Tag: design

  • Tips to Stop Sucking at PowerPoint

    The title is bold and direct, I know. I like it actually, because when a PowerPoint presentation sucks, it really, really sucks. So sometimes, we just have to call it what it is. YOU SUCK AT POWERPOINT! The bottom line is that we cannot escape PowerPoint in today’s business and/or academic world. And as Jessee…

  • Brushing Up On Your User Experience Design Skills? Take A Look At These Books

    Yesterday I wrote about the importance of user experience design testing as part of the overall eLearning course testing process. Paul Seys compiled a fantastic list of books on user experience design (or UX). Borrowing mainly from Web and multimedia design best practices, much of this can inform the design of your online learning environments…

  • Taking Into Account User Experience In Your E-learning Design

    Two months ago, Tom Kuhlmann wrote a piece on the importance of thoroughly reviewing your e-learning courses before launching them. One of his key tips was to watch learners go through the course in order to understand how they experience it. Web and multimedia designers call this user experience design testing. ZURB, a team of…

  • From the Innovative Mind of Janey Clarey: Instructional Design by Example Blog

    Janet Clarey is one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of training and developement. It is no surprise that she has kicked off this absolutely fabulous idea of blogging about real life instructional design examples. I wish her the best of luck possible and am thinking up an example to contribute in the very…

  • Wireframing Tools for Mockups and Prototypes

    Great list and commentary on desktop and online wireframing tools to create mockups and prototypes for when pen and paper just aren’t enough. Like most things today, the world of interaction design moves quickly. Although a pen and notebook may suffice when it comes to simply jotting down ideas, planning a series of website screens…

  • The Ethnography of Design

    I’ve been looking at ethnographical studies to determine how researchers and experts collaborate. Of course, this proposes that ethnographic analysis can inform design. This leads me to reflect further on the impact of the research results on the way that online environements in which researchers and experts collaborate are designed. Ethnography is a research method…

  • Blog Design Study

    Smashing Magazine present their findings of their study of top blogs. Part 1 discusses layout design and typographic settings. Part 2 discusses navigation design, information architecture, advertisements and functionality (RSS-feeds, tag clouds, pagination, etc). What Smashing Magazine has to say about their study: We have identified 30 design problems and considered solutions for each of…

  • The Capacity to Recall vs. the Capacity to be Resourceful

    In a post entitled Brain 2.0 : eLearning Technology, Tony Karrer discusses whether or not it is more important to be knowledge-able rather than knowledgeable. The basic premise is whether or not is more important to: store a bunch of information in our minds that we can recall at any time (recall), or know which…

  • If an Image is Worth a Thousand Words, How Much is an Animation Worth?

    Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James H. Fowler, Ph.D. recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network. What is fantastic with this article published online is that there is a page with supplementary material containing an animation entitled: Dynamic…

  • Visual Display of Information

    A few years ago, I discovered Edward Tufte, who has been writing about how to efficiently display information. Here are 2 exerpts from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) – click the images to enlarge. I was thoroughly impressed with the multiple examples of clever mix of text and images. It made me reflect…