The Ugly Templates Movement
Guiding academics through the long chains of common sense during course design and development makes using templates a mighty helpful and common strategy. Now, Learning Designers, as a tribe, are mighty capable in the digital space of creating media and learning resources such as templates. I've spent many an hour creating visually beautiful templates, with detailed instructions, lots of branding and fancy tricks. ...and failed miserably getting academics to use them. Ego is such a fragile thing. That's what I have had to do: let go of my own design ego and rethink my approach. As any UX designer will tell you: you must understand your user. In my case at university, academics aren't in media production day-in-day-out; they are constantly multitasking and time-poor. So when I give the fancy templates means they have to stop and figure out how to use the damn thing. That's where I fail with fancy. Every bit of extra metadata I ask the academic is yet ano...