Why Looks Matter in E-Learning Courses (And What You Can Do About It)

Good points – you can also go way overboard on making the presentation look good. It is important to strike a happy medium between a well designed good looking presentation and one that is so full of bells and whistles that the entire idea of rapid development is lost in the process.

It bears mentioning that under Image Quality, Photoshop has some good tools to make images sharper and the colors more vibrant.

I MUST tell you how much I LOVE your blog! The information is SO incredibly valuable. YOU are making ME look good at my job! When I get rave reviews, I try to tell them I’m getting my new/wonderful/fun ideas from you. Thank you SO much for your Blog!

[…] Why Looks Matter in E-Learning Courses (And What You Can Do About It) – The Rapid eLearning Blog […]

As always, Tom, you’re “spot on.” I have enjoyed Robin Williams’ book, “The Non-Designer’s Design Book” and learned so much from it many years ago. Once you have your eyes opened to that way of thinking / seeing the world, you can spot poorly designed layouts very quickly. But throwing away screen beans just because they’re out of style and have been over used? That’s like saying no song should ever have a Yamaha DX7 keyboard sound in it (you know the overused sound of the 80s). Yeah it is overused. Yeah its out of style. But there are still situations where it can be used well – albeit those situations are rare. I’m not throwing away the screen beans! But I rarely used them in the first place, and will be even more judicious in my use of them (if any) in the future.

Thanks Tom!

Tom,

I am a new reader to your newsletter and it’s one of the best series of newsletters I’ve ever read. It’s straight and “to the point” with lots of valuable information.
I’ve been using articulate for a year and just to cover the basic needs of our company – now I see there’s so much more we can do. Your ideas spark new interest in making learning fun and exciting.

I’m going back to read ALL your archived newsletters.
Please keep it coming!!

Bravo! Excellent content in a posting.

Our company has been doing traditional in person training for years. In the last few we have branched out to audio, video, and e-learning too. We help people use different mediums to communicate their message and I’m always looking for ideas on how to communicate it. The resources and books you cited aligned with your message. It made me want to read on and share the content. Thanks.

Good points, all, Tom!

I can’t recall if you’ve addressed this in earlier posts, but another easy way to look more professional is to keep photos proportional when resizing them. It’s simply a matter of using the corner resize handles (sometimes in conjunction with the key) instead of using the side/middle resize handles.

If the resized photo doesn’t fit comfortably into the layout, then use the crop tool (located on the Picture toolbar in MS Office) to trim it down some more. Most of the time a cropped photo is better than the original. It can help focus the learner on the section you want them to see and generally allows you to make that section larger.

Thanks for the post.

Great information and very informative to see others tips/tricks. We are new to the creation of e-learning and will be using an authoring tool called FireFly so looking forward to learning and sharing.

I like using Pixie by Nattyware for choosing color schemes I like. It’s free: http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html. Yet another great post. Thanks, Tom.

Tom,

What a great post! I am also a new reader to your blog. In a past few days you have given me so much idea to make such a wonderful courses for our clients.

I just want to share what color scheme we use in order for us to create a template for our elearning. You can visit this site http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html. Hope this could help. 🙂

Thanks

Tom
I am thoroughly enjoying your blog entries and believe that good consistent colour and design are significant tools for keeping the learner motivated and engaged in your content.
However, from an accessibility angle ensuring appropriate contrast between colours is a must for me – an easy to use tool can be found at: http://juicystudio.com/services/colourcontrast.php
Many thanks

I helped redesign a course within Blackboard using the kind of design approaches you might associate with commercial websites (consistent color scheme, icons, banners etc) and everyone who’s seen it wants one of their own.

The key was to get the client involved with the design, so that they had a feeling of ownership and enthusiasm which transmitted itself to the learners. Whether you do so by design or not, your materials have a visual identity which needs to sit well with those that use them.

“you can also go way overboard on making the presentation look good” – Mark

Mark, I think a common mistake people make is assuming a “good looking” presentation requires a lot of extra effort. Not true. Extra “bells and whistles” don’t necessarily equate a beautiful design (in fact, they often equate a poor design).

Sure, I could slop together something that looks bad faster than doing something that looks good, but I think it’s damaging to the “rapid development” concept to assume that good design can’t (and shouldn’t be) mandatory.

I will have to take the time to check out your many links.

One of the things I often notice when looking at other people’s presentation is that they lack consistency. This can be, as you said, using a variety of graphic styles. But it can also including making the font larger because the page has less text or smaller to fit more text on the page. It can also include having an object dance around, up and down or left and right, as you advance through a sequence of pages.

It seems that many people look for an excuse to not like taking online training. I wish that people would look forward to taking training and know that it will improve their performance instead of thinking, “Boy, that narrator has such a strange accent.”

[…] Kuhlmann has an excellent post on the importance of visual design in eLearning (my personal driving philosophy and the reason for the eQuixotic blog) on his Rapid E-Learning […]

I occasionally develop training materials at work but haven’t had any formal training in this area. What a wealth of information. Thank you for providing this resource for those of us who stumble through the process. There is hope!!

We have been involved in developing e-learning courseware for the maritime industry over the last 4 years. We work with a number of maritime academies and universities. The biggest stumbling block in e-learning is the teacher, who has been doing the job face-to-face for years that works or he/she thinks that to be so.

