How beautiful does e-learning need to be?

Jesse Schell's presentations always cheer me up. Have a look at "The Future is Beautiful", for example. He's not alone among media commentators to point out that aesthetics - or how lovely something is - are playing an increasing role in product and service design. Our expectations as consumers are on an ever-rising upward curve. Daniel Pink, quoted in this paper (sorry - you'll have to buy it) says that products "must be beautiful, unique and meaningful". Pat Jordan, sensationally successful product designer and commentator has always emphasised the importance of beauty in effective product design (in this book for example).

And so to e-learning. A recurrent line of questioning at conferences, in workshops, at webinars is i) "how good-looking does e-learning need to be?" followed by ii) "how do we make it that good-looking?". This is reflected in Clive Shepherd's posting "There's no need to aspire to Hollywood content", where he mentions the Articulate Conference in Leeds.

There aren't any easy answers to this. But my response, as somebody who makes a living from trying to improve creativity in design, has always been along the lines of "make your e-learning as lovely, as enticing, as seductive as your budget, skills and resources allow". There are lots of reasons for taking this line, that I've written about elsewhere, but I'd particularly emphasise:

• The medium is always the message; if you're saying to people that they're learning important stuff, but what the important stuff looks like is shoddy, they won't believe you.
• We're sensual beings; we like pleasure, and pleasure relates closely to learning; we learn better when we're emotionally engaged (OK - so you can emotionally engage somebody by making them appalled at how dreadful your e-learning looks, but I'm not sure that'll work).
• Everyone has a choice to alt-tab away from what you're showing them to something else that looks and feels better. It's a very unfair competition, but it's the world you live in. It's like being able to teleport from an old-style portacabin training room to the lobby of the Ritz.

I thought I'd try coming up with some simple guidelines around the aesthetics of production values, so here they are:

1. Your aesthetic needs to be consistent with the value and values of the subject matter. If you're training Rover dealers to sell to high net worth customers, the aesthetic needs to be a different level from a training programme on hygiene in a call-centre.
2. Your aesthetic needs to be consistent with the culture of the organisation. This isn't always that same as the first point.
3. Your aesthetic needs to facilitate ease of use, not obstruct it (e.g. through poor legibility, usability etc.)
4. Your aesthetic needs to emphasise key content, experiences and learning challenges. Invest in high production values where seduction and enticement are really needed.
5. Aesthetic decisions need to be part of an explicit and robust learning strategy.

It's actually getting much easier for small-budget designers to compete on aesthetics with consumer product designers. "Rapidisation" of design tools makes it much easier for me - a small-scale producer of e-learning - to develop learning experiences that a while ago would have cost a fortune. The key point is that designers need to understand that aesthetics is just one more design parameter that needs to be juggled. So let's try not to fixate on this.