Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Blogger Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen is well-known in the field of usability. All his articles are actually very current in nature and very useful for those designing interactions, UIs, Websites and any type of media that interacts with users. Here is his take on the 10 most common mistakes commited by bloggers as far as usability and design are concerned

Weblogs Usability: Top 10 Design Mistakes

Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich Mindset

Many educators in the United States have heard of or “gone through” the incredibly creative Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Activity (capitalized due to the degree of importance of the activity) — alternative link here. This “enigmatic” activity’s goal is to illustrate the fact that, as Instructional Designers, we can’t assume the learner knows something because WE know it, we need to try to see instruction with the learner’s eyes and develop instruction FOR THEM, not for us. As so many people that have done this activity are asked to write clear directions on how to make a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich forget the basic steps like “open the peanut butter jar” or “spread the jelly with a spoon on the inside of both slices of bread”, etc. and the instructor pretends s/he doesn’t understand they have to open the jelly jar to THEN spread the jelly on the bread (pantomimically putting the whole unopened jar between the slices of bread), everyone has a “blast” and the activity proves that what is clear to the instructor isn’t clear to the learner many times.  

Well, being from another country (even though a language teacher that studied the culture of the US as well as the language as a whole), that activity gets me thinking: it fails in a diverse classroom. what if I my background knowledge has nothing related to peanut butter sandwich? What if I had NEVER made one or had no idea if I had to mix the peanut butter and the jelly? What if I didn’t know what type of bread to use with that sandwich? So many possibilities that point to the failure of considering a diverse audience when introducing this activity. It fails in what its very own intentions, which include considering your learner’s uniqueness. 

This is how many design instruction, they assume that knowing a certain audience they know all of them. The ubiquitous peanut butter sandwich activity is just a silly example of how we fail to accommodate or even be sensitive to diversity when we are preaching that very same topic…

Instructional Designer

There is the basic difference between a language teacher and an instructional designer: being an instructional designer, one doesn’t always teach that which one knows…

Matt – Building a Web Application in 32 Hours

I have to admit that,typos aside, TechCrunch remains one of my favorite sources of information on technology, especially Web technologies. I suppose that unmerciful deadlines and the increasing speed of publication everyone ends up committing some spelling mistakes (I have noticed this especially in academic press). Well, let’s not get into that. TechCrunch and other tech blogs are still a good source of information if you want to stay informed on the latest technologies that can impact you somehow.

All of us that are involved with Instructional Design somehow (instructional designers, teachers, programmer, learners) can benefit from adopting or developing emerging technologies. At least playing with it…

Personal conversations with Thiagi, an expert in training and instructional design, reinforced even more my belief in quick but “quality” development.

Here is the most recent post from Ryan Carson, when invited to post on TechCrunch.com. In this post he discusses the process he and his colleagues from Carsonified Design underwent to design, develop and implement a simple Web application called Matt (a multi-account Twitter Tweeter) in 32 hours. The original post has valuable tips for quick application development such as:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR – something new for him.

Can we apply these principles (and others which Ryan’s team experimented with) when developing learning technologies and applications? Have you had a similar experience Let’s share it here.

PS.: you can find a video tour of “Matt” on their main page. If you look for “Matt Carsonified” on Youtube, you will find some videos they created throughout their “Matt 1 week”.