From Hierarchy to Avoiding the Rainbow: Key Design Principles for Engaging E-Learning Courses

Best Practices for Reducing Text and Expanding Visuals

As a graphic designer and media developer at Innovative Learning Group, I work with a lot of different instructional designers (IDs), each with their own communication style and personality. Over time, you get to learn their personal style and quirks. While some IDs enjoy diving into content stylizing — suggesting photos, layouts, animation ideas, etc., others won’t go near that territory with a 10-foot pole. Some of them are so preoccupied with overzealous subject matter experts (SMEs) and meeting multiple deadlines that they just rely on me to handle all creative aspects of a course

Recently, I was asked if I could give a short presentation to one of our life sciences clients on best practices for designing e-learning courses. I knew I could probably give a month-long course and still only scratch the surface, so I decided to boil it down to a few tips I’ve seen used most often with IDs and SMEs. These tips aren’t only valuable for anyone handling content but also serve as a great reminder for me.

Focus on Hierarchy

One of the key elements of design is hierarchy (or visual order). Often, I receive content that’s so crammed onto a page that I have no idea where to start looking. Most learners typically look for a title first, so they know what to expect. But then what? They need to be able to “see” where to jump next. Common ways to achieve this include using font sizes (no more than three different sizes per page), bolding, italicizing, color, and graphical elements (such as lines and boxes) to frame content boxes.

Here are other key principles you can follow:

Avoid Excessive Formatting

It’s handy to use a specific color or bold typeface to call out and accentuate an important piece of information. Unfortunately, I often run into pages full of bold, colored text. It’s hard to tell what’s important, and the screen becomes extremely distracting. It’s best to use this effect sparingly for the most significant impact. If you do find yourself highlighting too much information, it might be a good time to reassess the text onscreen. Maybe some of the excess language can be removed or put into audio/narration? Sometimes it’s easy to forget e-learning is not a novel. One other approach is to simply separate out chunks of information into clean, short, bullets. This can often make an overwhelming amount of content easy to “digest.”

Avoid the “Rainbow”

It’s easy to get familiar with a company’s branding, see all the colors they have to offer, and use  them to the extreme! I often see charts or pop-up interactions where every single bit of information is divided into a new color. This not only looks bad from a design perspective, but it’s also visually very confusing. Don’t forget to ask yourself a few important things when you start to divide up items by color, especially if you are using three or more colors:

• Why does this need to be a different color than everything else?
• Could I separate this using other visuals/icons instead?
• Will multiple colors benefit the learner or just be distracting?

There might be instances where there’s really a need to have color separation, but make sure you’re doing it with intent (or consult your nearest graphic designer).

Visuals Should Not Distract

This is a difficult one to master and can involve many opinions, but again, the essential word here is “intent.” Each visual you add to a course needs to add value. If it’s just there for eye candy, it’s important that it stays out of the learner’s way. We also want to make sure we aren’t overwhelming learners. For example, I’ll receive a slide with seven vastly different images for each little piece of information and they all need to flash on and off screen in 30 seconds. Not good! You want to keep things moving and interesting, but you also need to make sure the learner is absorbing the content, and that it’s easy to take in and doesn’t overwhelm.

As I mentioned, the tips, tricks, and guidelines are endless! If you’d like a short presentation to go into more depth about the best practices to create engaging e-learning modules, please reach out. There are many useful resources online; one I particularly recommend is an ILG blog on Gestalt Principles for e-learning written by my colleague Eris Noreen. Eris provides additional insights into why designers do the things we do, and how you can apply these principles as well.