Finds: What Makes Design Seem Intuitive? — from Williams Instructional Design, LLC

This entertaining and informative presentation by Jared spool of User Interface Engineering on, “What Makes Design Seem Intuitive?,” addresses web design, but much of his message applies to instructional design as well. Some of the gems of insight include…(see posting)

From DSC:
When we put educational materials online, we instantly create a user interface.
From the students’ standpoints, how intuitive/usable are those interfaces?

When we don’t enforce some type of consistency in our online-based offerings, do we not put the monkeys on the back of our students to try and figure out how their current instructor does things (i.e. where the syllabus is, where the discussion board forums are, etc.)?

And might I add in here (which I realize is controversial), this is yet another reason why we need to move towards the use of teams in higher ed. One person can not do it all anymore…it’s just too big of a job now. We can’t expect our subject matter experts to be usability/interface design/instructional design/interaction design specialists.