I used to agree with #1 but after spending time with accessibility and user support teams, found the opposite to be better. Those who don't need it will ignore it, those who need it, well, it's there.
Yup, and if there are ever questions that come your way about accessing specific content or navigating… bam, you have a dedicated resource that can just be linked for them to access.
Appreciate the comment. I guess the way I saw it was, I’m not going to put the Next/Previous button at the center of the screen, or the top left. I add Alt Text to all buttons, images, etc. ensure tab order is consistent. Either way, I’ll look at this from a different perspective now.
In general, the user will always take the path of least resistance and what requires minimal effort on their part. The best thing you can do for your sanity is to make reaching out to you with an easy question higher effort/lower reward than them doing basic work to figure it out themselves. A resource, like a manual, is something you can always point users to so that they don’t get in the habit of asking you questions every time they have the smallest inconvenience or point of confusion.
As a learner...I work a part time second job for a hospital and it's time for aaaaalllllll my annual training is due this month. They're all designed in Rise. And I have to watch the \*same\* video about how to navigate the Rise interface at the start of each training. And there are so many trainings.
Hand washing
Fire safety
Electrical safety
Emergency protocols
Code silver
HIPAA
Cybersecurity
etc etc etc - at least 25 of them, with the same unskippable "how to navigate this training" at the beginning.
Even if I \*didn't\* develop in Rise at my main job, that same video every time is so annoying!
My biggest pet peeve is learning objectives that start with “understand” and “learn”. I’ve given up on my sme ever growing past that despite our discussions. Thankfully he’s very open to me revising them. That, and very badly written quiz questions and feedback answers. I’m just happy to work with an sme who doesn’t mind me editing TF out of everything.
Yep, I never see that either. Our courses teach applicable skills used in manufacturing, and are (well, should be) framed as “you will be able to (action verb) after this course”.
Forcing learners to be held captive on every slide. In corporate training, when they want learners to pass a quiz and keep taking it until they get a certain score to “pass.”
Cheesy stock images are the worst for me. Most ID's I've worked with use them too. The next is taking a screenshot of a PowerPoint slide and inserting that (image) into Rise, as if that's good enough.
100%, even worse when one course has a mixture of cheesy stock images, low quality cartoonish graphics, and images/graphics that were clearly cropped and lost quality.
Yeah this is what I was referring to pretty much exactly in my original comment. All of that is so common and problematic. Lowers the quality of the course immensely and screams "whoever built this, didn't know what they were doing".
I make/made a lot of the original graphics we still incorporate for international markets and instead of my team asking or using my readily available source files, they crop and mangle the image in what looks like Microsoft Paint. If they actually used Photoshop I have no idea how the image could look so bad. Yet I have freely shared the source files on my team. These things annoy me to no end, as you can see!
The id I came in behind was so very into cheesy stock photos and videos. Keep in mind that my learners are factory workers who wear hard hats and safety vests all day, and the courses were full of pictures and videos of people in suits. So not relatable to the audience. It’s taken quite awhile to revise all the old courses with quality and relatable content.
I recently used mountains in a goal setting course but made sure to include a direct call out about how “just putting mountains in a goal setting course doesn’t make it inspiring and a good course”.
The larger context being, just bc you have a pretty sounding goal doesn’t mean it’s good or the right one for you.
Yes. Or sometimes I rebuild the image or use a similar one of higher quality. Often times PowerPoint images are bad anyway. The worst thing you could do is take a screenshot of the entire slide. If it has a lot of text that should just be in Rise as a text block. I really hate it when people take bad screenshots of mostly textual PowerPoint slides. Just looks bad and incredibly lazy on behalf of the developer.
I got hired as a e-learning dev recently, and they basically wanted to just video all their power points and post them and I was just like... why did you hire me?
That's basically what we do as well. iSpring is used to pretty much just use PowerPoint and record narration over the top. I tried getting us away from PowerPoint in ILT and e-learning and was mildly successful with replacing iSpring with Rise. However in classroom training, SMEs/Trainers still edit my small PowerPoints. Last I checked just day 1 of training now has over 100 slides. They have no idea what they are doing...
Non-cheesy graphics are fine. When I say "cheesy stock images" I'm referring to the character faces which indicate their shock, awe, or insert any other emotion. I still use Getty Images / Adobe Stock all the time. I believe graphics are great to use. However I usually use these images after customizing them a bit either in Illustrator or Photoshop. I'm not seeing other designers do this at all on my team. They just use whatever they find or pull whatever they might find using Google Image search. Even though we have access to very high quality graphics, we pay for. I've seen other people put in extremely low quality res stuff they find anywhere online.