The Instructional Designers are not teachers (most of them are glorified graphic designers) and they tend to get over- involved with multimedia without thinking of the student engagement who is learning alone without the supervision of a teacher.

If we could convert some teachers into IDs, we shall see real progress. e-learning can do most, while blending that with some face-to-face counseling and guidance could achieve good learning outcome.

Tom,

This is good stuff!!!! You hit it right on the nail with the colors, as many individuals are color blind. This is one of the main things learners complain of.

Typically, what I try to do is stick to the basic color scemes that is your basic blues, browns, greens and reds. Or, I use a format that is related to the company colors. This seems to go very well. It helps me market the course as well.

Thank you so much for this information. I feel like we should be paying you or at least contributing ideas to this wealth of knowledge.

That’s my two cents worth!

SD is right about teachers seeing technology as being antithetical to what they do best: teach. I work in higher education and a lot of teachers see the online environment as a place to park course documents, handouts, powerpoints etc. They use the standard layout and icons of the VLE and it looks pretty drab. Fair enough, their teaching takes place in classrooms, but a lot of their learners expect to be able to carry on learning and participating outside of the classroom.

Too little of what passes for elearning is about creating engaging interactions, environments and experiences that encourage learning, it’s what Tom calls ‘data dump’: here’s the info, go read!

I have been in content development for 14 years and decided to give the e-learning thing a go two years ago. I have for the past two years been actively involved in developing blended learning strategies for my clients and have been searching for a cost effective development tool. It is amazing that everyone who starts out wanting to implement e-learning want ‘dancing bunnies’. It always takes a long time to get them to understand that ‘dancing bunnies’aren’t always the right solution as it often does not get the message across. The tips you provide make it so easy to explain to people what and why.

Since reading your mails, I have gained so much confidence and using powerpoint is probably one of the smarted tools ever. No more flash in many instances – what my clients love about the elearning I’m now producing is that they can now do editing and maintenance themselves – no extra costs. They feel very empowered and so do I!

I cannot wait to receive your mails. Thank you so much for your insights and tips and links. Much appreciated.

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know to keep up the good work on this blog. We have just downloaded the trial version of the articulate software and this blog has helped give us so many ideas.

Thanks

Good article. Color and font are important material of eLearning course.

The best advice I’ve ever gotten is “Reduce the ink-to-information ratio as close as possible to a ‘one-to-one’ ratio.” Mark, in the first post, is right in the sense that “overboard” is usually at odds with “rapid.”

Dave and SB grasp the point that I was trying to make. Many bunnies equates to less rapid. Bunnies may look good but does it really help the person who is trying to extract useful information from that page of instruction? Maybe or maybe not. I have been doing this for over 20 years. I started with Apple Pilot on a Apple 2 with a whopping 48k of memory. (Yes, I do still have it.) Mainly I do recurrent training for commercial pilots so is it really necessary to animate the fluid flow through the hydraulic filter when a simple colored line and perhaps an arrow will impart the same information? Maybe not but the customer sometimes really really wants that dancing bunny so I spend an hour drawing dots that “flow” through the little pipe.

Gotta give the holder of the checkbook what they want. You try to heard them toward more training faster, cheaper and with more bang for the buck. In the end it is a question that they have to answer for themselves.

Mark

What great information. Being new to design and e-learning, I’m amazed how many tips and ideas everyone is willing to share. I could spend the whole day reading all the links. I have added this site to my favorites.

Beautiful! Today as I came out into my garden and admired the massive bunch of roses I was completely absorbed. The color, fragrance and soothing combination of the gentle pink hue with the light green of leaves was breath taking. I fully agree if we make the starting of the course inviting, the learner will happily enter the course and a happy beggining can lead to a happy journey through the course and an equally happy ending. Thanks for sharing
Regards
Rina

hi Tom

I would like to ask you if you can help me finding Doctorate programs in E-learning! I was trying to locate some of these programs in US schools, but most of which are directed toward the technology in general not the elearning part of it!

what do you think!

I, too, am a fan of your blog and find many useful insights and ideas. One resource I recommend to others is the book e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. Dr. Clark’s research is about how adult learners respond to eLearning inputs. Even something as simple as where information or controls appear on the screen affect the learner’s ability to connect with the learning so giving thought to your design is truly important. She may also be a resource concerning Doctoral programs in eLearning that focus on the Learner rather than the technology. Her website is: http://www.clarktraining.com.

[…] Lastly, Tom Kuhlmann at Articulate wrote a nice blog entry about Why Looks Matter in E-Learning Courses (And What You Can Do About It). […]

[…] what kind of web design should we choose? You can find it out on Tom Kuhlmann’s blog: “Why looks matter in E-learning courses“. According to him: You might be losing your learners before the even start the course […]

Hey, this is quite an informative article. Every time i make PPT presenations I get confused what colors should I use. This articles has many useful links which might prove useful in the next PPT and elearning course we design.

Hi,

I have just started designing courses and these few tips have been really helpful.

Thanks a lot.

[…] Resources: Articulate (Tom) did an article on why looks matter. e Learning Templates that look great and are branded. Fresh Articulate […]

[…] […]

[…] […]