The not so curious case of the “Click Next Fatigue”

As someone who annually sufferers through painful elearning courses, I thought that I’d make a list to help my punishers, who are surely ignorant of the pain they’re causing. My “click next button finger” is falling off at this point!

In a past life, I used to build courses like this. I’m sure that I’ve inflicted unmeasurable “click next fatigue” on countless employees/associates/teammates/whatever. But, I like to believe that I was aware of good user experience and always fought for what was best for the user.

So here’s my list, feel free to leave your thoughts or additions in the comments.

Some helpful guidelines for keeping the victim of an elearning course happy:

1. Golden Rule: Treat me like a responsible, honest adult
2. Let me test out
3. Never disable the back or next buttons
4. Don’t make me listen for the page to be read out loud before I can click next.
5. Don’t use sound! But if you must, make it optional.
6. Do not require me to click all of the buttons/links/etc. before I can click next.
7. If all of the content will fit on the page, put it there. Don’t force me through unnecessary interactions in the sake of “making it interactive.”
8. Don’t cover the next button I need to click on next with an oversized box from another button.
9. Be honest about how long the course will take to complete.
10. Developers: Don’t let the SMEs tell you how to build the interaction. That’s YOUR job.
11. Designers: Don’t let the SMEs write the content. That’s YOUR job.
12. Keep me entertained with novel interactions. When every course that you’ve created for the past 3 years uses the same interactions – you’re doing it wrong.
13. Make the graphics pretty. Pick stock art from at least the last decade. Why is that business executive on a Motorola flip phone (or worse!)?
14. Never copy a Microsoft UI style.
15. Never copy an Apple UI style.
16. When I miss a question, let me know what the correct answer was.
17. After you’ve shown me the correct answer, don’t make me change my answer and then resubmit the question.
18. The built-in knowledge check types in practically ALL elearning authoring tools suck. Don’t use them.
19. When you have mandatory popups on a page, don’t hide mandatory clicks in there.
20. Show my progress and let me know how much longer I’ll be stuck in here.
21. Ask for my opinion with at least one free form text field in a level 1 survey.

Created a few learning interactions today

When I started Ramen, one of the goals was to allow the page templates/interactions to be used outside of the system – in a Lectora course for example. This has even become more important as my day job standardizes on Lectora as the shell for any tracked learning content. Over the past year, I’ve been able to write a whole lot of really easy to use APIs for creating learning interactions. Creating a new interaction takes just a few hours using the Ramen page template API and borrowing functionality from existing templates.

The biggest benefit of this is quick and easy reusability. Just change the XML file and it’s a new page. I don’t want to even think about how hard  some of these would be to pull of in Lectora. It gets really confusing when the action icons start to pile up.

I’m helping out on a project now that needs a few learning interactions developed – quickly. So I spent today working on these. Here they are in the Ramen player:

These aren’t the fanciest interactions ever created, but not bad for a few hours work.

Articulate headaches, pt. 1

So, I had a really time with Articulate today. Something that should have taken 15 minutes stretched into hours due to a few mistakes. Here’s what went wrong and how I fixed it. I received a lot of help from Twitter – links below.

Problem: I needed to update a few Flash movies embedded in a straightforward Articulate ’09 course, then publish and upload. Simple enough, right?

Updating Flash movies embedded in an Articulate course

When you update a Flash movie that’s embedded in an Articulate course, Articulate picks up the new file since has a link to it on the hard drive.  But it wasn’t doing this with the Flash movies that I had. And I couldn’t figure out why – I didn’t want to reimport them all.

So, I tweeted the problem and Dave Anderson replied with a Screenr showing how this is supposed to work. Well, ok – I had the right idea. But I’d forgotten that when I installed Windows 7, I’d moved all of my working files – so the project was in a completely different location than it had been when I created it. Doh! Articulate stores absolute references to embedded Flash, not relative. Moved the files back to where I had them and that problem was fixed.

Dave later directed me to a Screenr by James Kingsley showing good Flash/Articulate workflow techniques.

Presenter locking up when publishing

So, next problem that I had was presenter stopped publishing the deck. It always stopped on the “Saving files to disk” operation. At first it seemed random as to which slide it got stuck on, and then finally settled on slide 18. It just would not go past this point. I rebooted, which has resolved this issue in the past, but no luck.

Back to Twitter. Brian Batt offered to help and directed me to download and run the Articulate debug tracer, and then send the results back to him. With this running I could see that the SWF on that slide was causing the freeze. I republished the SWF. Not fixed. Reinserted the SWF. Not fixed. Deleted the slide and rebuilt it. Still no luck.

Out of ideas, I uninstalled Articulate, rebooted and reinstalled it. I’d seen that anti virus programs can also interfere with this so I turned it off while I was at it. One of these fixed it. Not sure which since I didn’t follow good troubleshooting procedures, but it publishes just fine now. Which is all I cared about.

The trace window is pretty cool – they should include something like this in the tool under a “More Details” button  – I’m not a fan of processes that take >10 minutes to run with little information. This fixes that for me.

Uploading to a FTP site

I uploaded it to my site and went to preview it. I got the dreaded “Slide 100 of 160” blank screen error. This means that either I’m using Articulate 4 with Flash 10 (which I’m not) or something didn’t upload correctly. I deleted the files and tried again. Same issue. Articulate has a built in FTP option, so I used that. It failed twice saying “Cannot upload file, unknown error.”

I’m just a little mad at this point </sarcasm>.

I started looking at options in my FTP program. I noticed that the file transfer type was set to “auto.” I’d seen problems in the past where binary files has been uploaded as ASCII, so I changed it to binary. Re-uploaded and viola!

Lessons learned

So here’s what I got out of this:

  1. Articulate doesn’t use relative paths to imported Flash movies. Don’t move things around!
  2. Turn off your virus scanner if you have problems publishing
  3. Always upload Articulate courses in binary mode
  4. Articulate has awesome support via Twitter