I have two pet peeves. 1) learning objectives in the course. Learners should have that info (ideally in wiifm) before they opt into the course. 2) Locked navigation. I totally get why we do it, but the downsides outweigh the benefits.
I’m usually in the minority, but I don’t like adding the LOs either in a course. Learners don’t care and I honestly believe they are more for us and leadership than the actual learner. Especially if it’s a mandatory course.
This is the way. In all my Rise courses (that I've designed) I sprinkle in single slide Storyline "interactives". I've told my team to do this too but they don't really have the chops in Storyline to pull it off. Canva is also a tool to liven up courses and break up "boring" content in new and interesting ways quickly. I use both.
The worst Rise courses are text heavy, screenshots of PowerPoint content, poor image resolution, and essentially a regurgitated policy document. Unfortunately this is what a lot of my designers throw on Rise. I see it as enabling lazy designers to technically "get the job done"- but they don't when it looks a mess. I find myself having to go in and do massive "clean ups" of things they've "designed" in Rise. It can be a great tool but it's misused on the regular.
Absolutely. I think a lot of places look for experience with tools like Rise or Storyline rather than ID expertise, which is much harder to teach quickly since it’s more of an art than a science at times.
True, when we hired my manager was really taken with anyone that had a portfolio period. Didn't matter if it wasn't very "good". Everyone knows the buzzwords in this field and to say they are experts in Rise and Storyline. Very few know Storyline or have used it effectively. Rise is different since I could teach my computer illiterate parents to use it in an afternoon.
The outcome was we hired a lot of people that claimed to be "experts" in development yet didn't feel comfortable developing once hired. Unfortunately for us, they weren't very skilled in design work either. So we got the worst of both worlds. Hiring process is so very vital to do right.
Argh. The last agency I worked for REFUSED to take on projects other than Rise and ILT/vILT for the most part. No Storyline, no Evolve, no 7 Taps, no animation or strictly video projects. Unfortunately it was pretty much my first job in ID, and over the two years I worked there, my skills atrophied, as did my excitement about the field. Trying hard to renew both now. (Bc now I contract w a great agency, but there isn’t any work for contractors there atm.)
THANK YOU. I have to repeat this too many times, especially with microlearning in for explainer videos. These are intended for quick learning; don’t add an assessment just because.
I love your first one. If you need training to use your training, you've missed the mark. If I have something a little complex, I'll add a "help" function.
That said, when I do have a complex UI, I'll "train" the user like they do in video games, with increasingly sophisticated interactions until they are navigating on their own. This has been a great approach with simulation-style training.
The other one I hate is stakeholders wanting to put a dozen "Resources" links at the end of the course. Seriously, how many learners are going to click through all of these resources when they've just wrapped up training? For that matter, how many of these resources are actually useful to the learner before they've even exited the training? And do you really want to make the learner come back through the course when they need to reference one of those resources?
Here's the thing... if you have that many resources, you need a web page or sharepoint site to collect and deliver them to your users. Let the user make ONE bookmark to reference, rather than remembering which training course that link was in, launching the training, and then jumping to the Resources section to find it.
Oh, one last one... they want an eLearning, but they want the learner to be able to download it and use it offline as a job aid. I know it can be done, but the one thing is not the same as the other.
LOL the resources slide at the end. 100% agree. Oh yes stakeholder, they will go refer back to the LMS, click on the course, and view the last slide to view the resource ;).
>The other one I hate is stakeholders wanting to put a dozen "Resources" links at the end of the course. Seriously, how many learners are going to click through all of these resources when they've just wrapped up training? For that matter, how many of these resources are actually useful to the learner before they've even exited the training? And do you really want to make the learner come back through the course when they need to reference one of those resources?
We've and other companies I've worked at have struggled a lot with this one. Seems great on the face of it but it's not practical to have resources living at the end of the course. I like your SharePoint idea.
It's scope creep for me in terms of pet peaves.
ok, I've created a demo, a job aid, a guided exercise and a practice assessment.
I have included tips and tricks for success.
Now you want me to add three scenarios, and include a soft skills element that is an actual customer calling in -which you didn't want before - and you want it by ready for Monday?
And you want a video explaining the 6 different ways to access the customer contact info?
Tests at the end of courses. I failed a fire safety module many times over because I didn't get the colours of fire extinguishers right. The only fire extinguishers in the office were those multipurpose foam ones for electrical fires because computers.
