Change! Or face a future in which you are obsolete. We aren’t going to argue against that on a large scale, but we are going to state that change doesn’t always drive forward movement and it is not always the harbinger of positive growth.
An example of change putting the kibosh on things is the tendency to allow and overlook the negative results of constantly changing the GUI. Changing the Graphical User Interface or the GUI, pronounced ‘gooey’, is a genuinely sticky matter for companies who use multiple vendors to design and produce their online and mobile training courses.
In our world, the GUI is the “static” part of a training course that a user must learn and then use to navigate their way through a learning program. It’s the things like the back, forward, and refresh buttons. It’s the placement on the screen of all the tools a person needs to make sense of and use the program.
The practice of introducing new GUIs, changing them from one course to another, can lead to unnecessary frustration and confusion for your learners. Frustration prevents a learner from fully immersing themselves in the learning process. Confusion can stop the learning process altogether. The bottom line is that frustrated learners don’t learn as well as they might otherwise. And that affects a company’s ability to move forward.
Audi of America recently addressed this issue. They asked us to design and create a GUI that would be the template for all of their web-based training courses. Three templates were created to work with varying degrees of course design, from simple to complex. Now, all vendors who create training courses for Audi of America use one of three GUI templates, whichever suits the course ― all suit the needs of the learner.
The function of all GUIs is to move a user through a program. They are utilitarian. By design, a GUI should be intuitive and user friendly, and the best ones reflect a company’s brand in an understated way. A great GUI should not get in the way of or distract learners from learning what they need to know. A GUI that remains the same from course to course is a sensible solution that promotes growth and forward movement, not just for the learner, but for the company.
We appreciate assisting Audi of America with their smart and intentional choice to develop a Graphical User Interface that their workers can count on time after time.