What Makes Learning Videos Effective and Impactful?

Best Practices for Creating Learning Videos

Today, it’s common to use video and animation in the learning and performance space, but what makes one video effective and impactful and another one not so much? As a graphic designer and animator, here are some best practices you should consider when creating learning videos.

General Video Tips

Here are some overarching tips to consider at the start of your learning video project.

• Define the use. Understanding the role your video plays in your training is an important consideration. Is it a brief awareness-level video helping to showcase a new system your team is using, or is it an instructional video that should follow a more step-by-step approach?
• Break the topic up. It can help to break up your topic into small, manageable chunks. Don’t overwhelm learners with too much information — find a way to simplify what you want to say.
• Keep the video short and concise. This helps with the overall cost and budget, respects the learner’s time, and aligns with today’s shorter attention spans. Ideally, learning videos should be less than 12 minutes but definitely no more than 20 minutes. Three to six minutes is preferable. However, no matter the length, the video must effectively address the learning objectives.
• Know exactly what you want to say. Trim the fat off the script and watch out for bloating as your project moves along. Many times, when a team decides to create a video, a lot of attention and energy are directed to the project and soon every stakeholder wants to contribute additional material. It helps to have a single focus and stick to it. A video will tend to fall flat and sound like ‘corporate speak’ if you try to incorporate too many things at one time.
• Agree on the voice and feel. Make sure your team is in sync and agrees upon the ‘voice’ of the video. Whatever style you choose, the script, the visuals, and the audio should all align with this voice, and it should remain consistent throughout the entire video. If your team is making a short video introducing some new software, make sure the script doesn’t turn into how-to-use this software. The voice should align with the goal, and this can be particularly challenging when there are multiple stakeholders who want to be represented.

Text in Video

Here are some things to watch out for when using text in your videos.

• Avoid jarring color combinations. Be mindful of your color choices. Red text on a blue background is hard to read and rarely looks good. Also, pay attention to the contrast, especially if the text is over an image or video. Black text won’t be legible over a dark video, and, likewise, white text over a light video can cause a problem. You may have to tint the image beneath or place a box behind the text to make sure it stands out from the background.

• Text should always be legible. Although on-screen text might fade, slide, pop, or otherwise animate in and out, it should remain legible most of the time. Text needs to sit still long enough for the learner to read it.

• Use a consistent font. Consistency looks good, and consistent fonts are no exception. Not only does this apply to choosing a standard font family but also to using lowercase, uppercase, sentence case, bold, italics, etc. If you plan to use multiple fonts and font styles, make sure there’s some element, such as color, size, or movement pattern, to indicate that they belong together.

• Remember hierarchy. A document or website will usually have a title, headings, subheadings, and body text. It’s important to define and use a hierarchy with animated text even if you only show a few words here and there. Important things should be bigger, bolder, etc. And remember that if everything is bolded, nothing is bolded!
• Plan for translation. Consider if any translation of on-screen text is going to be needed. Let’s say you have “It’s a big deal!” animation. In a different language, this phrase might be four words, or it might use much longer words. Other languages don’t follow the same subject/verb/object order, so it helps to plan and allow extra spacing around the text to accommodate any additional sizing or placement issues that may arise.

Movement and Timing

Let’s move on to some best practices for dealing with video movement and timing.

• Use movement judiciously. Movement should engage the learner and not distract or confuse. This means the movement should always direct the learner’s eye somewhere. Examples of this could be highlighting an item or text, bringing something on or off the screen, or using movement to direct attention to where the next action will occur.
• Keep some movement happening. It usually looks good to have something moving, even just a little bit. Gentle changes, such as a bit of hair blowing in the wind, a pulsing star, or a slow background color change are small, but the learner will understand they aren’t just looking at a static image. This helps keep the scene feeling dynamic.
• Be mindful of the pacing. When it comes to the pacing, move quickly, but don’t rush. Brains need time to absorb things, especially complicated concepts. If you try to cram too much into the learner’s brain, the prefrontal cortex will explode, and learners won’t remember anything.
• Use easing. Easing is a term that means an animation varies its speed across a movement and doesn’t simply use the same speed the entire time. Most things start slowly, build up speed, and then gradually slow back down. Using these principles in your animation will give it a more polished and realistic look. For example, a car doesn’t move from point A to point B at the same speed the entire way. Instead, there’s acceleration, deceleration, and friction. The same goes for a basketball, a bird, or a person. Everything follows the rules of science, and animated items look more realistic when they follow the rules too.
• Use match cuts. Play off visual similarities when transitioning into a different scene. A view of the earth can turn into a ball and bounce out of the frame, for example.
• Be Consistent. Nearly any movement pattern can work. By that I mean things can fly in from the right, left, top or bottom, or they can fade in, grow, or shrink. There are countless ways to create movement, but the important thing is to be consistent in your style. This consistency should apply to your choice of graphics, colors, movements, timing, audio, effects, and more. It’s perfectly fine to mix and match or have multiple styles, especially for longer animations, but everything should feel like a cohesive package throughout the video. For example, a learner will get used to important text popping in and exploding, but if you suddenly slide text in, that will break the pattern and be distracting.

Effects and Sound

Here are a few more things to keep in mind.

• Limit your effects. Have you ever used all the filters in Photoshop? It’s neat to see how they can modify an image, but they very rarely help make an image better; usually they look old and dated. Most premade filters aren’t your friend. The same goes for many of the motion effects bundled within video software. Many are just too jarring. Having a word pop on the screen should be light and quick, not overwhelming. A good rule of thumb is to not overuse glows, blurs, and other effects. When it comes to these effects, think smaller and fewer.
• Music should enhance the video. A soundtrack is a nice touch, but make sure it matches the overall speed, tone, and feel of the information, and that it also doesn’t get too repetitive or distracting. If the video has audio narration, it’s very important that the music doesn’t compete with or overpower the narration.
• Narration helps. Sometimes just an image and music play nicely together, but adding narration usually helps to reinforce the content and makes it stick in learners’ minds. The style and tone of voice can play an important part in how information is delivered and interpreted, so it should be easy to hear and understand.

So, are you ready to create a video? Hopefully, these best practice tips can help you ask the right questions when you create your next learning video.

Want more information? My colleague Carly Patterson and I conducted a webinar, “Videos and Animations: Defining and Creating Movement,” where I talk more about items in this blog and Carly gives her perspective on creating learning videos from the instructional design side. Additionally, check out Episode 2: Animate Your Ideas in ILG’s podcast series “Let’s Talk Learning Technology,” where my colleague Zach Swisher and I discuss all things animation from what tools to use to how we get our ideas for using animations in learning.