless words. In his own words, “Half the number of words and half again”. 

Search

Krug was among the earliest evangelists for search on websites. Search is a window into the collective mind of your users. It tells you what people really want, look for and what is most likely missing.

Interface design in online learning

In interface design, as Steve Krug says in the title, the point is NOT to make people think. In learning, the whole point is to make people think. Yet many of his recommendations are applicable across learning experiences. His advice on drastically reducing text has been confirmed in research by Mayer and others in online learning design. The importance of search has also come to the fore in Learning Experience Platforms used for learning in the workflow.

Krug’s prescriptions are even more important in online learning than in web design, as learning’s great enemy is cognitive overload and dissonance. If learners have to work hard to understand, navigate and read online learning, they have less sustained attention for retentive learning. Most online learning, like most offline learning, is too long winded and needs to be seriously edited to avoid cognitive overload. Keep navigation simple and consistent, use de facto conventions, avoid deep hierarchies and write for the screen not the page. And don’t forget to test – a few iterations with experts.

Usability testing

His second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, shows how to do modest, low budget testing. His starting point is that designers can’t see the mistakes they make as they get too close to the design and as the navigation has come from their own heads, they lack objectivity. You need other fingers and eyeballs, guided by experts, using voiced testimonies. 

Krug, like Norman and Nielsen, is a strong believer in a specific form of usability testing. Following Nielsen and Landauer he takes the view that a few good, experienced testers and a few iterations are all you need. Forget the large-scale focus groups and massive testing, which suffer from the law of diminishing returns. His practical experience shows that just one, or a few testers early on are more effective than a large number at the end. 

He recommends evidence gathering with a camcorder and facilitator who asks questions and gives tasks, especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you probe the user for their understanding of the point of the experience, how it works and how it is organised. The point of the facilitator is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at but what they’re thinking. Listen, keep an open mind and take lots of notes.

An underlying point, made many years before by Dewey and Heidegger is that technologies work best when they hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology is at its best when it is invisible. This is the consistent theme in all good usability theorists and practitioners. The task of the designer, to make the delivery mechanism as invisible as possible.

Krug understands the different roles of specialists in design teams and the tensions that arise between them. His solution is to objectify the debate through testing, not with the mythical average user, but with real users. His is a useful, practical and prescriptive approach to good usability through good design.

Influence

Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think has sold over 600,000 copies. Rather than depend on academic literature, this popular book, in a sense he practices what he preaches. It is readable and does exactly what the user expects, give concrete advice on design and testing. As user design has grown as a practice Krug’s work is still relevant for its lasting recommendations.

Bibliography

Krug, S., 2009. Rocket surgery made easy: The do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. New Riders.

Krug, S., 2000. Don't make me think!: a common sense approach to Web usability. New Riders.

10 top INTERFACE design rules for online learning

How often does online learning suffer from bad interface design, confused menus, you click and nothing happens, you get lost? Too often. Yet there's some simple rules that will avoid most problems, that are well established in interface design around consistency
Here’s some simple tips to reduce those possibilities.

1. Instinctive intuitive and invisible

Dewey, Heidegger and many since, have made the point that technologies work best when they hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology is at its best when it is invisible. This is the consistent theme in all good usability theory and practice. How do we really use online learning interfaces? We glance, scan and muddle through. We don’t read pages, we scan them, choose the first reasonable option, and because we’re lazy, we meander and look for shortcuts through content. This is important and, if excesses in design are to be avoided, it has to be understood when designing online learning. We need to apply the brakes on the excesses of text-heavy, over designed, poorly navigable online learning. The single goal of the interface designer is to make it as instinctive, intuitive and invisible as possible.

2. Unnecessary noise

Avoid unnecessary noise. In online learning this can be translated into merely illustrative graphics, wallpaper video, icons that animate, company or institutional branding on every page. Background music is even worse. Less is more. You don’t get all of this on every page of a book, so don’t do it on screen. Noise is the enemy of navigation.

3. Icons that are not icons

You click on something that looks as though it should take you somewhere. It doesn’t. It’s dead. This is a consistent fault on poor interfaces. Make it obvious that its clickable, visually or with highlighting.
4. Signposting
Make it clear what it is that you are clicking to. Fanciful but difficult to interpret icons (unless well known conventions) are a nuisance. Indeed the urge to use icons for everything is sometimes best avoided. They're fine for familiar interfaces, with established conventions for icons, such as text editing B i U and so on. But in many cases the user needs to know. They're there to learn knowledge and skills, not your interface.

