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 another decision they have to make. It's better to make the decisions upfront, to keep things as simple as possible - but no simpler.

Now, I'm having much more success with Ugly Templates. These are templates deliberately stripped back to the barest of essentials.

These are just black-and-white Word docs. No branding. No fancy fonts. No diagrams. No tricks. Check out my latest template for a video storyboard to see what I mean: Ugly!

...and I'm getting a decent amount of traction with them. The reasons why, I reckon, are:
1. Simpler to explain - it's all signal and no noise.
2. Less intimidating to start and easier to fix if stuffed up
3. It possesses a degree of informality - just the way I like to run my design sessions
4. Simple templates take less time to fill.

I reckon it's the last point that is the real kicker. Ugly templates mean that I'm more likely to get a response from the person I'm giving the template to. That is the whole point of the exercise: to get the content and move the whole development along to the conclusion as quickly as possible.

So now I'm ignoring all the slick Word doc styles and Spreadsheet Conditional formatting features and truly following the principles of KISS with Ugly Templates.

Your mileage may vary - but I'm keen to know your experience.