I hope someone can help me with the following thing, can someone tell me how many interactions are recommended maximum in each of the slides? Is there any way of knowing how many clicks are excessive when designing a learning object?
A good rule of thumb - as few as is necessary and no more.
The answer to how many this is really depends on a range of factors. Since a slide can contain a long chain of gated information and interactions can be used for a variety of purposes, "how many clicks" might be the wrong question. Here are two I'd ask instead:
1) What's the purpose of the interaction? In his book About Face, Alan Cooper calls this focus on purpose Goal-Directed design. Does this interaction represent an authentic context, task, or experience or is it used to drive engagement with a topic?
2) Is an interaction or gate necessary at all? Back to number 1) What's the purpose of the interaction?
There are other things I'd consider like working memory, what information the interaction serves to help the participant commit to memory, etc..
Progressive disclosure is a great mechanism to deal with a lot of information. The secret is managing the number of choices available. One trap I see lots of folks fall into is using clicks to break up lots of content to fit into a slide without much thought to strategy. This results in what I call rabbit-hole navigation, where branches are used to spoon-feed content. After going down the rabbit-hole in one direction, the user is presented with another set of choices. To me, this represents another challenge entirely. Not one that can be solved with more clicks:)
Completely agree with Steve. If the interaction serves no real purpose and only ends up frustrating the user then it shouldn't be included. I know many of us feel pressured to make the courses as engaging as possible, but interactive does not equal engaging.
2 Replies
A good rule of thumb - as few as is necessary and no more.
The answer to how many this is really depends on a range of factors. Since a slide can contain a long chain of gated information and interactions can be used for a variety of purposes, "how many clicks" might be the wrong question. Here are two I'd ask instead:
There are other things I'd consider like working memory, what information the interaction serves to help the participant commit to memory, etc..
Progressive disclosure is a great mechanism to deal with a lot of information. The secret is managing the number of choices available. One trap I see lots of folks fall into is using clicks to break up lots of content to fit into a slide without much thought to strategy. This results in what I call rabbit-hole navigation, where branches are used to spoon-feed content. After going down the rabbit-hole in one direction, the user is presented with another set of choices. To me, this represents another challenge entirely. Not one that can be solved with more clicks:)
Completely agree with Steve. If the interaction serves no real purpose and only ends up frustrating the user then it shouldn't be included. I know many of us feel pressured to make the courses as engaging as possible, but interactive does not equal engaging.
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