If I asked you what makes good eLearning, how would you answer? Would you say instructional design? I’m sure you would—that’s what everyone says! But, think for a minute about all the other components that go into creating an eLearning course. It’s not just instructional design— it’s graphic design, user interface design, and visual communications!

When designing an eLearning course, how often do you think about the learner’s experience? And, when I say, “learner’s experience,” I’m not referring to the learning content! I’m talking about the literal experience learners have while using your course.

Besides the development of learning content, think about all the other elements you have to develop to make your course functional and interactive. As an eLearning designer, your job also includes user interface design!

When an eLearning course is difficult to use or lacks intuitiveness, it becomes a barrier to your learner! Is there a clear path forward? Do buttons look like buttons? Is the navigation consistent from one slide to the next? Making your course easy to use and navigate lets the learner focus on learning!

What to learn more about how user interface design can make good eLearning? Check out these posts:

• 4 Tips for Effective User Interface Design for eLearning
• 3 Things You Should Always Include in an eLearning Prototype
• How to Conduct User Acceptance Testing for eLearning

Do you know the difference between graphic design and visual communications? If not, you might be missing a huge opportunity to enhance the presentation of your learning content!

Graphic design relates to the way your course looks and feels. This is how your fonts, colors, images, graphics, layouts, and effects work together to create a cohesive design. Visual communications, on the other hand, relates to how you communicate ideas, processes, or procedures visually on the screen.

eLearning is a tool for visual communications. Carefully selecting a collection of images to represent an idea, creating a series of animations to explain a process, or designing a diagram to show the relationship between different concepts are all examples of visual communications. When storyboarding your learning content, you must always consider how you plan to visually communicate it on the screen.

What to learn more about how visual communications can make good eLearning? Check out these posts:

• Graphic Design vs. Visual Communications for eLearning
• 3  Ways to Transform Bullet Points in eLearning
• 3 Tips for Using Animations in eLearning

When you’re new to eLearning, the concept of creating interactive content might be as simple as the learner clicking to reveal some learning content. However, let me ask you this: how much knowledge or critical thinking does it take for the learner to execute this task? Not much! Instead, strive to create interactions that require the learner to think before clicking.

This means the learner is challenged to make some decision or provide a response based on knowledge provided earlier in the course.

Here are some examples of interactivity that require the learner to think:

• The learner is asked how to select an appropriate response to an angry customer.
• The learner is asked to sort items by dragging and dropping them into multiple categories.
• The learner is asked to type his or her response to an employee’s complaint.