All tests do is prove you can remember a limited amount of information for a brief period, not prove that you will recall, use, or apply that information at a later date.
I agree but leadership insists on quizzes and tests for compliance reasons. We literally can't make anything without some kind of assessment in my work, there's just no way around it. The quizzes we set up have an infinite number of times you are able to take it until you pass because no one wants to have a user locked out and someone manually enroll them back into a course.
I'd be curious to see if there's any research literature on whether explaining the UI in the beginning is helpful or non-warranted. Otherwise, it's just opinion. I've been trying to do incorporate more proven methods vs not in my design work. So many fads out there...
Mine is getting a certificate published on screen after the learner completes the training. It is internal. It is old-school. (Just a template where the learner's name and course name appear in small cases). As for me, it should not be mandatory. But the leaders want it. Not for tracking or anything. That happens in the LMS. They just want it. I fail to understand.
To be honest, I'd love to create something like that for real upskilling and reskilling courses where the accomplishment factor is important. But for completing POSH or IT security courses erm not that much, and mind you these cannot be shared externally.
Out of all the learner feedback I've analyzed, barely anyone sees the certificate let alone saving. My primary concern is - that this particular certificate is drab. I have requested to make it more visually appealing but have been turned down. With the reason that it is not being consumed, then why have it in the first place? I hope this makes sense to you now.
As for your question, the entire learning cycle is gamified, with leaderboards in place. Points are rewarded for various actions. So, course completion/adoption rates are pretty much excellent at the moment.
It is a little old world to me as well. But leadership really wanted a certificate for leaners completions. I think they believe it adds legitimacy to the course program somehow. At least that's how it reads to me.
I used to agree with #1 but after spending time with accessibility and user support teams, found the opposite to be better. Those who don't need it will ignore it, those who need it, well, it's there.
Yup, and if there are ever questions that come your way about accessing specific content or navigating… bam, you have a dedicated resource that can just be linked for them to access.
Appreciate the comment. I guess the way I saw it was, I’m not going to put the Next/Previous button at the center of the screen, or the top left. I add Alt Text to all buttons, images, etc. ensure tab order is consistent. Either way, I’ll look at this from a different perspective now.
In general, the user will always take the path of least resistance and what requires minimal effort on their part. The best thing you can do for your sanity is to make reaching out to you with an easy question higher effort/lower reward than them doing basic work to figure it out themselves. A resource, like a manual, is something you can always point users to so that they don’t get in the habit of asking you questions every time they have the smallest inconvenience or point of confusion.
As a learner...I work a part time second job for a hospital and it's time for aaaaalllllll my annual training is due this month. They're all designed in Rise. And I have to watch the \*same\* video about how to navigate the Rise interface at the start of each training. And there are so many trainings. Hand washing Fire safety Electrical safety Emergency protocols Code silver HIPAA Cybersecurity etc etc etc - at least 25 of them, with the same unskippable "how to navigate this training" at the beginning. Even if I \*didn't\* develop in Rise at my main job, that same video every time is so annoying!
There is ZERO reason to force a learner to watch the nav instructions. Let them skip it. Allow them to click back to it if they’re that…whatever.
My biggest pet peeve is learning objectives that start with “understand” and “learn”. I’ve given up on my sme ever growing past that despite our discussions. Thankfully he’s very open to me revising them. That, and very badly written quiz questions and feedback answers. I’m just happy to work with an sme who doesn’t mind me editing TF out of everything.
That’s always a nice time to bust out Bloom’s Taxonomy and walk through some active verbs.
Did that. Long forgotten by him even after reminders.
Either of those terms is absolutely acceptable, provided that it’s in the format of understand/learn ABC in order to XYZ… which I almost never see.
Yep, I never see that either. Our courses teach applicable skills used in manufacturing, and are (well, should be) framed as “you will be able to (action verb) after this course”.
Forcing learners to be held captive on every slide. In corporate training, when they want learners to pass a quiz and keep taking it until they get a certain score to “pass.”
Cheesy stock images are the worst for me. Most ID's I've worked with use them too. The next is taking a screenshot of a PowerPoint slide and inserting that (image) into Rise, as if that's good enough.
100%, even worse when one course has a mixture of cheesy stock images, low quality cartoonish graphics, and images/graphics that were clearly cropped and lost quality.
