Design Guidance (Adult)
My upbringing into the World of Design was full of third-person impositions of colour, shape, contrast, and interaction design rules along side my own interpretation of what look and feels quality borne of schooling from excellent art and design teachers through school and my family’s artistic bent.
When it came to PowerPoint presentations, I found the graphics easy to negotiate but the presentation of information was a new science. I encountered lots of ‘experts’ but on reflection non were qualified to influence me. My thirst to maximise learning through PowerPoint, coupled with my own fledgling adult learning lead me to rush to employ a number of ‘expert’ sound-bites with dumb enthusiasm.
Almost without fail, the initial enthusiasm dulled to disappointment as each ‘expert’ opinion failed to match the knowledge I was gathering from Cert Ed (PCE) and self-learning XHTML for Webpage design in what I now know to be human interaction design (HID) or Graphical user-Interface Design (GID).
The experts had ‘read something in The Times’, or ‘heard something’ over dinner: I needed more than tertiary opinion or unreferenced bias. Even my own organisation’s trainer training included hard rulings on what to achieve and what to avoid in presentation design. Some well-intentioned bits of advice I recall are,
- • “Don’t use a green background, it’ll send your students to sleep”.
• “Always use yellow text on a blue background”.
• “Don’t use any font less than 36pt on a PowerPoint because the students at the back can’t read them- and stop reducing the size of the titles, Godfrey!”.
• “Don’t use more that 8 x 8 word blocks”.
• “List points in full if you are using bullets at all”.
• “Don’t use build or reveal effects”.
• “Never place images behind text”.
• “Always display images full-screen”.
I’ve read counter and counter-counter argument on most of these and conclude much of the hype over (PowerPoint) presentation design has been a result of opinion, conservancy, and of fashion. That which has been derived from research, of course, is open to debate and modification according to what success is discovered in the classroom and changing attitudes of the learner population. Things seem to need to change as time, technology, and expectancy move on.
As much as I admire a majority of Jacob Nielson’s Web guidance, and the fact so many learned experts refer to his opinion, I still find it difficult to agree with the clarity he believes he brings to textual content.
The pages on his Web Site are dull. They often appear overly-full of page-width text and lack user signposts. A lot of hard eye-searching seems required. This, despite the eye-movement research he published (to my joy).
Research claims to decide what I prefer. Often, it is – or feels wrong.
If I reflect on much of the advice and research gathered over the years I respect the work and summaries of the ‘teachers’ and ‘experts’, but often fail to feel included as a learner.
On expertise
With Jacob Neilson, he’s an influential expert. It seems you only need to mention his name and the World stops to listen. Who is an ‘expert’? When does an expert seek to justify their power base and influence and when does this lead to their being a politician. Education and design are such huge businesses I cannot feel but a little untrusting of a design utopia in a World so full of similar-subject books and papers delivering their similar but varying opinion.
As I 'mature' as a student I get the feeling that I am not being taught rules but offered guidance in the way or route I take forward in my development. Research is published to inform best practice and is updated regularly to keep pace with the changes in the way our members of our societies change, too. If that is the case, then what are standards? Who can claim to be expert enough to publish industry-wide standards? If the expert group is only agreeing a standard, what makes it the best where interpersonal interaction could easily enable an opinion to be omitted or stifled due to weakness in character? And, if that standard constrains my solutions as a designer, how can it be right?
It all comes down to our perception and acceptance of experts. There is evidence to suggest the culture of the expert is flawed. We aspire to be an expert in our field but what is our motivation?
I am an expert in a number of areas of my field of work. I have self-promoted the notion of expert in some areas over 20-years, others have promoted me as an expert across areas, too. Between these there are areas I have become an expert in because no one else seems to be. It doesn’t mean I always know an answer, but that I can administer a considered opinion. I am not so conceited as to believe I am always right, but in the face of no other viable solution I’ll use my force of personality to win an argument to ensure what I consider to be the best outcome for all. I love a win-win solution.
My fear is that some people can’t argue or they become awed by my vocabulary, position, or expertise. How can I then be satisfied the outcome is the best if I haven’t been challenged?
So experts become expert as a result of the environment they are in. Others are perceived as an expert and do little to correct the assumption. To be an expert can be a powerful experience.
A piece on the philosophy of colour on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site (click here for link) claims we are all experts in how we cognate colour although there are experts in how to measure it. We each have, “different ranges and levels of expertise”.
Perhaps it is my (our) perception of expertise that is at fault? Wikipedia (see here for link) indicates how this could be a flaw. “is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by the public or their peers.” An expert doesn’t know everything; we think they do!
