My wife and I recently returned from a two-week trip to Italy. It was my first time ever in the country and my first time to Europe in over a decade. We were hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB for over a week, living out of a carry-on-size bag each, before we stayed at a place that included a much-needed washing machine. But as we got ready to wash our clothes, there was a problem. We had no idea what the icons on the machine meant. 

I just wanted a standard cold-temperature wash for colors–which one is it? There’s two kinds of flower icons with different parts shaded in. Maybe one of them is whites and the other is colors, but which is which? Wait, why is there a chemistry beaker? Why are there butterflies?! Wait—butterflies are colorful! Is that what I want?

We spent almost an hour of our honeymoon trying to find a user manual or YouTube tutorial that would decode these icons. As it turns out, we didn’t even have the right frame of reference–none of them are for “colors.” We needed to select either cottons (the second flower from the top) or mixed fabrics (the chemistry beaker).

Not only was it unfamiliar iconography, it was also counter to my expectations in terms of how it was organized.

Travel is great for immersing you in the experience of being a novice.

It’s important in this line of work–course design, instructional design, design in general. We need to be able to see the world through the eyes of a novice.

At the 2019 DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, Dr. Michele DiPietro introduced us to the idea of the “expert blindspot.”

As you learn about a particular topic, you move from 1) not knowing what you don’t know to 2) knowing what you don’t know to 3) knowing what you do know to 4) knowing so much that you don’t really remember what it’s like to not know.

It’s important for instructors to keep this principle in mind as subject-matter experts in their field who need to communicate information to novices. We as designers also need to keep this concept in mind as we design course structures and interfaces and decide how much explicit instruction is enough. A course design may seem self-evident to we who designed it, to our colleagues who have seen hundreds of similarly designed courses, and even to our traditional students who have seen thousands of digital interfaces for websites and apps. But is it self-evident to more marginal students?

Technology is not inherently easy to use. We can only learn how to use a new website or app so quickly because designers employ a particular shared set of iconography, terminology, and layout. I know how to use a website I’ve never seen before largely because it functions much the same way as other websites I’ve been to. I can look for a menu on the top, the left, or maybe hidden behind a ☰ icon. I know I can go to the homepage by clicking the website logo. These features aren’t inherently easy to discover–they’re easy to discover because we’ve seen them before.

Sometimes we’re so used to a particular design language that it’s invisible to us until we’re thrust into a foreign environment. In Italy, navigating the foreign design language was as much a struggle as language itself (perhaps more–most Italians I encountered spoke English quite well). For example, in America, exit signs are generally red. In Italy (and I’ve learned much of the rest of the world), they’re green. The first few times I saw this sign, I had to stop and think about what it meant.

So what is my point in all this? Just because a design is self-evident for you, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be self-evident for everyone else–particularly if you’re a high-level user of web technology, or specifically if you’ve seen dozens of courses in your particular learning-management system before.

At DePaul, we are not just designing for the typical student. We are designing for students who may have had less access to technology, or international students who may not have the same shared language of iconography, layout, and terminology as we do. We need to approach this challenge thoughtfully and make sure we are being inclusive in our design, even if that means that our perfect, beautiful, self-evident course design sometimes needs some explanation.