I had established in this earlier post that attaining a clearly defined goal is important. The following are some common problems that can not only detract from the clarity or success of your goal, but even cause your users to retain little or no information.

Problem 1: You know the goal of your course is to teach users about product X. The problem is that you have 3 managers, all fighting for the same promotion telling you what to do. Whenever you need a fact or concept approved, you are stuck running it by all 3 managers, each with their own idea of what is important to include, and each hating the other 2 managers.

Reason this is a problem: What you’d end up with is manager 1 wanting you to cover how great product X is, manager 2 wants you to showcase the molecular construction of product X, and manager 3 feels that underneath the giant marketing campaign for product X, product Y is really the product that matters. If you ended up building the course using all of their input, the user taking the course would be confused, and probably would find the whole thing to be a waste of time.

Solution: Have a conversation with your managers that tells them first and foremost you value not only the success of the project, but the success and betterment of your company as a whole. This will butter them up. They, politely demand that they decide on one overall manager who has the final say over course content. They can now argue all they want amongst themselves, but in the end it’s one manager, not three who makes the call on what is most important, and what best meets the requirements of your goal.

Problem 2: Your goal is too general or covers a broad area when it should be focused.

Reason this is a problem: If your goal covers hundreds of sub topics under an umbrella term it may be too general. A general or loose goal is not concise, and in no way helps a user retain everything they’ll need to know on any particular topic. Most people when taking a 10 minute long course would come away from the experience with two or three major and possibly 5 minor newly learned concepts. If your goal is too general and you expect the user to memorize 10 minor aspects each of 20 different products, you are heading down a path to failure. People just can’t retain that much information in ten minutes!

Solution: The easiest way to create a more specific goal is to brake up your general goal into sub categories, each with their own developed course. So while the overall general goal still holds relevant, you are successfully implementing your training through mini, to the point courses covering 2 to 5 concepts each.

Problem 3: Your course has been infected with some sort of over the top graphical style overload, effectively distracting your users from the all important topic being taught.

Reason this is a problem: Style and layout are very important. People react well to clean, uncluttered layouts that focus on one topic or idea at a time. If your course looks like a train wreck of animated .gif files, pixilated transitions, and farm animal sound effects you may have just pushed your chances of building a successful course off a giant cliff.

Solution: Building a course brand kit is the equivalent to having precise ‘Style Goals’. You may not think of your template, font type and sizes as well as graphical treatment as a brand, but they are. Having consistently high quality, well laid out courses helps your user focus on the relevant content, as opposed to that great picture you found of a dog eating a taco that just had to make its way into the course.

A course brand kit might outline the specifics of colors, branding elements (logos), menu type and placement, text placement, font type and size, graphical treatments, and layout issues (perhaps ½ inch of white space around every image).

Standardizing your visuals and styles will give your project a great graphical backbone and consistency that users will appreciate.