Uba Kontrovasie

Thinking about who reads your content

I remember studying an e-learning module at University during my final year, it involved learning about different learning styles and the psychology behind learning.

One of the learning theories we covered was called VARK learning styles by Flemming and Mills.

The theory outlined four main types of learning style/persona:

- Visual
People who are visually stimulated learn more effectively through images and videos
- Auditory
Learning through sound based mediums such as lectures, music etc
- Read/Write
People who learn most effectively through reading and writing
- Kinesthetic
Learning via vocation or “doing”

Some of my day to day work involves content consulting and advising clients how, what and where to place content on their websites. One key person I always keep in mind is the reader.

If we refer back to VARK we can see four distinct personalities, it is therefore important to identify how your website and its content will cater for these personalities.

Some will argue that a lot of this is hard to determine without quantitive and qualitative research, however, stepping back and using a common sense approach can sometimes be quite effective.

Take an insurance company for example: they could publish online information about their policies in so many ways, some people (including me admittedly) are lazy about the reading the small print so why not publish it onto a video as an alternative?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project with the Beeb for children, it allowed me to gain an insight into how they were teaching children in a Kinesthetic manner, through games and learning tools. The project seemed to take into account the attention spans of their audiences (children) and then provide them with learning tools, which kept them engaged through participation.

So what’s the moral of my story? People absorb information in different ways, the Read/Write types just want the facts and the text, whilst others will prefer different mediums. It is important to make sure the core pieces of content on your website cater all types of learning style/persona.

The easier you make it for people to learn about your brand and it’s offerings, the faster they will understand what your brand has to offer.

(Just chucking it out there… I’m no UE expert, just thinking aloud)

Tags: content optimisation, content planning, elearning, VARK

Kids and Kom-pu-ters

I was with family on Sunday, my little nephew (aged 9) went into his bedroom came back out with his laptop. Not just any old laptop my I add, a state of the art Dell Inspiron. 

As he was loading up Roxio photo software to show me a slideshow of their holiday (which he compiled and edited) he continued to tell me the spec including; clock speed, hard drive capacity and other particulars.

Coming from a big family all my nieces and nephews from the age of 9+ seem to be on Facebook and they all have fast computers and broadband at home. 

Noticing all of this was quite a fortunate coincidence as I had to recently cook up some research ideas for a project centered around children. 

Naturally the project would require understanding digital natives and carrying out qualitative and quantitative research. However, without doing a single piece of work I learned a lot from just watching the kids play with their gadgetry at our family get together. 

I sound like my Dad but when I was their age I used to word process my homework on a hand me down IBM DOS based machine, using Wordstar and a dot matrix printer, which was basically a typewriter with a printer cable. 

I got my first all singing and dancing “multimedia” PC in year 9 of upper school, oh how things have changed!

Tags: children, digital natives, elearning, kids, research