DDX Day 4: Zombies, xAPI, WFH & CRAP ... oh my!

Tracy Parish is you. (Or the you you want to be when you grow up.) She’s the Instructional Designer, LMS Administrator, Voiceover Artist, Visual Designer, & Learning Consultant. Team of one. That spirit of “if it’s got to be, it’s got to be me” gave her very practical opener to DDX today extra moxie. If I had to sum it up, Tracy’s featured session was full of CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, & Proximity. She led the virtual crowd on a visual tour of the rules of UX and UI for digital learning. Check out Robin Williams book The Non-Designer’s Design Book for even more CRAP, but here’s the list that Tracy shared to get started:

• Size and Scale (helps draw focus/attention to specific elements)
• Color and Contrast (helps things pop, draws eyes to key elements)
• Hierarchy in Typography (guides the user in terms of where to look first)
• Spacing (white/negative space – draws the user’s gaze, shows how things are interconnected)
• Alignment (helps user focus on content, designs can mix and match shapes)
• Rule of odds (idea that things that are in odds are more visually appealing than things in events)
• Repetition (take one visual element and repeat it throughout to keep design flowing, gives user an idea of what to expect)
• Leading lines (naturally draws attention from one element to the associated information)
• Rule of thirds (draws attention, visually creates movement on screen, makes things feel balanced)
• Perspective (gives the idea of depth)
• Proximity (gives the sense that items that are grouped together work together)

But wait there’s more! Tracy offered up a whole bunch of gestalt principles and UI design principles (let me know if you’d like the list, or check out her presentation in the DDX app). And then she shared a really awesome tip I’d never heard of: to check your design, take a screenshot of it, blur the screenshot (you can do this in Snagit or PowerPoint) and then look at what stands out. Is that what you intended? So simple, so effective. 

Duncan Welder & Art Werkenthin’s session offered tips for making the business case to your organization to adopt xAPI. As they got started, Duncan described the xAPI data stream as “like Twitter without all the fighting” which I thought was brilliant. And funny. (and then the two of them went on to share 5 xAPI case studies in the xAPI Cohort weekly web session later in the afternoon – a full day of production!)

"like Twitter without all the fighting"

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Allen Partridge‘s review of research he co-authored on L&D strategy post COVID-19. If you’ve read this far into this post, you won’t be too surprised by the fact that organizations in his research reported an increased use of learning platforms and online communications. 

Allen offered context to the role of L&D in this new environment. Remote office work has been around for a decade or more. That’s not new. The change is now the number of people who have a sudden, forced change in lifestyle, family dynamics, economic impacts and the reality of serious disease. After a brief spurt of increased productivity (now we don’t commute!) we can expect (and are seeing already as we head into the fall) burnout, depression, anxiety and overall decreased productivity.

Bright spots? Of course. Organizations are emphasizing training on wellness, mindfulness and balance for both employees and families. And we’re getting more creative in avoiding the wear and tear of excessive travel.

Allen’s research report isn’t live yet, but for a prequel, check out this report that Jessica Jackson and I co-authored for the Learning Guild in early summer.

One of the things I love about Karl Kapp is his casual way of dropping research-based insights and zombies into practical takeaways about learning design and gamification. Instead of featuring high-end games out of the reach of most L&D teams’ budgets, he demonstrated simple ways to use gamification with tools we already have or can get for (almost) free. Fun fact: Students in active learning experiences learn more but feel like they learn less. Karl’s suspicion is that this is because it’s easier to learn in these contexts so people don’t feel like they’ve had to work as hard to get the context. This explains why people groan at doing role play activities … but learn so much from them.

And there was a whole conversation about whether and how to introduce zombies into your organization. No kidding. It was awesome. And totally on point for 2020.

DDX spans 2 weeks!

Week 1 wraps up with featured speakers Myra Roldan & Josh Cavalier. Betwixt and between I’m looking forward to sessions by Emily Wood, Stephanie Lawless, Cara North & Carla Torgerson … and more! But it’s sooooo hard to choose. Well done, DDX.

Next week on deck ...

Both the DevLearn DDX and ATD’s Fall Virtual Conference. I’ll have sessions in one or the other every day so stay tuned for SlideShares, samples and more wrap-ups like these. (With huge props to Leanne Gee & Marijn Meijer who are helping me be in 3 places at once this week.)

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