Cognitive Ease
Daniel Kahneman calls the packaging kind "cognitive ease." When something is easy to process, your brain trusts it faster and works less hard to get through it. Familiar fonts. Predictable structure. Plain language. Predictable is a feature, not a failure of imagination. A module that looks the same every week, with headers in the same place and instructions phrased the same way, isn't lazy design. It's a favor to your learner's brain. Every ounce of effort they don't spend figuring out your interface is an ounce they get to spend on the actual content.
But people confuse "boring format" with "boring content." Then they make the content boring too. That's the payload kind. And it's fatal.
Chip and Dan Heath built their whole framework in Made to Stick — SUCCESs — around the opposite instinct. Simple, yes. But also Unexpected. Concrete. Credible. Emotional. Wrapped in a story. Their argument: the ideas that survive in someone's head are the ones that surprised them, or made them feel something. Boring content doesn't just fail to delight. It fails to stick.
There's a study that puts a number on exactly how badly it fails.
In 2004, Tali Sharot, Mauricio Delgado, and Elizabeth Phelps showed people a mix of emotionally charged and neutral images. Later, they asked everyone to recall what they'd seen, and to say whether it felt like actually remembering the moment or just a vague sense of "yeah, I think I saw that." For the emotional images, people said "I remember this" with real confidence and vivid detail. For the neutral images, even when people had technically seen them, the best they could manage was "I think I've seen this." No vividness. No confidence. Just a shrug.
Read that twice. Boring content doesn't just get forgotten. What survives feels thinner and less certain to the person holding it. That's the mechanism behind every eval that says "I remember doing the module," but can't name one thing it taught them.
So the actual design choice isn't "boring versus exciting." It's this: make the container boring, and make the content anything but.
Predictable structure. Plain language. No surprises in how the thing is built. Save the unexpected for the content itself. A stat that shocks people. A story instead of a bullet list. Stakes up front, instead of "by the end of this module, you will be able to."
Boring is a design choice. Just make sure you're choosing it for the wrapper, not for what's inside. It's the same split Bianca and I kept circling back to while writing Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro:
The delivery can be as easy to skim as a grocery list. The idea inside it can't be.
The Bottom Line
The next time you're tempted to fix "boring" with an AI avatar host or a badge nobody wanted, ask where the boredom actually lives.
In the format? Leave it alone.
In the message? A confetti animation won't save it. It just delays the moment your learner notices there was nothing underneath.
