UX/UI Design: Pitfalls And Ideas That Really Work
UX/UI Is Not Ornament, It is Basis
On the earth of customized eLearning, good content material alone is not sufficient. Learners count on intuitive, partaking, and accessible platforms that assist—not hinder—their studying expertise. That is the place UX/UI is available in. For Tutorial Designers, UX/UI designers in EdTech, and eLearning builders, mastering the Person Expertise in eLearning is not non-obligatory.
On this article, we’ll discover widespread pitfalls in eLearning design, break down greatest practices for crafting seamless UX/UI, and spotlight alongside the best way real-world examples that present how these ideas work in motion.
The Pitfalls Of Poor UI In eLearning
Let’s begin with the apparent: a scarcity of visible orchestration kills motivation.
Even with the best-written content material and most tailor-made studying journey, learners’ motivation can drop once they encounter a blandly designed course. A number of variables think about to influence this blandness, so let’s delve into the widespread ones.
1. An Unbalanced Textual content-To-Graphics-To-Colours Ratio
Learners have a restricted consideration span and reminiscence at any given second. Therefore, bigger our bodies of textual content and fewer visible breaks (whether or not inventive or informative) can shortly flip the duty of comprehension right into a battle to combat boredom.
Using too many fonts, not sufficient whitespace, too many colours, or too few colours can influence the steadiness on display screen. The perfect apply right here is to just be sure you are attaining steadiness within the visible that enhances your nice content material. Creating a method information on your venture that features most important parts corresponding to main and secondary colours in addition to colour utilization proportions helps. You might additionally embody the graphic type you’re going for and present the way it can work with textual content blocks inside precise content material.
As soon as you’ve got chosen your main and secondary colours, outline how a lot every will probably be used. Setting clear proportions helps create a constant, visually balanced type throughout your content material.
2. An Unclear And Inconsistent Design Language
Nice UI design ought to disappear into the background. If learners are busy determining the best way to work together with the platform, they don’t seem to be targeted on what they’re speculated to study.
Ensuring you’re basing your Person Interface on a system will be sure that no determination of colour, sizing, placement, and so forth., is made haphazardly. A superb tip is to check completely different obtainable UI techniques, corresponding to Google’s Materials Design, and make the most of the prevailing constructing blocks to your benefit. This ensures that no matter UI wants you may have will probably be correctly and constantly executed for any eLearning venture, whether or not a course on an LMS the place you possibly can customise buttons and your theme or a gamified interactive bundle.
An instance of that is establishing templates for each thinkable sort of web page or slide in your venture and ensuring the system you create accounts for the assorted potentialities of how your content material could be structured.
This showcases the best way to manage numerous web page parts right into a cohesive format utilizing design software program (on this case Figma), to display how all parts align and work together in a unified Person Expertise.
3. A Completely Set Up Course Optimized For Desktop Use That Dismisses The Proportion Of Cellular Customers
This pertains to extremely customizable authoring instruments amongst different platforms. It’s not non-obligatory to design for smaller screens. The objective right here is to begin from the smallest display screen attainable after which adapt your designs to the bigger ones. This ensures that font sizing, clunky and messy layouts, hover-only interactions, in addition to tiny faucet areas are all prevented. This is able to additionally inform your button sizing, in addition to the quantity of textual content that seems at a time. A really specific case of that is utilizing software program corresponding to Articulate Storyline to create totally interactive programs. Whereas this software program affords quite a lot of customizability and a wide range of capabilities and coding, what you design is what you get regardless of the display screen measurement. So, it would not be greatest apply to design your interactions based mostly on desktop-only parameters as a result of it can most definitely translate badly when seen on cell.
Display seize of a course in-built Articulate Storyline with a customized UI. Be aware: Faucet targets like buttons must be not less than 38×38 pixels to make sure simple interplay on cell gadgets.
4. A Weak Visible Hierarchy
This goes again to the system you created on your venture. A course that doesn’t outline the content material construction visually can simply grow to be boring if not complicated. Using a correct Kinds Scale will guarantee there’s sufficient readability. And whereas at it, you have to guarantee that you’ve not less than two scales: a desktop and a cell one. And the perfect apply right here is to make use of two fonts, one for headings and one other for physique textual content and buttons. This rule has been tried and examined because the invention of printmaking and helps the learners establish the sections of your course extra simply and anchor themselves within the studying journey. One other level of which try to be conscious is ensuring you’re accounting for the font sizes throughout completely different languages when relevant. Level or pixel sizes change from one font to a different and from one language to a different. So, whereas 16px is the rule for cell font measurement, it’s not essentially true in all languages and font decisions. Make time to check and examine.
