Less Is More Is Not Just About Content, but About Learning Experience

Many years ago, I attended a presentation by Dr. Michael Allen, an eLearning pioneer. I still remember (I learned!) two things:

He used M&Ms (chocolate!) as a mnemonic to remind us that content should be meaningful and memorable. 

And he said something like this: "Alternate navigation is not interaction." In other words, clicking extra buttons on the screen to view more text isn't really an interaction. It's still a one-way content dump. Instead, a true interaction involves the user making a decision and encountering consequences, aka feedback.

More recently, he's called that the CCAF (Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback) framework. I've seen others refer to CCC (Context, Challenge, Consequences). 

I wish I could say that all my courses always included true interactions. But I've worked on a lot of compliance courses... 🤷‍♀️