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Lecturing to people is a poor way to help them learn new facts. People learn better when they are actively engaged in their learning. Here's a training game that we use on one of our training courses to help people learn about usability heuristics. Why not play this game with your user experience team during your next team meeting?
Most of us look back fondly at our college and university days. Think about yours for the moment. What good memories come to mind?
If your experience is anything like mine, then I can guarantee one thing you're not visualising right now: a lecture. There is growing evidence that lectures are a poor way to transfer skills and knowledge from the brain of an expert to the hands of a novice. The chances are that you did most of your best learning when you were actively engaged in project work, discussion or private reading. If you can recall any of your lectures, these were probably the lectures that were dramatic or unusual in some way: lectures that were more learner-friendly than traditional face-to-face instruction.
This isn't just a problem for universities. At Userfocus, we run dozens of short courses on usability. These vary from half-a-day to two days. If delegates leave our training courses unable to put what we've taught them into practice, they won't come back.
So if lecturing isn't the answer, what is?
Nowadays, any trainer worth his or her salt uses "Accelerated Learning" (AL) techniques. Unlike a traditional lecture, a training course that uses AL techniques will begin with a short activity that connects learners to the training material, to the trainer and to the other delegates. Concepts are split into short lecture segments of 10-15 mins with short review activities after each segment. Delegates get the opportunity to review the information and practice their new skills in pairs or small groups. Finally, the trainer encourages the delegates to describe how they will apply the skills they have learnt. These training methods increase interest, motivation, learning and retention. (This is also the reason why we don't offer distance learning courses. We haven't yet managed to work out how to build this kind of interactivity into podcasts and videos).
One misconception is that AL is all about playing games (reinforced by the fact that one of the more famous books in the area is called Games Trainers Play). This has now got a bit clichéd, and was famously satirised in the episode of "The Office" when an outside facilitator visited Wernham Hogg to educate the Slough branch about customer care. (David Brent railroads the seminar, ending up singing "Freelove Freeway"). Although AL incorporates instructional games, it's important that the games are directly relevant to the training goals, and not just about filling time.
To give you an example of the way this works in practice, here's a specific activity that we use on one of our training courses to help people learn about usability heuristics. Feel free to adapt this game for your own training, or use it with your user experience team during your next team meeting. We based it on the framegame "Thirty-Five" by Sivasailam Thiagarajan.
Guideline Gallop is a way for delegates to both generate and evaluate usability guidelines. Each delegate creates a usability guideline on an index card (delegates can invent their own usability guidelines). They then move around the room, swapping their card with other delegates. After several swaps, the trainer blows a whistle and delegates award points to the guidelines on their cards. Delegates swap cards again and the process continues until each guideline has been evaluated five times.
The game creates a lot of energy and activity in the training room, which in turn creates a good atmosphere for learning to take place. The game also gives delegates the opportunity to get to know each other. By evaluating several guidelines, delegates learn what makes a good and bad usability guideline.
Prior to the seminar, purchase a stack of 3 x 5 index cards (you'll need one card per delegate). Delegates will also need a pen and pencil and you will need a timer and a whistle.
The room needs to be large enough to accommodate movement with enough space for people to move between tables, chairs and walls as they exchange cards.
The group size can be small (from 6 delegates) or large (to over 40 delegates). If you have fewer than 6 participants, see the "Variations" section at the end.
About half-an-hour.
The discussion is where most of the learning takes place in this activity. Prepare a few discussion points in advance, or try out these suggestions.
Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher. If you like his articles, you might enjoy his free online user experience course.
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This article is tagged tools, expert review.
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