The A, B, C’s of Consumer Learning: N is for Navigation

Follow the yellow brick road.

Follow the yellow brick road.

Follow, follow, follow, follow…

Between the flying monkeys, sleep-inducing poppies, and wicked witch, Dorothy and her friends needed lots of help to make it to the Emerald City.

Online students are just as eager to reach their learning goals. But when learners spend too much time fumbling their way through a dodgy course structure, they end up missing out on key information and activities. Help your e-learning customers make a beeline to success with a well-designed course structure.

Four Steps For Designing an Awesome Course Navigation

1. Tell your students how your course is organized.

You’ve spent hours sketching out a balanced curriculum and writing copy. You know how all the lessons and pages fit together. And you’ve edited so many drafts, you can walk through each activity in your sleep.

But, for your learners, this is a whole new world. Start by orienting them to how your course is set up and helping them get comfortable in your online school’s environment.

How? Begin with a brief sentence or two that summarizes the course structure. 

• Here’s an example from an online cooking school: “Welcome to our cooking course! In the next five modules, you’ll learn how to cook five healthy meals. Each recipe section features a snapshot of the ingredients and tools you’ll need, plus a video and step-by-step slideshow so you can follow along.”
• And here’s how one client introduced his financial literacy course: “Congrats on your commitment to financial literacy. Each module starts with a reflection question to help you think about your own personal approach, followed by a video where the concepts are discussed in-depth. After every lesson, you’ll gauge your progress with an interactive quiz.”
  
  

2. Use graphic design principles to create user-friendly learning experiences.

Bold type, color, and well-placed text and images can help learners move seamlessly through your material. Use sub headers, paragraph spacing, and bulleted lists to break up the body of text and guide the learner’s eye through the page.

3. Show your learners how to get around.

Today, most folks are comfortable thumbing, scrolling and clicking their way through web pages. But even the most web-savvy learners can get lost or frustrated by poorly executed navigation.

Keep your students happily learning with clear directions and guidance. Use brief statements — on your welcome page and transitional pages between modules — to help learners understand how to move forward and back, skip sections, participate in discussions, and use other interactive features.

Here are some examples:

• “Use the red arrow to move through the course. Or click on the menu icon in the top left of your screen to choose the lesson that interests you.”
• “Now that you’ve learned some photography basics, it’s time to shoot! In this next lesson you can watch a video about taking still life photos. Want to skip the video and go straight to the slideshow? Just scroll to the top left and click on the menu icon.”

4. Keep your navigation features clear and consistent.

Nowadays, people know that an arrow icon usually means forward or backward. But they might not know that the asterisk on your interactive hotspot image is clickable.

Help your consumer learning clients find and use all the navigation features in your course.

• On your welcome page and at appropriate transitions in your course offer navigation tips like this: “Have a question about a particular lesson? Be sure to join the conversation with fellow photographers by clicking on Discussions in the menu bar.”
• Got a great financial planning worksheet tucked away in your course’s resources section? Make sure your learners can find it with hints like this: “Remember, you can print out recipes and create shopping lists by clicking on the Resources icon located below the Menu icon at the top left of your screen.”
• Finally, be consistent in how you use and present icons, buttons and other navigation features. For example, if you’re using a red arrow as the forward/backward icon, don’t switch mid-way through your course to a blue check mark.

Move over munchkins. There’s no need to hire musically gifted little people to make your course a snap to navigate. The next time you create an online course, put your learners on the road to success with a well-crafted welcome page, clear directions, and an intuitive, user-friendly course navigation.

Because even Dorothy needed directions.