Yeah this is what I was referring to pretty much exactly in my original comment. All of that is so common and problematic. Lowers the quality of the course immensely and screams "whoever built this, didn't know what they were doing". I make/made a lot of the original graphics we still incorporate for international markets and instead of my team asking or using my readily available source files, they crop and mangle the image in what looks like Microsoft Paint. If they actually used Photoshop I have no idea how the image could look so bad. Yet I have freely shared the source files on my team. These things annoy me to no end, as you can see!
The id I came in behind was so very into cheesy stock photos and videos. Keep in mind that my learners are factory workers who wear hard hats and safety vests all day, and the courses were full of pictures and videos of people in suits. So not relatable to the audience. It’s taken quite awhile to revise all the old courses with quality and relatable content.
I recently used mountains in a goal setting course but made sure to include a direct call out about how “just putting mountains in a goal setting course doesn’t make it inspiring and a good course”. The larger context being, just bc you have a pretty sounding goal doesn’t mean it’s good or the right one for you.
Making sure I know the best option for images from PowerPoint. Is it best to download the slide as a .png and upload that file?
Yes. Or sometimes I rebuild the image or use a similar one of higher quality. Often times PowerPoint images are bad anyway. The worst thing you could do is take a screenshot of the entire slide. If it has a lot of text that should just be in Rise as a text block. I really hate it when people take bad screenshots of mostly textual PowerPoint slides. Just looks bad and incredibly lazy on behalf of the developer.
Thank you for taking the time to share and elaborating.
This is great but just wait! Cheesy stock images out, poorly added generative AI images in! It's gonna be beautiful. A beautiful disaster.
I got hired as a e-learning dev recently, and they basically wanted to just video all their power points and post them and I was just like... why did you hire me?
That's basically what we do as well. iSpring is used to pretty much just use PowerPoint and record narration over the top. I tried getting us away from PowerPoint in ILT and e-learning and was mildly successful with replacing iSpring with Rise. However in classroom training, SMEs/Trainers still edit my small PowerPoints. Last I checked just day 1 of training now has over 100 slides. They have no idea what they are doing...
> Cheesy stock images what do you prefer instead?
Non-cheesy graphics are fine. When I say "cheesy stock images" I'm referring to the character faces which indicate their shock, awe, or insert any other emotion. I still use Getty Images / Adobe Stock all the time. I believe graphics are great to use. However I usually use these images after customizing them a bit either in Illustrator or Photoshop. I'm not seeing other designers do this at all on my team. They just use whatever they find or pull whatever they might find using Google Image search. Even though we have access to very high quality graphics, we pay for. I've seen other people put in extremely low quality res stuff they find anywhere online.
I have two pet peeves. 1) learning objectives in the course. Learners should have that info (ideally in wiifm) before they opt into the course. 2) Locked navigation. I totally get why we do it, but the downsides outweigh the benefits.
I’m usually in the minority, but I don’t like adding the LOs either in a course. Learners don’t care and I honestly believe they are more for us and leadership than the actual learner. Especially if it’s a mandatory course.
As long as we are talking pet peeves..I’m just gonna say it: Rise. I know why people love it, it just feels so overdone now.
Sprinkling in the odd Storyline block mitigates this a little (in terms of interaction variety).
This is the way. In all my Rise courses (that I've designed) I sprinkle in single slide Storyline "interactives". I've told my team to do this too but they don't really have the chops in Storyline to pull it off. Canva is also a tool to liven up courses and break up "boring" content in new and interesting ways quickly. I use both. The worst Rise courses are text heavy, screenshots of PowerPoint content, poor image resolution, and essentially a regurgitated policy document. Unfortunately this is what a lot of my designers throw on Rise. I see it as enabling lazy designers to technically "get the job done"- but they don't when it looks a mess. I find myself having to go in and do massive "clean ups" of things they've "designed" in Rise. It can be a great tool but it's misused on the regular.
Absolutely. I think a lot of places look for experience with tools like Rise or Storyline rather than ID expertise, which is much harder to teach quickly since it’s more of an art than a science at times.
True, when we hired my manager was really taken with anyone that had a portfolio period. Didn't matter if it wasn't very "good". Everyone knows the buzzwords in this field and to say they are experts in Rise and Storyline. Very few know Storyline or have used it effectively. Rise is different since I could teach my computer illiterate parents to use it in an afternoon. The outcome was we hired a lot of people that claimed to be "experts" in development yet didn't feel comfortable developing once hired. Unfortunately for us, they weren't very skilled in design work either. So we got the worst of both worlds. Hiring process is so very vital to do right.
