Last fall I did a quick overview of how to find good stock photos. Here are more in-depth tips that will help you use stock photos to reach your learners’ hearts as well as their minds.

Aim for the evocative

In a previous life as a marketer, I learned the difference between functional and evocative company names. For example, compare the names of two computer companies:

• Digital Equipment (functional–it simply describes the product)
• Apple (evocative–involves our senses, suggests simplicity)

The same concepts apply to images.

For example, more courses than I ever want to see use sterile images of bland business people because the courses are about business, and “everyone knows” that business involves people in suits talking at meetings or shaking hands. That’s the functional mindset, and it has spawned thousands of lifeless photos.

But our courses aren’t really about stiff, overdressed people whose souls have already departed. They’re about problems that need to be fixed or changes that will improve our lives. To communicate that, we need emotionally evocative images.

Quick guide to finding evocative images

Let’s say your course discusses the importance of building trust in others. How can you quickly find good images about such an abstract concept?

1. Choose your stock site carefully

If you Google “microstock” or “stock photos,” you’ll find plenty of sites. The trick is to find a site that actually delivers useful photos when you search for them.

I usually use iStockPhoto, because it seems to have the most useful search engine and accurate keywords. If you want to shop around, pick an abstract keyword like “trust” and see what you get at each site. Also check the collection for diversity.

Once you find a site you like, stick to it. Limiting your options will both save time and make you more creative.

As you use the site, you’ll see images you like but that don’t answer an immediate need. Put them in the site’s online lightbox and give them a useful tag so you can quickly find them later.

2. Search the site for the concept.

Here are a few results for “trust” at iStockPhoto. How do they affect you emotionally?

A functionally-minded person might argue, “But our course isn’t about children or mountain climbing or transplanting tomatoes! Our course is about business!” They’ll want to use an image like this:

But where’s the emotional appeal? And apparently those two guys agree a lot, because most of the bajillion handshaking photos show two male hands emerging from dark suits.

I’m not saying that if a suit appears, the photo is automatically literal and boring. Some photographers are getting creative with workplace images. But there’s still an unfortunately good chance that a “business” photo will seem sterile, staged, and stereotyped.

3. Think of opposing similes

If you don’t like any of the results you got from searching on the concept, brainstorm some similes. Start with “[the concept] is like…” and include some opposites in your ideas, because they’ll lead you to new ideas. You’ll end up with a lot more keywords to search for.

Trust is like…

• being in a cozy house vs. being outside in a storm
• walking on a wide path vs. walking a tightrope
• having a big net under a tightrope
• swimming with water wings
• cooperating vs. competing
• listening vs. yelling
• walking together vs. walking away from each other
• parallel lines vs. diverging lines

Here are a couple of results from “tightrope” that might be useful for “trust”:

4. Avoid culturally specific images

Another iStockPhoto result for “trust” was this:

Will all our learners recognize this as a baton being handed off in a relay race (apparently the Relay Race of the Gods)? Will it have as much emotional meaning for them as other images might?

5. Manage your images locally

When you buy a stock image, give it a meaningful name and tag it with useful keywords, if your operating system allows that. I also put images in folders that make sense to me. For example, one of my image folders is “emotions.”

If you establish a naming and tagging system from the start, you’ll quickly build an on-site collection that’s easy to search.

Why is this scary?

It seems like a lot of elearning developers shy away from using non-”business” images. Can you help me understand why? Is it considered risky or unprofessional to use emotionally evocative photos? Do your clients welcome them? Please let me know in the comments.

Save $300 when you register by June 30 for the Brandon Hall Research Innovations in Learning conference. You’ll have lots of hands-on chances to learn, as you’ll see when you check out the preliminary program. I’ll give a half-day workshop on how to Dump the Drone and will participate in the Women’s Blog Jam.

See the difference a picture can make: Before & After magazine shows ways to make your presentations and elearning more compelling with visuals: “Remember: story, not data. Rather than talk about your topic, find a way to show it.”

Are you using feedback effectively? Get research-based recommendations from Will Thalheimer’s free two-part report.

Duck, duck, … goose? Cammy Bean bravely tries to convince a client to make Six Sigma training fun with rubber ducks.

How? Try action mapping.

I’ve been using a quick, visual process to design projects. I call it action mapping because it helps you change what people do, not just what they know. It helps you design action-packed materials that are 100% dedicated to improving business performance, and it can keep stakeholders from adding extraneous information.

Here’s a slideshow with an overview. You can also download a PDF of the slides.

| View | Upload your own

How does it work in the real world?

For me, the map fills three roles:

• Design document
• Outline (obviously non-linear; if someone wants a linear approach, I write a short, high-level text outline or move the nodes so they form a list on one side of the goal)
• Content repository

The map is a content repository because I use Compendium, which lets you include PowerPoint slides, Word documents, and other files in the map. This means each information node actually contains the relevant source materials.

