The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

Found in today’s nytimes.com, a compelling proposal for a ballot re-design.

Wordle has been making the rounds lately but I’ve just gotten in to mess around with it — and it’s fabulous.

Here is a Wordle rendering of all of my del.icio.us tags:

Sure, it’s just a tag cloud. But, because the final layout is so well done and the creation interface is so thoughtfully put together, the data can be manipulated and understood in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional tag clouds.

“I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop… Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some ‘I’m still starting up the OS’ queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once.”

Review of Windows XP

Why do I have to answer so many questions when I just want to shut down my laptop and go home?

Textpad: Do you want to save untitled.txt?
Me: No! If I’d wanted to save it, I would have.
Entourage: Do you want to empty your junkmail folder?
Me: I don’t care! Maybe I do, but why do I have to decide right now?
Firefox: You are about to close 10 tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?
Me: Yes! Why else would I be trying to shut down the machine?

Imagine if our houses were like this. (Error: you are about to leave the kitchen without emptying the dishwasher. Cancel | Yes | No ) We would not stand for it.

Why can’t I just turn off the computer? Is it really such a dumb machine that it can’t remember the last version of all open files? I wish I had a switch labeled “just turn off, I mean it, it’s time to go home and I don’t want to deal with you anymore.”

Another conference/seminar/meeting, another reference to netflix.com.

Many web eons ago, back in 2001 or so, amazon.com was brought up in every conversation of “what a website should look like.” Build tabs! Tabs are neat. They’re like file folders. People understand them. Just keep adding more tabs as you get or define new content areas. If you have more tabs than fit across one row? No problem! Add a second row. And a third. Amazon continued with the tab metaphor to the point where, because of the multiple rows of tabs, the structure became increasingly clumsy. So at some point the amazon.com designers scaled back to one row of tabs and had one of the tabs show, on hover, a big list of all categories. This felt like progress. Recently amazon.com was reborn with no tabs at all. This felt like an important moment in the trajectory of designing for the web.

In any case, my web-oriented discussions in meetings in 2001 focused on “What should a website look like? What is good navigation? What is amazon.com doing, and how can do learn from it?”

Fast forward, sort of, to a couple years later. Thanks to the efforts of Tantek and other smart people, the possibilities for page structuring using CSS were beginning to be understood, and navigation issues took the backseat to convincing Powers That Be that CSS was worth ripping apart and reassembling many thousands (in my case) of HTML documents.

Around this time a showy and fabulous grouping of sites known as csszengarden.com came on the scene. The CSS Zen Garden project was a chance for designers and CSS aficionados to prove to the world that CSS sites could be even more lovely than table layouts. From this point, in every meeting, in every discussion, in every utterance of web strategy-ness there came the inevitable “look at csszengarden.com! Look at what we can do with CSS!”

Somewhere along the way we, the CSS converts, won the battle over tabled layouts. CSS and XHTML are now standard. I’m not sure what role csszengarden.com played in this, but in my experience it was certainly significant in helping convince designers and business managers that CSS could help make stuff beautiful (as well as, of course, more easily maintainable). This started around 2002 and lasted until around 2005.

The discussion, particularly around 2002-03, was centered around “How should we build websites? What can we do with CSS?”

Since that time, web interactions have gotten more complicated and more important than ever for business operations — and the discussion has shifted to be more about ROI and customer experience. My conversations are less about how websites should be built, and more about what they should do.

And now, people bring up netflix.com to me on an almost daily basis, as the site does an exemplary job of explaining a complicated business process at the same time as offering a compelling and easy sign-up process; we are all thinking about the user experience in ways that we weren’t before.

I would say this is progress.

And I would say that the luster of the netflix.com experience will wear off fast. Until you sign up and provide personal information, the experience feels flat and disconnected. I predict that the next “brought up in every meeting” site will provide a rich and contextual experience before the sign up process is completed. (Maybe along the lines of upcoming.org?)

A week ago the Bay Area experienced a 5.6 magnitude earthquake. Below, part of the USGS “Did you feel it?” earthquake report form:

Your experience of the earthquake:

How would you best describe the ground shaking?

• No description
• Not felt
• Weak
• Mild
• Moderate
• Strong
• Violent

About how many seconds did the shaking last? []

How would you best describe your reaction?

• No answer/No
  reaction/Not felt
• Very little reaction
• Excitement
• Somewhat frightened
• Very frightened
• Extremely frightened

How did you respond? (Select one)

• No answer/Don’t remember
• Took no action
• Moved to doorway
• Dropped and covered
• Ran outside
• Other

If other, please describe:[]

Steve Ganz uncovered this gem:

The Solar Magnitude Forum concept is essentially that a given user will be most interested in topics that are either 1. very closely aligned with her interests or 2. unusually important and interesting.

The idea was initially defined within the context of the asynchronous discussion forum, but it could be extended further.

A couple days ago I came across this example from the Forrester site:

(larger screen capture)

Forrester is suggesting that I’d be interested in subscribing to newsletters that they assume as being directly applicable to my interests, and also newsletters that they assume I’d be interested in because they are the most widely read or broadly positioned.

The UI is simple and the app does the (relatively) heavy lifting of determining what the user would find the most interesting. The user is saved from paging through a painfully long list of all available newsletters to pick out the ones that are the most useful.

I’m listening to All Things Considered, where they’re doing an admirable job of explaining the new Microsoft Surface. Interesting confluence of very different media.

NPR story
more about MS Surface