Do as you would be done by

It’s the time of year for resolutions. In fact, as I type, it’s already 2nd January, so it’s already the time for regrets as most resolutions are already broken, but I’ll stick with the theme. For the past few years, my resolution has been to take the football less seriously, as my emotional state is so often determined by the run of results of Brighton and Hove Albion FC, but this time it’s different. For 2013, I will endeavour to ‘do as you would be done by’, not in any karmic sense, but as a designer of learning solutions.
As a designer, there’s a real risk of under-estimating your audience. The key, I believe, is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential users; not to try and second guess what it feels like to be them, but to imagine yourself in the same situation. Think, what would I want, given the same tasks to perform and the same starting position?
You patronise your users when you believe them to be less intelligent, perceptive or deserving than you. In the 1960s, brutalist architecture was highly fashionable, but would you ever find an architect living in one of these soulless concrete blocks? Of course not. They’re living on elegant Georgian terraces. It’s the same when, as an instructional designer, you design information-heavy, tell-and-test e-learning for your target users, when you would be horrified to have to use anything like this yourself.
A little bit of care is needed in putting this into practice, because you probably do not have the same tasks to perform or the same starting position as your potential users. You may do a very different type of work. You may be an expert in what you are teaching. Perhaps the secret here is to think back to times when you have had to learn something comparable and with the same amount of prior knowledge. What helped or hindered you to bridge the gap? If you had your time again, what would you have done differently?
So next time you’re putting together a design for learning, think twice. Don’t get forced into the same old top-down approaches that work on the assumption that every learner is an idiot and a lazy one at that. Do as you would be done by.

Link to original post

Leave a Reply