Upfront planning and design considerations can be intimidating to some. It is very difficult to design visuals when you don’t have content, and tough to set the mood for a story that might not exist yet.

The process of planning ahead for design and functionality changes down the road can be intimidating. First you’ll have to come to the realization that there is no way to predict the future. Who could have guessed that by 2010, all computer monitors would be set to 10,000 x 6,000 resolution, and that project you created in 2004 at 640 x 480 is now the size of a postage stamp? Some things just can’t be predicted. Your best bet would be to look one or two years ahead and take a guess, especially with projects you know will be used year after year.

Issues that arise from changes in storyboards, content or anything affecting your project can be infinite. What if in the middle of your 6 month long project you came to realize you needed audio controls, such as play, stop and volume. What would save you time and get the addition completed would be a sloppy hack job. This might take you less than a day to get up and running. You’d be doing this however, with the knowledge that any future projects based on this backend system you’re building will crumble the second any programmer but yourself touches the source files.

An alternative approach is to work within structured guidelines using reasonable timeline goals. This audio fix might now take 2 weeks to do it right as opposed to half a day. What a bummer! The truth is, when you do something wrong or sloppy, the problems you create may take a whole month to fix later on, as other aspects of the code become dependant on your sloppy code. It’s the house of cards effect, where you pull out one part of the structure that all other parts rely on, and the whole thing may come crashing down.

Seeing there’s no right way to plan far in advance, what you have to do is create some sort of constant update timeline. Checkpoints in development where you really focus on debugging code, making everything work together flawlessly, so that in the end you don’t have a hulking mess of jumbled up templates, actionscript files and graphics.

I had an interesting discussion with a client yesterday about project direction and process, and there was some open debate on how to develop an interaction to not only meet a tight budget, but fulfill some broad goals. Is there a best method, or does every project deserve to flex and adjust into multiple styles of interaction and teaching methods? Also discussed were the pros and cons of linear vs. nonlinear activities, and we went over the possibilities of having a little of both mixed in.

Getting to the point, I’ve written up a fairly detailed overview on Living Children’s initial project process. It covers our first four steps when brainstorming a new project, and covers each topic up to actual production (a page on production process will come another day).

The overall process includes:

• 1. Defining The Goal(s)
• 2. Rough Project Outline
• 3. Refining Goals and Listing Objectives
• 4. Creation of Flow Diagrams

Click here for the full page on project process, including samples of each step. This page will become a permanent addition under “About” in due time.

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.

A goal is a clearly stated word, phrase or description of what you hope to achieve through your eLearning course. Without a goal or goals, users can quickly misinterpret the reasoning behind your course. They may ask themselves “Why am I taking this course?” “What was I supposed to be learning about?” You end up wasting people’s time and money creating a generic, poorly though out eLearning course. Not only that, but if you don’t take your goals seriously, your user’s aren’t going to learn a single concept.

Also on the development end, without a clearly structured set of goals you’ll have little to fall back on if you get confused or want to add a new topic or feature. With a solid set of goals you can refer new ideas and project process back to a clearly stated list of objectives. If your new idea or direction doesn’t match up to that list, chances are it would dilute the effectiveness of your course.

Creating a Project Goal

When creating your project goal, the end result should immediately show what the topic to be covered is, the purpose of the course, as well as what success in understanding the topic will allow a learner to do. In other words a goal will show: (Oh there is more…)

If I think of eLearning as a means to immerse my students or employees in a topic, why wouldn’t I use it for all situations? For starters, eLearning, and especially the higher-end eLearning courses take a lot of time, energy and money to produce. eLearning is not meant to override proven learning methods, and I doubt you could ever beat real world experience as the ultimate teaching tool. So when and where should you implement an eLearning system? Let’s get an idea of basic situations where eLearning can be highly effective.

Lack of Access

The first area where eLearning can be highly effective is when you or your users have a lack of access to some form of physical item or situation. Let’s say topic being taught has a lot of costly materials associated with it.

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The most exciting prospect of eLearning is the ability to produce nearly any dangerous, or complex situation and provide access to anyone who has the skill to click a mouse. There really was nothing like the time I had a fashion major friend of my wife user test the Virtual Knee Surgery simulation before launch.

Here was a person, who pretty much knew how to check email, and after 10 minutes of slicing and dicing, felt completely capable of performing major surgery in her own home. To hear her response and excitement over having just done surgery was inspiring, as I’d given someone who would have never in their life cut someone open, the ability to take on the roll of a med student with $400,000 in school loans, all in a 10 minute simulation.

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When you think of eLearning, what comes to mind? Is it a technological advancement created to rid the world of teachers and the traditional classroom environment? Is it a term you use in your job description to impress parents and colleagues?

I have spent the last ten years creating educational content using Flash, and six of those years were spent creating eLearning activities. The reason being, I had never heard the term eLearning until 2000 or so, and it truly wasn’t a life changing event as I simply kept on doing what I was doing, whether it had a name or not. eLearning, the word and concept itself, can be defined in numerous ways. Just like asking the question “is this normal?” No one can really define ‘normal’ as each person relates the concept to their own personal experiences. (Oh there is more…)

One thing I’ve noticed over the last couple of years user testing eLearning activities with kids, is that the present adults tend to underestimate their kid’s abilities. I’ve watched adults play through the same activity and become hopelessly lost or stuck, not because the activity was broken, but more like their way of thinking had long settled into its routine of adulthood. When a kid gets stuck I’ve seen them do everything from randomly click everything on the screen, to socializing with a neighbor, collaborating to find out the answer. The adults just tended to give up or bottle in their frustration.

I really feel that fear, and more specifically, fear of consequence is a learned skill that a lot of adults grow to accept, and for good reason. When I was a kid I enjoyed setting things on fire… you know, cups of gasoline, WD-40, it was great fun! As an adult, understanding fear and consequences I now know that playing with such materials could have blown off my hand or burnt down my house. Now I am extremely responsible around such materials, and actually take the time to read warning labels. How boring! It’s like I’ve learned my place, had my fun and have settled in for a long and mundane ride. (Oh there is more…)