How NOT to do navigation and instructions in eLearning

Are you treating your new hires or people who do your online learning like they don’t have a brain?

I often see instructional text for activities and navigation through eLearning content done in a way that treats staff or the audience as though they’re thick.?

I'll fess up, I wrote this blog over 5 years ago.

And even though I’ve seen improvements. I still come across many internal online learning courses that still follow these same patterns.

So here are some ways you can treat your audience like idiots:

1. State the obvious, obviously
2. Push next to continue… repeat, repeat, repeat, did you get that, do you know how to push next?
3. Only ever give instructions in text and make sure it includes lots of detail. Okay now you can read the next sentence.
4. Always put instructions in for the lowest common denominator. Okay now you can read the next sentence.
5. Never take into account previous experiences with technology. Assume everyone is a blank slate and they never used the internet, Youtube or scrolled through a website.
6. Make sure no content can be skipped ( ?? I mean missed). If you didn’t read it, see it or hear it here then you won’t know or learn it.?
7. Never mind how disengaged you are, if navigation is locked then you must have learnt it!
8. To save getting lost you can move forwards (next button) or backwards (back button) only.
9. Blatantly state when it is the end of the module and give precise instructions on how to exit it. After all you don’t want them stuck in your eLearning course forever!! They’ve got work to do.
10. Give pointless instructions — if you wish to read these points you can scroll back to the top of the page?;)

I know I’ve focused on sarcasm in this post. But I’m surprised as I keep seeing the above techniques repeated again and again. Especially in slide-based courses—I’m looking at you ?? Storyline.

Have you seen any other navigation and instructional techniques that didn’t work or treated the audience like idiots? Please share and comment below.

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And just in case you didn’t know, this is the end ??.