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Friday Finds
Fresh ideas, practical tools, and marketing-inspired thinking for people who design learning.
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May is shaping up to be a genuine world tour. LearnTec in Germany at the start of May, ATD in Los Angeles in the middle, and then the Canadian eLearning Conference to close it out. Three countries in four weeks. I think that qualifies as an adventure, doesn't it?
If you're going to be at or near any of those places, let me know. I want to see you in person!
Thanks for reading.
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Supported by iSpring
Not another AI-will-transform-everything webinar. On May 5, Dr. Cris Wildermuth takes a hard look at adult learning principles; what survives the AI moment, what doesn't, and why the difference matters. If you're tired of breathless takes, this one's for you.
Register now for free →
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You've Been Assuming. Marketers Have Been Testing.
Marketers have been doing something you probably haven't.
Before their content goes live, they upload it to a tool that predicts, in seconds, where your audience's eyes will land. No participants. No lab. Just a heatmap showing exactly what gets seen and what gets skipped entirely.
Slides. Job aids. Infographics. Everything you design for learners works the same way.
Here's the uncomfortable part: most people who create training materials never actually check that their learners focus on what they intended. We assume they read the main point first. We assume they notice the important instructions before getting distracted by the images next to them. We assume the visual hierarchy we built is the one learners actually experience.
Sometimes we're right. Often we're not.
You don't need to run everything through one of these. Save it for your most important designs.
For important designs, where getting attention wrong actually costs something, this is worth ten minutes of your time. Curious? I'll bet at least one of the tools below will earn a valuable spot in your learning design toolkit.
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Also supported by Neovation
Most AI webinars tell you AI is coming. This one tells you if your team is ready and exactly what to do about it. You'll score yourself across five readiness dimensions and build a 30-day action plan before you log off. Practical, timely, and useful.
Get Your Team's AI Readiness Score →
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Microsoft Clarity Predictive Heat Maps
Upload an image. Get a heatmap. That's it.
Clarity is Microsoft's behavior analytics platform, and this feature is free. No signup. No credit card. No trial period counting down in the background. Upload a slide, a job aid, a screenshot of anything, and it tells you where your audience's eyes are likely to go.
As a zero-friction starting point? Hard to argue with free.
Try it this week. Seriously.→
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Attention Insight
If Clarity is the starting point, Attention Insight is where you go when you want more.
It's trained on actual eye-tracking data, which gives it an edge for static visual analysis. The output goes deeper too — you get a Focus Map (what gets seen in the first 3–5 seconds), a Clarity Score, contrast analysis, and AI recommendations on what to fix.
The integration list is the real selling point for L&D practitioners. Figma, Photoshop, InDesign, Adobe Express; there are plugins for all of them. You don't have to leave your design workflow to run an analysis.
The free Adobe Express add-on is permanently free.
Run eye-tracking analysis inside your design workflow →
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Brainsight
This is the one with the strongest scientific pedigree.
Brainsight was built inside Braingineers, a neuromarketing research agency. Their heatmaps are validated at 94% accuracy against live eye-tracking studies. The benchmarks are real, not marketing copy.
The differentiator that matters for L&D: it tests video, not just static images. If you produce video-based learning and want to know whether key moments are actually getting seen, none of the other tools here answer that question. Brainsight does.
The price is the real conversation. €199/month is a team investment, not a personal one. But the data it produces is the kind you can take to a stakeholder meeting.
See exactly what learners watch in your video content →
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Want to know what real people actually remember?
Everything above uses AI to predict attention. Useful, but prediction isn't the same as validation.
Lyssna does something different. Show your design to real people for exactly five seconds. Ask what they remember. That's it.
No AI. Actual humans. Actual reactions. The free plan lets you recruit your own participants and see up to 15 responses.
Think of it as the next rung. Heatmap tools tell you where eyes go. Lyssna tells you what landed. For most decisions, the heatmap is enough. For your highest-stakes content, the extra step is worth it.
Find out what real people actually remember →
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The Bottom Line
Marketers have been engineering visual attention for years. Most L&D practitioners have been guessing or, worse, not even thinking about it at all.
Start with Clarity. Only takes a few minutes and costs you nothing. If you work in Adobe or Figma, add Attention Insight. If your team produces high-stakes content at scale, Brainsight gives you data you can actually defend.
Or tap into tests with real people using Lyssna.
The question was never whether your learners are paying attention. It's whether your designs deserve it.
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🎵 Today I'm listening to Kygo |
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