My job as a user experience designer is to design everything around users needs and feelings. Have you ever visited a website or seen an advertisement that does not match the photos with the content? or the pictures simply make no sense, and do not mean anything to you? Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.” - Dieter Rams Kick the stereotypical stock photos to the curb and use illustrations for a fresh, on-brand approach that’ll keep your learners hooked from the first frame.“Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Illustrations are sometimes seen as child’s play, but in many cases, they’re more effective than the same old stock photography you’re probably used to using. Illustrations make it easier to control the images so they’re brand-specific and align better with your company culture. It’s glossy and polished appearance might not really jive with your brand or the tone of your content. Learners can sense stock photography from a mile away. You can even reuse old graphics in a new way to save money. Because they’re graphic characters, it’s simple to customize based on role and application. With illustrations, you don’t need a reshoot each time you create new eLearning. Animation and illustrations can ensure that all races, genders, ability levels, and cultures are properly represented (and can be changed for various applications, like international training). One type of person can’t represent the spectrum of employees in an international organization. Training for dangerous situations ( think of the training that could have helped in the JFK bomb scare) can easily be shown via illustrations (even without the Hollywood-style special effects). Unless you’re Michael Bay, you probably don’t have the eLearning budget to show dangerous scenarios. Animation is always fresh, and makes it easy to switch out outfits and hairstyles to give your training a modern look. Whether it’s bad quality, old clothes, or retro hairstyles, it only takes a year or two for your pictures and videos to look dated. You can spot an outdated photo from a mile away–and it becomes more kitschy than vintage when it comes to training. Illustration can also be reused and repurposed, which is a plus because your content is not static and will evolve as the role, technology or skillsets advance in your business and industry. Illustration is less expensive because it’s usually the work of one graphic designer. Let’s face it: film and photography are pricey because of how many people are involved in the creative process. Better relevance means more engagement and better connections to the material. Illustrations can be changed at any time and created to be hyper-relevant to the stuff your learners face every day. Unless you take the time to film or photograph every possible scenario for training, you’re stuck with scenes that may be irrelevant to some learners. Illustrations provide more freedom to show a spectrum of nonverbal cues and communication and aren’t limited to static pictures. And, if you’re using stock video, you might be limited in what you can show based on budget, actors, and a slew of other factors. The brain can only handle so much extraneous processing, so illustration removes the distraction to save brain CPU and help it focus on what’s really important.Ī stock photo can’t really convey things like nonverbal communication or reactions to different scenarios. Illustrations do an amazing job of making sure the learner is paying attention to what they’re supposed to. Using animation, you take away the personal bias so that users can focus on the content. Photography puts real people in front of learners, and their own unconscious biases could affect the connection (or lack thereof) they feel. Whether or not we like to admit it, we all have biases towards different situations and types of people. Here are some other reasons why you should ditch the pics and go for something more engaging. Animation and illustration are far more versatile when compared to the sometimes-stiff, always impersonal stock photo. In most cases, illustrations are the superior choice. What may work for an anonymous website doesn’t have the same impact when you’re trying to get learners to sit up and pay attention. And while it definitely has its place, stock photography isn’t the gold standard when it comes to learning. The grinning woman eating a salad the perfectly multicultural meeting the man with a headset: these are the standards for stock photography.
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