What Happens when Human-Centered Design Meets Instructional Design?
Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology.
— Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Learners = Users
The problem starts in the title: Instructional design.
Instructional designers are designing instruction first, learning experiences second. They’re choosing to focus on simplifying the (admittedly) labor-intensive cycle of updating and maintaining eLearning content over time, rather than prioritizing learning experience design at the outset.
As a result, many learners are forced to trudge through poor-quality eLearning.
It’s not learner-centered. It’s not even human-centered.
Instead, it’s business-centered, government-centered, onboarding- centered, training-centered, or compliance-centered. Sometimes it’s gamification-centered. eLearning designers add gamification elements to their content and think “This is close enough to human-centered. People like games, right?”
This is the wrong way to approach Don Norman’s credo above. Gamification is an eLearning strategy, not an manifestation of understanding learners’ psychological needs.
eLearning isn’t going away any time soon. Instead, it’s going to become even more important in all education and many corporate settings as people need to learn new skills at a faster rate than ever before in all of human history.
So, how do we make eLearning more human-centered?
Learning Objectives
Learning is deeply intertwined with both cognition and emotion. This is the basis of the term “learning experience.”
Unfortunately, many people who work as learning experience designers don’t have any notion of the user/learner experience. This is in contrast to general users of technology and software, who are treated quite well these days. User experience design as a profession sprouted up around the question of how to build technology products that demonstrate empathy for users. That is, user experience is focused on designing products that meet users’ needs. Right now, learners don’t get the same treatment. Learning experience designers are often an army of one. In many cases, they don’t have the resources to do “learnability” surveys, or focus groups, or even iterate their learning content at all, ever.
Still, learning experience designers do have one huge advantage. While much of user experience and interface design is subjective and based on personal aesthetics, designing effective learner experiences is based on learning theory. In other words, cognitive science and educational psychology are the basis for solid learning experience design.
Yet, good eLearning starts by asking a very subjective question. It wants to know what value learners might get out of the eLearning content they’re consuming. That is, what goals do learners have, and how can this eLearning content meet those goals? Then, the eLearning designer works back from learners’ goals to specify the precise knowledge and skills to be to learned; these become learning objectives.
The difference here is description of the learners’ goals and objectives, not prescription based on some flashy new software, tool, or approach (ahem, gamification).
What’s Next?
eLearning faces a crossroads. It is necessarily technology-based but it always seems out of step with the pace of the technology industry, because it must juggle the pull of the shiny new next great thing in tech with its actual goal of creating valuable learning content, and then structure and deliver that content in a way that meet the needs of real-life learners.
But when eLearning is built on descriptions of learners’ goals and actual learning theory, not technological prescriptions based on the newest software and gizmos, it really works. Learners are okay with last year’s interface if it offers the content — and value — they’re looking for.