If you use a rapid tool, you could probably just dive into the tool after creating the map, using the map as an outline and tightening the source materials as you go.

Why use the map?

A tool like the action map makes everyone focus on the business reason for the project and keeps extraneous information out–it provides discipline.

Undisciplined communication is the third biggest source of harmful complexity in business, according to Bill Jensen in Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage.

Time pressure allows people to justify behaviors they would not accept from others….Communication becomes a matter of disseminating information and taking any available e-shortcuts. When it comes to communication, business is facing major discipline and accountability problems.

Jensen says that communication becomes ineffective when we don’t identify the deep problem that the communication is supposed to solve. Instead, we say, “Let’s communicate more,” which, according to Jensen, “just creates noise and distracts from the original problem.”

How does this work at your organization? Do you have a design process that keeps everyone focused on the business goal for each elearning project? Or are you expected to include whatever information the stakeholders say you should include, and if so, how might you change this?

Marvel (or not!) at the advanced special effects used in the 1927 silent movie How to Use the Dial Telephone. See more old training movies at the Internet Archive.

What generation are you? This test uses your social media habits to determine your generation. (I’m Generation Y trapped in a Boomer body.)

Learn absolutely nothing from the PowerPoint presentation Chicken Chicken Chicken.

As you decide who said each blurb, notice the cues that you’re responding to. What makes dialog sound natural, and what makes it sound stiff?

Click the image to start the activity, and pretend the “TRIAL” watermark isn’t there. Then come back here for some dialog tips and a mini-review of Dragster.

What did you notice about the dialog?

In the droid’s lines, you probably saw these symptoms of unnatural dialog:

• Lack of contractions (”you are wearing”)
• Obsessively grammatical sentences
• Formal wording (”wish” instead of “want”)
• Introductory -ing phrases (”Upon examining the data…”)
• Legalistic weaseling (”and/or”)
• No idioms or slang
• Buzzwords that no human should say (”key value-add”)

We can make the droid sound more like a dude with a few changes:

• Use contractions: “She is our best chainsaw juggler” becomes “She’s our best…”
• Break sentences into fragments of different types: “If you wish to play the banjo, please go outside” becomes “You want to play the banjo? Then go outside” –and it has more personality, too
• Choose informal words: “wish” becomes “want”
• Replace -ing introductions with past tense: “Upon examining the data” becomes “When we examined the data”

What about “Our biggest deal just fell through?” Why did I make that a dude line? Mostly because it uses an idiom (”fell through”). Most droids don’t know idioms and would say something like “Our biggest opportunity is no longer viable.”

Dragster mini-review

To create the activity, I used version 3 of Dragster, an easy-to-use web tool that creates Flash drag-and-drop activities that are SCORM compliant. A basic version of the tool is available free; the version I tested costs £45 a year.

The workflow is intuitive and fast. Once my graphic was ready, it took less than 15 minutes to create and publish the activity in Dragster.

I got confused once, when I thought I could save some draggable labels and edit them later. Apparently, once you’ve saved the labels, you can’t change them, though you can add more labels.

The technique for defining target areas will be familiar to PowerPoint and Keynote users: you draw an invisible shape over the target area. Because your shape can have an almost infinite number of points, you can accurately define complex “correct” areas. You can also set up “close, but not quite” areas. (I just used super-easy rectangular targets.)

The draggable items can be images or text labels. You can save learners’ scores, and learners can also collaboratively work on an activity and add their own labels. One feature I would recommend for future versions is individual feedback for each dragged item, such as a hint that appears when the learner drags something to the wrong spot.

Your customization choices are limited, but that’s a fair price to pay for speed and ease of use. Learn more at the Dragster site.

Click the green arrow to help determine the next celebrity verb!

Your child has been possessed by the Compulsive Completer, a beast that lives in all of us. From deep within our brains, it intones, “Must! Complete! Collection!” The closer we are to completion, the more insistent the demand.

You can harness the mighty force of the Completer to motivate your learners. Here’s one way to do it.

Consider offering a series of rewards throughout a course or other linear experience. Each reward builds on the last to create a desirable collection–all of it imaginary.

In a comment to Tom Kuhlmann’s post Motivate Your Learners with These 5 Simple Tips, Martin Kopsch describes the approach he took with home loan consultants:

At the beginning of the course they were given a floorplan of a 3 bedroom house. No furniture, fittings, finishes. At various stages during the course the learner was rewarded by being offered options of furniture, kitchen appliances, bathroom fittings, etc. The final reward, at the end of the course, was a virtual car in the virtual garage. All these “rewards” cost absolutely nothing, but a sense of competition quickly developed amongst learners: Result? Every one got a virtual car, ie 100% completion rate.

