Giving the info without clutter

Reading the Rapid eLearning Blog's latest entry on What Steve Jobs can Teach you about eLearning revived a debate I've been having with myself (and my customers) about decluttering elearning screens. I've long preferred Powerpoint presentations that had no text, or only a few words and relevant images; but in these cases the message is being delivered by the speaker.

Transfer this to eLearning and the equivalent is the minimalist-text-plus-recorded-voiceover that is the staple of 'rapid' elearning. And it's good, infinitely preferable to 'read these 17 paragraphs and press Return for another 17'. But what to do where audio isn't an option i.e. our intranet?

The way we've approached this in our in-house templates is to set a recommended maximum text for a page (250 words) and pages for a 'chunk' (16 - so that the learner doesn't have the prospect of 'page 1 of 30'); in practice these get stretched a little but our authors are managing to temper the expectations of our SMEs a bit, and screens are definitely looking better.  But they're nowhere near the minimalism of, for example, Cathy Moore's lovely Dump the Drone. 

We're dealing largely with legalistic or procedural material which comes to us as streams of, to be brutal, "In these circumstances you must:" plus ten bullet points. In a minority of cases we've persuaded the SMEs to work with us to produce work-based roleplay scenarios, but most aren't interested when they realise the input they'd need to give.

There are approaches to putting more text info up without cluttering the page; these generally fall under the banner of 'show and hide'.  We've made heavy use of the Dynarch Rollbar script to provide a nice way of grouping related info under tabs. We've used comic strips, as I mentioned before, for storytelling, and we've taken delivery of, but not used, Raptivity's variety of presentation widgets. All on the principle of 'click something and see more text revealed'.  One SME has objected - 'the user shouldn't be able to move on until they've clicked all the headings. How do we know they've seen and learned everything if it's up to them what they look at?' (The ripostes are many and obvious, so I won't dwell on them here). The other is my own unease - that clicking on headings (however graphically disguised) to see more text isn't really interactivity. You're just making the user do some work for the sake of your 'nice' clean screen. 

I know there's more to eLearning than presentations, but we must begin from where we are, and this is where we are in a world without audio, wikis or blogs. What are your opinions and practices re keeping a clutter-free screen?

Comments

[Tom Kuhlmann]

Good question. I try to find a distinction between information-based courses and those that require changes in behavior or performance. For the types of courses you mentioned above, I'd be inclined to create some sort of abstract course (only essentional info) with links to additional detail.

Personally, if I can't find a link to performance, I try to put the least amount of effort into the course. Give a nice looking course that works and let the employees get back to work. I prefer keeping it simple and straight forward.

[Cathy Moore]

I know that in finance and other compliance-heavy industries, SMEs in particular become quite attached to their wording and fear dire legal consequences if anything is changed. One way around this could be to move a lot of the SME's text out of the course and into a PDF or intranet reference.

Then you could use the course as Tom suggested as a high-level intro & motivational piece that shows the learner how and why to use the PDF.

A deeper fix and one that may be more politically challenging could be to insist that there must be a clear performance goal before a course will be developed.

You might also find a way to encourage SMEs to come up with scenarios instead of just rules. Maybe a contest of sorts for the best story that shows rule X in action? Or give the SMEs their own copy of ComicLife as a reward for being willing to do a story? Probably a little optimistic on my part.