An instance of the textual content type scales for cell and desktop.
5. Not Sufficient Consideration To The Particulars
After caring for all of the above factors, considerate use of animations, transitions, and suggestions animations could make the interface really feel extra alive and responsive. Using animations sparingly to bolster actions—like a checkmark when a module is accomplished or refined motion when hovering over interactive parts—will create a greater expertise for the learner.
Now that we lined the UI ache factors, let’s dive into how being attentive to sure UX pitfalls can uplift the educational journey.
The Pitfalls Of Poor UX In eLearning
1. Non-Person-Centered Design
Designing a studying journey with out correct analysis and a superb understanding of your learner would possibly flip into wasted time, effort, and assets. To keep away from that, begin with the learner in thoughts. Perceive their objectives, challenges, tech habits, and accessibility wants. Creating learner personas helps you modify the educational preferences and objectives and lets you work across the learners’ ache factors. Alternatively, mapping the person journey locations you of their head and ensures that precedence is ready to what issues. This validates the selections made and will increase relevance, motivation, and retention.
2. Poorly Timed Disclosures Or Directions Throughout The Studying Journey
Think about beginning a brand new on-line course, and earlier than you even begin with the introduction, you get messages and directions about gadgets with which you have not interacted but. This is applicable strongly to gamified programs. And people must be handled utilizing correct gaming UX. Take into consideration progressively onboarding your learner and solely dissipating the related directions or suggestions because the journey unfolds. This may be simply achieved if the journey map has been nicely executed. At that stage you possibly can guarantee how a lot and if you end up disclosing. One other stage the place this may be recognized is throughout person testing the place you possibly can collect suggestions from customers concerning the course onboarding.
An instance of a course that reveals content material progressively, guiding learners step-by-step to take care of focus and keep away from cognitive overload.
3. Lengthy Reads, No Breaks, And Passive Data Dumps
Going via content material with no obvious finish in sight may deviate the learner from finishing their course. Microlearning helps trendy learners preferring fast, digestible chunks of content material. It additionally aligns nicely with spaced repetition for higher data retention. To realize that, designing modules which can be 3–7 minutes lengthy, every targeted on a single studying goal, is the best way to go. It additionally helps when there’s a clear set rhythm to the educational journey. Engagement skyrockets when learners “do” as an alternative of simply “watch.” Interactivity reinforces ideas and retains learners curious. An instance is providing brief scenario-based content material adopted by brief questions that assist recapitulate the knowledge and retain it sooner. Different ways embody:
- Gamification (factors, badges, leaderboards)
- Animated transitions to information consideration
- Micro-interactions (hover results, visible suggestions)
Display seize of an interactive exercise designed to assist learners discover their pursuits and uncover what actually drives them.
4. Accessibility And Inclusivity
Accessibility is not simply compliance; it is a chance. Designing for customers with disabilities pushes creativity and makes content material higher for everybody.
WCAG ideas to comply with: Present alt textual content for all visuals, use transcripts and captions for media, guarantee keyboard navigation works easily, preserve colour distinction and scalable textual content.
Inventive tip: Accessibility does not imply boring. Use haptic suggestions, audio cues, or visible progress bars to complement studying for all sorts.
Utilizing accessibility testing instruments helps guarantee your design decisions meet compliance requirements, and extra importantly, that they create an inclusive, user-friendly expertise for all learners.
Wrap-Up: UX/UI Is A Strategic Benefit
In eLearning, UX/UI will not be ornament; it is basis. An ideal course design balances type and performance. It makes studying simple, partaking, and inclusive. And when carried out proper, it drives actual outcomes: higher retention, increased completion, and empowered learners.
If you happen to’re constructing or bettering your customized eLearning, give attention to:
- Designing for the learner, not the system
- Preserving it clear, easy, and interactive
- Guaranteeing accessibility as a energy, not a limitation
- Prioritizing cell usability from the beginning
At Kashida, we construct with these ideas in thoughts, as a result of design is not nearly the way it seems, however how nicely it really works for each learner.
Kashida
We’re about studying, merely.We design and create customized studying content material and ship it throughout a number of platforms, at all times enriching studying with expertise.Gold winners at Studying Applied sciences Awards UK 2018 for Finest Studying Applied sciences Venture
