Discover how to ensure that your user experience meets the expectations of your users. Discover how you can quantitatively evaluate your UI to determine if it will resonate with users.

2. UX for Elearning:
Designing the Learner
Experience
Majid Tahir / majid@acumenity.com

3. About Me/
acumenity
▪ acumenity
▪ We build communities for your products
▪ Majid Tahir
▪ I’m a Seasoned Entrepreneur
▪ Partner and Founder of acumenity
▪ Provide technical direction and leadership
▪ Have experience working at large management
consulting firms as well as boutique design
agencies

4. You Have a
Job to Do
▪ Imagine you are tasked with developing/
designing an awesome experience
▪ And it’s due in 2 months
▪ And there’s no content ready
▪ And the users are not understood
▪ And…yeah, this is bad

5. How Do You
Do Your Job?
▪ Let’s go online and see what’s out there!
▪ Good luck sorting that out
▪ What looks cool when you’re desperate
may not be cool once delivered
▪ Let’s read design books/articles!
▪ Do you really have the time?
▪ Hit-or-miss probability
▪ I have design experience super-powers
▪ Nope

6. How Do You
Do Your Job?
Is this good?

7. How Do You
Do Your Job?
Or, is this good?

8. How Do You
Do Your Job?
Do I read this book? Or that book?
Or articles!?

9. Some Great
Resources…
▪ Responsive Web Design (Ethan Marcotte)
▪ The Web Designer’s Idea Book (Patrick McNeil)
▪ Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug)
▪ Designing for Emotion (Aaron Walter)
▪ Mobile First (Luke Wroblewski)
▪ Android Design Patterns (Greg Nudleman)
▪ Mobile Design Pattern Gallery (Theresa Neil)
▪ Motivational Design for Learning and Performance
(John M. Keller)
▪ User Centered Design (Travis Lowdermilk)
▪ Interactive Design (Andy Pratt & Jason Nunes)
▪ And so forth…

10. How to succeed
at your job
▪ You want to stand out
▪ Make it awesome
▪ You want to defend your work
▪ Be able to explain every element and the
harmony between them
▪ You want to quickly learn from your work
▪ Knowing why you chose elements and
design prepares you to incorporate
feedback and criticism
▪ You want confidence in yourself
▪ You should be able to repeat your success
because you know why

11. How to learn to
stop worrying
and love your job
Start the work by ensuring success
1. Understand what makes an impactful user
experience
2. Use the acumenity Clarity Index to create
an awesome experience

12. What is User Experience?
The judicious application of certain user-
centered design practices
(http://uxdesign.com/ux-defined#sthash.y5mlAv63.dpuf)

13. UCD Principles
Excerpted from usabilitynet.org
1. Design for the users and their tasks
2. Be consistent
3. Use simple and natural dialogue
4. Reduce unnecessary mental effort by
the user
5. Provide adequate feedback
(success/fail at goal)
6. Provide adequate navigation
mechanisms
7. Let the user drive
8. Present information clearly
9. Be helpful
10. Reduce errors

14. 3 Benefits of a Great User
Experience

15. How Do You Achieve a
Great User Experience?

16. What Do You Achieve through
Great User Experiences?
Gain the positives and avoid the negatives

17. What Are the Elements of
acumenity’s Clarity Index?

18. What Are the Elements of
acumenity’s Clarity Index?

19. The Clarity Index

20. The Clarity Index

21. Increase Tact
Tact is the sensitivity and empathy towards the learner.

22. Tact: Attractive Design
Brings Instant Credibility
A Stanford University study states that 46% of participants
assessed the credibility of a site based on the appeal of the
visual design, including layout, typography, and color
schemes. http://credibility.stanford.edu
Where would you buy your wedding dress?
Site A Site B

23. Where would you buy your electronics?
Site A Site B

24. Where would you buy your groceries?
Site A Site B

25. Tact: Aesthetic-Usability Effect
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect is the phenomenon that
describes users perception that more aesthetically
pleasing designs to be easier to use than less
aesthetically pleasing designs. Users are more
sympathetic to faults or failures if a design is
aesthetically pleasing, leading them to believe that
the better looking option is the better option entirely.

30. Distract: Remove
Distractions

31. Distract: Use Simple,
Meaningful Visuals
Consider using simple drawings or icons that lack
unnecessary detail.

32. Distract: Use Simple,
Meaningful Visuals

36. Interact
User interaction or active involvement

37. Passive
Learning
Interction
Make Learning Active
Interaction
Active
Learning

38. Interaction
• Creates an active learning process that aids understanding
and retention.
• Ensure that your knowledge checks or quizzes test that they
have understood the learning objective rather than recall
what they just heard.
• Product simulations create workflow memories. Can be
useful, but not if your product changes often
• Exercises engage the user to independently solve problems
outside the training.
• “Variety is the spice of life.”

39. Interaction

40. How to Quantify
the Relationship
▪ Tact & Interact
▪ Simplest way is to develop a checklist
▪ Elements meeting more of the checklist items
score higher
▪ Elements not meeting all of the checklist items
should be redone or justified
▪ For example: User Centered Design principles
▪ Ensure standards are met
▪ Principles can be used as the checklist

41. Testing the Index
High Tact: Navigation
menu placed on the left
Distract: Consider using
simplified visuals
:Low Interact Difficult
interaction, especially
on mobile
Low Tact: Visuals do
not look like buttons
Low Tact: Important
Menu items are faded
Distract:
Too much
text; difficult
to read

42. How Mobile Impacts the
Learning Experience
▪ Extra diligence must be applied in identifying
learning distractions.
▪ Mobile requires a different set of tact than
desktop
▪ Different design and content conventions are
used on mobile than desktop

43. Wrap Up
and Q&A
Majid Tahir / majid@acumenity.com / 847-312-6504