Here are five places I’d look first.
Too Much Is Competing for Attention
You know the slide. Title. Six bullets. Diagram. Stock photo. Logo. Three callouts. Footer. Maybe a tasteful swoosh for emotional support.
Everything wants attention, so the learner has to figure out where to look, what matters, and what can safely be ignored. That’s mental work before the learning even starts.
Instead, create a clear winner. If one thing matters most, make it obvious. If three things matter, consider giving them three moments instead of squeezing them onto one screen.
Whitespace isn’t wasted space. It helps tell the eye where to go.
Try this: Open your busiest slide and remove one thing. Then another. Did the meaning suffer? If not, keep going.
Your Narration Is Reading the Screen
Imagine trying to read while someone stands beside you reading the exact same words aloud. Annoying, right?
Yet e-learning does this all the time.
The screen says:
Never share your password with anyone.
And the narrator says:
“Never share your password with anyone.”
Nothing new has been added.
If learners need to read detailed text, let them read. Use audio when it earns its place: to explain, tell a story, give an example, add context, or direct attention.
Your audio and visuals should work together. They don’t need to match.
Try this: Mute one section of your course. If the audio simply repeats what learners can already see, you’ve found an easy edit.
The Visuals Aren't Helping
A visual should do more than make a slide look finished. It should help someone understand something.
Useful visuals can show what something looks like, explain a relationship, reveal a pattern, provide context, direct attention, or make an abstract idea concrete.
A smiling stock-photo team gathered around a laptop may look polished, but what is it teaching?
Before adding an image, ask: What job is this visual doing?
If you don’t have a good answer, you probably don’t need it.
Try this: Pick three images from your current course or deck and explain, in one sentence each, what they help the learner understand. If you can’t, cut or replace them.
Related Things Are Too Far Apart
Sometimes the problem isn’t too much information. It’s making learners assemble the pieces themselves.
Picture a diagram on the left and a numbered explanation on the right. The learner looks at #4, searches for #4 in the text, tries to remember what #4 looked like, then goes back to the diagram.
Now they’re playing mental Tetris.
Whenever possible, put related information together. Label parts of a diagram directly. Put instructions beside the thing they refer to. Show the example while you explain the idea.
Reduce the distance between “What am I looking at?” and “Ah. Got it.”
Try this: Look for places where learners have to bounce between two parts of the screen—or two screens—to understand one idea. Bring those pieces together.
You're Confusing Clicking for Learning
Interactivity can help learning. Clicking is not automatically interactivity.
“Click all five tabs to reveal five paragraphs” is often just reading with extra steps.
Before adding an interaction, ask what thinking it creates. Does the learner have to make a decision, predict what happens next, compare options, retrieve something from memory, or solve a problem?
Great. That interaction is earning its place.
But if the click only reveals information you could have shown more simply, you’re adding friction.
Here’s my rule:
Don’t ask learners to do something unless doing it helps them think.
The 30-Second Test
Pull up something you’re building right now—a course, slide deck, job aid, or email—and ask:
What mental work am I asking people to do that has nothing to do with what I want them to learn?
You’ll start noticing things: the crowded screen, the confusing diagram, the repeated narration, the decorative image, the click-for-the-sake-of-clicking interaction.
Take one of those things away. You may improve the learning without adding anything at all.
The Bottom Line
Good learning design isn’t only about deciding what to add. A lot of the craft is deciding what to remove.
Your learners have limited attention and limited working memory. Spend those resources on the thinking that matters.
Make the learning challenging. Don’t make the design challenging.
Want the research behind all of this? I wrote a deeper dive into extraneous cognitive load and the learning science behind these ideas. Read the original article →