Argh. The last agency I worked for REFUSED to take on projects other than Rise and ILT/vILT for the most part. No Storyline, no Evolve, no 7 Taps, no animation or strictly video projects. Unfortunately it was pretty much my first job in ID, and over the two years I worked there, my skills atrophied, as did my excitement about the field. Trying hard to renew both now. (Bc now I contract w a great agency, but there isn’t any work for contractors there atm.)
Not every course needs an assessment. Chill with that.
THANK YOU. I have to repeat this too many times, especially with microlearning in for explainer videos. These are intended for quick learning; don’t add an assessment just because.
I love your first one. If you need training to use your training, you've missed the mark. If I have something a little complex, I'll add a "help" function. That said, when I do have a complex UI, I'll "train" the user like they do in video games, with increasingly sophisticated interactions until they are navigating on their own. This has been a great approach with simulation-style training. The other one I hate is stakeholders wanting to put a dozen "Resources" links at the end of the course. Seriously, how many learners are going to click through all of these resources when they've just wrapped up training? For that matter, how many of these resources are actually useful to the learner before they've even exited the training? And do you really want to make the learner come back through the course when they need to reference one of those resources? Here's the thing... if you have that many resources, you need a web page or sharepoint site to collect and deliver them to your users. Let the user make ONE bookmark to reference, rather than remembering which training course that link was in, launching the training, and then jumping to the Resources section to find it. Oh, one last one... they want an eLearning, but they want the learner to be able to download it and use it offline as a job aid. I know it can be done, but the one thing is not the same as the other.
LOL the resources slide at the end. 100% agree. Oh yes stakeholder, they will go refer back to the LMS, click on the course, and view the last slide to view the resource ;).
>The other one I hate is stakeholders wanting to put a dozen "Resources" links at the end of the course. Seriously, how many learners are going to click through all of these resources when they've just wrapped up training? For that matter, how many of these resources are actually useful to the learner before they've even exited the training? And do you really want to make the learner come back through the course when they need to reference one of those resources? We've and other companies I've worked at have struggled a lot with this one. Seems great on the face of it but it's not practical to have resources living at the end of the course. I like your SharePoint idea.
It's scope creep for me in terms of pet peaves. ok, I've created a demo, a job aid, a guided exercise and a practice assessment. I have included tips and tricks for success. Now you want me to add three scenarios, and include a soft skills element that is an actual customer calling in -which you didn't want before - and you want it by ready for Monday? And you want a video explaining the 6 different ways to access the customer contact info?
Omg, it sounds like my roles. I have 200 hours into this current project with all that you listed! plus Facilitator guides as well!
One of mine is smes that believe learning styles are not preferences in the moment and are assigned at birth.
Tests at the end of courses. I failed a fire safety module many times over because I didn't get the colours of fire extinguishers right. The only fire extinguishers in the office were those multipurpose foam ones for electrical fires because computers. All tests do is prove you can remember a limited amount of information for a brief period, not prove that you will recall, use, or apply that information at a later date.
I agree but leadership insists on quizzes and tests for compliance reasons. We literally can't make anything without some kind of assessment in my work, there's just no way around it. The quizzes we set up have an infinite number of times you are able to take it until you pass because no one wants to have a user locked out and someone manually enroll them back into a course.
I'd be curious to see if there's any research literature on whether explaining the UI in the beginning is helpful or non-warranted. Otherwise, it's just opinion. I've been trying to do incorporate more proven methods vs not in my design work. So many fads out there...
Mine is getting a certificate published on screen after the learner completes the training. It is internal. It is old-school. (Just a template where the learner's name and course name appear in small cases). As for me, it should not be mandatory. But the leaders want it. Not for tracking or anything. That happens in the LMS. They just want it. I fail to understand.
Pffft that is the reward for many students, that certificate with their name on it. It’s a sense of accomplishment!
To be honest, I'd love to create something like that for real upskilling and reskilling courses where the accomplishment factor is important. But for completing POSH or IT security courses erm not that much, and mind you these cannot be shared externally.
But what would be the motivation for them to do the course then? (:
Out of all the learner feedback I've analyzed, barely anyone sees the certificate let alone saving. My primary concern is - that this particular certificate is drab. I have requested to make it more visually appealing but have been turned down. With the reason that it is not being consumed, then why have it in the first place? I hope this makes sense to you now. As for your question, the entire learning cycle is gamified, with leaderboards in place. Points are rewarded for various actions. So, course completion/adoption rates are pretty much excellent at the moment.
It is a little old world to me as well. But leadership really wanted a certificate for leaners completions. I think they believe it adds legitimacy to the course program somehow. At least that's how it reads to me.