When a house is incomplete, it’s obvious–and the Compulsive Completer complains loudly. Any physical project will clearly show its incomplete status and motivate learners to finish it. What kind of imaginary project or collection would inspire your learners?

Experience instead of stuff?

If you don’t want to offer your learners a collection of imaginary stuff, how about some imaginary experiences? Let’s say that your organization has 9 locations around the world, and your course covers a topic related to this globalization. You could try something like this:

1. Tell your learners that they will be taking a trip around the world, stopping at all 9 locations and having an adventure at each one.
2. Show them a map with the locations identified and none of them marked as visited.
3. When a learner earns the first reward, send them to the first location. Show them a photo of an appealing staff person in that location and in one engaging paragraph describe a fun local adventure (or mis-adventure!) that the learner enjoys with that person.
4. Maybe give the learner an imaginary souvenir from that adventure, and mark that spot on the map as visited.

Offer choices to increase involvement

To involve your learners more, let them choose something about their reward at each step. For example, give them a choice of carpeting styles, including something fun like hideous orange shag. Or if they’re on a world tour, let them pick an adventure at each location.

Or turn the whole thing into a story

Of course, you won’t need separate rewards if you can make the entire course a story and use plot devices to make learners want to know what happens next. There are basic ideas about plot in this post; in future posts I’ll cover some techniques in more detail.

What are some other ways in which you can make an incomplete course practically demand to be completed?

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Thanks for organizing this, Dave!

Let’s say you’re writing materials for people who create custom pet hedgehogs using genetic engineering. You might be tempted to write a question like the one below.

It’s a good idea to include parrot genes in a custom hedgehog.

1. True
2. False (correct)

How could you make this question more realistically reflect the learner’s world?

First ask yourself, “Why does the learner need to know this fact?”

Then write a question that tests both the learner’s knowledge of the fact and their ability to apply it in the real world. “What if…” questions come in handy for this.

What would happen if you included parrot genes in a custom hedgehog?

1. The hedgehog would become depressed by its inability to fly.
2. The hedgehog would charm customers with its bright plumage.
3. The hedgehog would develop an offensive vocabulary.

The “before” question tests only basic knowledge. The “after” question tests the same basic knowledge and at the same time tests whether learners understand why the fact is important.

Of course, make sure your materials answer the question.

Obviously, the “after” question has more shades of meaning and suggests that the materials contain more information than simply, “It’s a bad idea to include parrot genes.”

I’m a big advocate of writing questions before you write the main materials. So if you want your low-tech materials to simulate real life, you might:

1. Write questions that learners must be able to answer in order to fully understand (not just perform) their jobs. These probably aren’t fact-based questions but instead are “What if” and “Why” questions.
2. Then write the materials that will precede the questions, assuming you’re doing the standard “tell, then test” approach. Also consider putting the questions first, then explaining why the correct answer is correct.

What are some other ways to give basic questions more depth? Are simple fact checks ever appropriate?

This hilarious YouTube video shows what I mean.

To fight the enemy, we have to see it

My favorite writing teacher used parody to help us recognize and remove bloat. Here’s a small example.

The following statement is sort of Apple style–minimal and direct. Your assignment is to rewrite it, packing in as many words and details as possible.

Don’t bring your cat to work, because some of your colleagues could be allergic.

Here’s one possible rewrite:

All staff, both exempt and non-exempt, should endeavor to observe a complete ban on feline companion animals in the workplace at all times, due to the fact that much of the human population experiences an allergic histamine reaction to cat glycoprotein. Your observation of this ban is appreciated.

By examining how we bloated the statement, we can begin to recognize bloat in our own materials. So let’s look at the damage we did.

• Instead of speaking directly to the reader (”don’t”), we spoke in the abstract (”all staff…should endeavor”).
• We redundantly defined “all” (”both exempt and non-exempt”).
• We over-elaborated “cat” (”feline companion animals”).
• We chose words with lots of syllables (”endeavor,” “feline,” etc.).
• We unnecessarily pointed out that a “complete ban” is in effect “at all times.”
• We replaced one word (”because”) with five (”due to the fact that”).
• We got overly scientific. Probably a stakeholder said, “We have to say what they’re allergic to!”
• We added an unnecessary and fake-sounding thanks that has no real subject (”is appreciated” by whom?). Probably a stakeholder said, “We can’t just issue an edict. It sounds too harsh.”

Of course, bloated prose is just a tiny symptom of a bigger problem: too much information. In a future post, I’ll share a technique that can help you keep your courses lean and focused.

How much bloat did you pack in to your rewrite? And how do you persuade your stakeholders that some of their details should be cut?