5. Hierarchical menu breakdown

Navigation can easily break down when you get past the second level. The solution is persistent global navigation across the whole online learning experience, at the same position on every page with a home button and tracking. There’s nothing wrong with fixed menus. Other common errors are badly designed rollovers and poorly designed pull down menus, that disappear on you all too easily. Keep it simple and don’t hide things away from the learner. You don’t want to waste cognitive effort on navigation, when you need it for learning. On menus, be aware that people do not make rational choices.

6. Navigation v utilities v content

Make the useful distinction between navigation (moving through the course), utilities (print, search and so on) and content (presentation). It is always a payoff between ‘wide' and 'deep’ hierarchies but don’t make the learner have to work too hard or even worse, guess. Cluster or design these navigational elements so that their functions are clear i.e. don't treat navigation and utilites as a single set of icons, seprate and cluster.

7. Progress

People like to know where they stand. When reading a book, you know by feel alone, as well as the page numbers. Keep to this principle in online learning. Use some sort of indicator for progress. It may be numerical (1 of x), a percentage or graphical line that shows progress. It needn’t be too imposing, something small and subtle, even occasional.

8. Be conventional

Stick to conventions. Look and feel matter but don’t play fast and loose with design. Make things easy and consistent. Use conventions, such as standard video controls and icons. This is sound advice. Conventions are more than just objects of convenience, they are part of the grammar of interface design. Designers often refuse to use conventions as they crave creativity and innovation – this is rarely useful. Pages should also be broken up into carefully defined areas, clickable areas should be obvious.

9. Page v scrolling

Online learning has been accused of ‘page turning’. The charge has some resonance, as it has, for a long time, been stuck in the old paradigm of simple page turning. Yet many of the most popular resources on the web have scrolling pages, think Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon… most websites. There are some good arguments for moving to the new paradigm, on the basis of being simply conventional, to scrolling structures. WildFire is a good example of an authoring tool that does exactly this.

10. Usability testing

The production of online learning involves the different roles of specialists in design teams and tensions that arise between them. The look and feel of graphics may rub up against the needs for clear communication. What can or cannot be done in coding or functionality, may affect what can be done in presentation and navigation. Client views may clash with vendor views. The solution is to objectify the debate through testing, not with the mythical average user, but with real users.

Following Nielsen. Krug and Landauer, recognize that that a few good, experienced testers and a few iterations are all you need. Forget the large-scale focus groups and massive testing, which are expensive and difficult to organize. Practical experience shows that just one, or a few testers, early on, are more effective than a large number at the end.
Another useful technique is A/B testing where, with close-call design judgements, you present both and decide from user feedback, which one to use.

Gather evidence with a camcorder and facilitator who asks questions and gives tasks, especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you probe the user for their understanding of the point of the experience, how it works and how it is organised. The point of the facilitator is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at but what they’re thinking. Get them to ‘voice what they’re doing, listen, keep an open mind and take lots of notes. For technical testing, content testing, proof reading and functionality testing, you may need professional services.

Conclusion

The big rule is, as always, less is more. Look at the most popular interfaces in the world - Google, Twitter, Netflix - consistent but simple. These prescriptions are even more important in online learning than in web design, as learning’s great enemy is cognitive overload and dissonance. If learners have to work hard to understand, navigate and use the interface, they have less sustained attention for retentive learning. Keep navigation simple and consistent, use de facto conventions, avoid deep hierarchies and write for the screen not the page. And don’t forget to test – a few iterations with experts.

There's more!
Top ten tips in top ten topics in online learning:

10 ways to make badass INTROs in online learning 

10 bloody good reasons for using much-maligned TEXT in online learning 

10 essential online learning WRITING TIPS in online learning 

10 stupid mistakes in design of MULTIPLE CHOICE questions

10 essential points on use of (recall not recognition) OPEN RESPONSE questions

10 rules on how to create great GRAPHICS in online learning ‪

10 sound pieces of advice on use of AUDIO in onlinelearning 

10 ways based on research to use VIDEO in online learning

10 ideas on use of much maligned TALKING HEAD videos in online learning

10 unusual ways to make SPACED PRACTICE happen in online learning