Screen Design Question
June 23, 2009 12:00 AM
One point of clarification. When you look at the study it addresses eye movement / focus on fairly complex compilations of information. I'd say that if your screen is that crowded that there's something wrong with the information and navigation design.
We recently reviewed our construction principles and revised our guidelines. Here's sort of how it came out:
1. Things are too deep. Break down and simplify the SCO's at the lesson level. Focus on the concepts at that level and the lesson contains no more depth than Section > Activity. We did away with Mod > Lesson > Topic > Screen. This helped to simplify things a bit.
2. Entry screen. We prescribe no more than three navigation options from the activity area on the entry screen. For some of our courses these are: (1) Test Out (2) Jump In (3) Download for offline viewing.
3. Screen navigation. We went back to simple links and culled our navigation back to a simplified set. These include the modes, which in our case are Test Out, Index, and Download. We added Info and Exit. So in our lower right corner we have Index | Test Out | Download | Info | Exit.
Other navigation is activity specific. We took out all the standard / typical eLearning navigation controls. We felt these encouraged a cookie cutter approach. The courses now have a modular build that prescribes more organic navigation (ask a question, answer a question). The idea behind this is 'everything is modular and could stand on it's own to build concept understanding, expose the learner to value baselines, attribute to skill building, etc.'
Our guidelights: (1) Respect the learner's time (2) Focus on value and relevance. This means taking a hard line with the SME to separate the need to know from the nice to know and strategically building the assemblies, leveraging media, and alternate means of engaging the materials in the most effortless way possible for all involved. We put more energy in up front fighting the content battle then we do down the line putting together the package. The results just feel liberating for everyone involved.
The biggest shift for us is not focusing on our work as 'it'. When we look at it differently and consider that our work is part of something bigger - it really puts things into perspective.
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