Expertise is also local. It shouldn’t be general in the realm of the development of visualizations? Expertise develops, continues to develop, and should develop. Roll over the experts of today, let me find some new ones for tomorrow (me, me, me!).
Personal Preferences and Individual Needs
There are Learning Styles and Learning Preferences, etc, etc. A great deal of mileage has been made out of these and there are Instructional Designers and teachers all over the Developed World who struggle to ensure each learning episode for which they are responsible to deliver includes a variety of activities in order each learner with each preference or style is accommodated.
Some fail to see that each activity they develop for each preference or style is pertinent to only one part of the whole delivery – that some learners might only have their needs pandered to in Part 1, but not during Parts 2-6, which are designed for other learners. It’s a balance we need, across the range of activities to include all of our learners at all of the time, not for them to take part in learning only when invited. Preferences are not didactic absolutes.
We are so individual that any packaging of the strategies that we particularly learn from should be difficult. Thank goodness for the well-intentioned folk who normalise our differences and allow us to develop them to become our strengths.
Altogether, Now
When it comes to our preferences on how we wish information to be presented to us we are possibly not the executive expert, but we’ll be able to demonstrate our preference in our practice of our decoding of that information (even if we cannot vocalise it in a scientific language, or need help or facilitation through our tutor or teacher, etc.) I fear some of what I have read forgets this, being overly generalist though applicable to or tested within defined circumstances that are anything but general. There is even shoe-horning of findings to suit specific purposes; prejudice or suppositions result in potentially stagnant guidelines that when employed, may not work.
Okay: we know this. It’s how it is. It just doesn’t sit right. I’d like to work out what’s good for my learners rather than reading what is right for all learners. I fear the lack of facial interaction that eLearning can present to a tutor results in overly reacting to becoming generalist. Designers of eLearning try too hard to remain main-stream in what they present often at the expense of commonly acknowledged principles of presenting engagement and activity resulting in directed reading reference materials (see and example via this link).
Related to Learning Icons™ and Best Practice
The more widely I have read around the icon matter the more I have become aware that each research episode has been designed around a fairly unique problem to which wide-appeal solutions, sometimes ready-made from the can, are applied.
Each application of icons is different. Each of us designing icons to implement as navigation devices or Learning Icons™ (objects) has a different agenda, or in Dewey’s words, “need” to fulfil.
Each of us carries our own prejudices, principles, and learning whether taught or developed, and we mix these to create a consensus of our own thoughts. If “A” worked for group “A”, and “B” for group “B”, how can solutions “A” and “B” both suit groups “A” and “B”?
I think I’m a little frustrated, like finding out Santa doesn’t exist after my wife went away for Christmas. (Devastating). I hoped to find a formula, a hard and fast rule set to harmonise the process of icon design across the breadth of their implementation in IT, CBL, etc.
The British Standards Institute (BSI) don’t make their solutions freely available to all designers: and these are standards?! What is the point of introducing standards if they are not freely available or well promoted in the market place? Why, in the absence of these standards, do designers derive different solutions to those developed by the standards institutes toward, or from “best practice”? Best practice where; with whom? In what text or context?
Further disappointment abounds from the Widgets for people with reading difficulties. Some of their icon designs are (to me) awful and their drawing presentation matches only my downwardly spiralling expectation of them. They’ll work in their text, fine, but does that make their style something to emulate across education? Yuck! You can please some of the people some of the time…
A Summary of Sorts
I think I have a point: standards and research guide and inform, there is no right or wrong, only what is effective or ineffective in promoting learning. Trial and error: research, design, application, and evaluation.
The trouble is, I have a great belief in what I am doing but I don’t have much to offer as an explanation of my own. I am not an expert in your eyes. I have to use the expertise of others respected in different fields and shoe-horn it into my own work. I am becoming the monster I criticised earlier.
• An expert carries preferences and opinion as well as the proven.
• Experts are perceived or promoted by the observer, or themselves.
• Evidence-bases are not often generalist enough to apply in all situations.
• Standards are created incestuously and pimped out to the needy, the insecure, or the too rich to bother checking, “why?”
• Designers can be lead, scared into ‘best practice’ or driven by the expediency of the business budget.
What worries me is the expert designer or teacher who has learned much, but questioned little. I am sure they are more common than I think – or you know?
I can become a Member of an institute or professional body by submitting a portfolio and CV: at near £100 per annum I can continue to flout myself as an expert. Alternatively I can take higher education (degrees) at only cost of time and money to place letters after my name and then craft my educationalist writing style to publish research you might find credible. I mean, really! Me?
Perhaps frighteningly, yes. I can buy and develop your perception of me and still be crap. How many have gone before?
(See this link for a random example of becoming a professional)
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