Navigation of Video eLearning
This was originally contributed as a chapter of the eLearning Guild’s eBook Beyond The Next Button. The full eBook is freely available to members, or a separate purchase for non-members.
Like most Instructional Designers, I’d never really considered video navigation to be different than any other type of navigation. It’s just a page in an online course, right? When I was content to build my Storyline, Captivate, or other SCORM-compliant courseware, that worked just fine.
Then I took a contract with YouTube. Nothing was a given. When I was brought on to build the “YouTube Certified Online” training program (a nearly-impossible 3-month project), they had never delivered an online training externally. There wasn’t a videocamera anywhere in their HQ, and they didn’t even know how to spell LMS. Still, not knowing what they didn’t know, they wanted to use YouTube itself to deliver what had previously been a 2-day ILT in 6-8 hours, complete with a 100 question certification exam.
Clearly, I had to get very creative, very quickly. Fortunately, there were already many brilliant educators and other creators already on the YouTube platform pushing all the limits. So I learned from their example what could be done with a video.
One of the first things I found is that online video is entirely different from TV or movie screens in two key ways:
- user data collected
- user navigation control
Data collection is a topic for another time, but basically anything you watch online is watching you back in some form. Data about you and your interactions with online videos are being stored somewhere. Because this data isn’t generally stored in an LMS, L&D isn’t using it much yet. But the data is simply too revealing and too valuable to ignore. It’s coming soon to a system near you…
As for navigation, I saw people using simple links to refer to specific parts of a video, popping up clickable hotspots and in-line navigational messages, directing users to actions on other platforms, making customized playlists to leverage content created and managed by others (without needing to ask for any permission), and generally doing everything really fast.
This shifted how I think about video, navigation, and all the instructional work I’ve done since.
Let’s take a look at the familiar video player controls with a fresh perspective.
Online video has at least two controls: PLAY and STOP. Even if it autoplays there’s not a button in sight, Learners can refresh the browser window, or exit it, and at any time of their own choosing.
We tend to forget this in our design, preferring the illusion that our Learners are in a classroom and can’t escape. They can, and they do – and often, according all the data I’ve seen. Your Video eLearning is good or it’s off. The ROI on an unwatched video is $0, by the way. No pressure ;)
You’re probably familiar with this set of buttons on your old VCR or tape deck. What these same icons mean now can be just as simple, though they can also be used for much more!
PLAY is usually combined with PAUSE into a single icon, as above. When the video is playing, this pauses it. When it’s paused, this plays it again. It seems quaint to spell this out now, but just a decade ago this was not well-known to most users. Nor was it available in our course creation tools.
It’s become so ubiquitous since then that the PLAY/PAUSE navigation is very frequently omitted now. Tap on the video to pause it. Tap it again to resume play. This is implied whenever you see a video on a screen. Your Learners expect this behavior, and it frustrates them to do without it. Are you currently satisfying this navigational demand?
Also it’s probably worth pointing out that PLAY happens automatically with nearly all online video, so why have a button for it? Sometimes there’s a sound instructional reason why you need one. Mostly not. So ditch it anytime you can to become one step more friendly to your Learners.
Regardless of if or how the icon displays, PAUSE is a critical navigation for any online video. Please never, ever omit or restrict this ability in your eLearning Video. Though we commonly consider PAUSE to be little more than a “hold on a second” function for use with real-world distractions, this simple navigation can be used as tool for increasing engagement, and for widening the audience for a given video.
Consider a video’s pace. Given your Learner’s individual preferences, every video will be either a little too fast for them or a little too slow (or a lot too slow!). Unlike with the TV & movie screens you grew up with, you no longer need to split the difference and abandon the edges of your target audience in favor of the middle of the bell curve. You can now design a video to be in constant motion, and let the Learner slow it down by freezing the frame whenever they need.
Granted this behavior is not the same viewing experience as many of your Learners may be expecting, so it’s only right to set them explicitly with an orienting interaction. But trust me, anyone who can name a YouTube Star will already be very well oriented to this approach.
In fact, as I found at YouTube, this is the very reason why YouTubers flash things on the screen, edit out the spaces between their sentences, and generally go so dang fast! They’re counting on you to PAUSE when you need to see something standing still, or navigate to another application to do something, or simply take a moment to understand. The act of doing so actually keeps viewers more engaged. You too can do this.
For this reason, it’s rare to see FAST-FORWARD as a video control these days. Remember when you could press that button on your tape deck and hear it play at chipmunk speeds? For audiobooks and podcasts, you’ll see SPEED controls such as 1.5, 2x, etc. that work kind of like that and allow us to listen in less time. But for online videos, the thing to do is allow users to “scrub the playhead” or click the progress bar at the bottom that represents the full-length of the video and jumps the user to the approximate position they clicked.
Sometimes we show this to our Learners without letting them have the navigational control to do something with it. Why? When they see it, they will want to use it. Don’t tease. Either give the functionality, or don’t show it off. And please grant this ability by default. Again, you may have a good instructional reason not to allow this, but unless you do, give your Learners what they are used to: control.
Occasionally we’ll still see the SKIP controls on a video that move to the next section. I’ve seen the kids on YouTube make fantastic use of this from time to time, building out a whole table of contents within a video overlay or bookmarking major points. For your eLearning Video, however, the urge to do this is probably a sign that your video is too long. It’s likely better to make several shorter videos than one big one, if for no other reason than to make your videos easier to produce and to update.
General rule of thumb, one well-written learning objective = one video. New point? New video. The SKIP function becomes the NEXT button.
Last but not least, there is the REWIND function. I believe this to be the most important and most underestimated of all. Sure, if you missed something due to the phone ringing or some other real-world distraction, this REWIND give you your chance to go back without starting all over. But the savvy Learners will use it to learn at their own pace. When you’re not quite sure if you understood a key point and want to listen again, need to replay and PAUSE what just went by too fast, or (let’s be real here) were glancing at your phone while the video was playing on your computer and just plain missed something, REWIND will save you. It is critical for allowing your Learners to learn at their own pace.
REWIND is also one of the best indicators of engagement…and of confusion! If you have access to your video analytics and can see that Learners are rewinding and rewatching a certain part of your video, that’s either an indication that you had them in the palm of your hand in that moment, or that this is where you totally lost them. Figuring out which is which may still be more art than science, but without giving your Learners navigational control and gathering the data about how they wield that control, you’ll never know what you could be doing better.