You’ve probably sat through one. A slide deck with fifty-some-odd pages, a monotone voiceover, and a "quiz" at the end that basically asks if you were breathing for the last twenty minutes. It's painful. But more importantly, it is a massive waste of money. Most people think "learning" is about shoveling information into a brain like coal into a furnace. It isn't. If you want to actually change how someone behaves or what they know, you have to start with design for how people learn, which is a lot more about psychology than it is about pretty graphics or LMS platforms.
The brain is a stubborn organ. It's designed to forget. In fact, forgetting is a survival mechanism. If we remembered every license plate we saw on the commute, we'd have no room for the important stuff, like how to do our jobs or where we left the keys.
Julie Dirksen, who literally wrote the book on this—Design for How People Learn—often talks about the "gap." Before you build a single slide, you have to ask: Why aren't they doing it already? Is it a knowledge gap? A skills gap? Or is it just that the environment makes it impossible? Most designers treat every problem like a knowledge gap. They think, "If I just tell them one more time to wear their safety goggles, they'll do it." Narrator voice: They won't.
The Cognitive Load Problem
Stop trying to be fancy.
When we talk about design for how people learn, we have to talk about Cognitive Load Theory. John Sweller developed this back in the 80s, and it’s still the gold standard for why your training is crashing and burning. Your working memory is tiny. It can hold maybe four to seven "chunks" of information at once. If you're teaching a complex new software and you spend twenty minutes on the history of the company's UI choices, you've already filled the bucket. The actual instructions? Those are just overflowing onto the floor.
There are three types of load you need to care about:
- Intrinsic load: How hard the task actually is. You can’t make quantum physics "easy," but you can break it down.
- Extraneous load: The garbage. This is the distracting background music, the unnecessary animations, and the "clever" metaphors that don't actually track.
- Germane load: The good stuff. This is the mental effort that actually leads to a "schema" or a mental map.
If you want people to learn, you have to ruthlessly murder the extraneous load. If a graphic doesn't directly explain the concept, delete it. If a paragraph is just fluff, kill it. Honestly, most "engaging" e-learning is actually just distracting. You don't need a gamified leaderboard for a course on compliance; you need a clear explanation of how not to get sued.
Why "Engagement" is a Trap
We have this obsession with making things "fun."
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Look, nobody thinks a HIPAA certification is fun. Trying to make it fun by adding a cartoon mascot is just insulting. True engagement in design for how people learn doesn't mean "entertaining." It means "relevant." If I'm a salesperson and you show me exactly how to overcome the three most common objections I hear every day, I'm engaged. I'm engaged because you're helping me solve a problem.
We often confuse fluency with learning. Fluency is when you read something and think, "Yeah, that makes sense." It feels easy. You feel like you've got it. But research by Dr. Robert Bjork at UCLA shows that "desirable difficulties" are actually better for long-term retention. If it’s too easy, it doesn't stick. You need to make the learner work a little. Ask them a hard question before you give them the answer. Make them retrieve the information from their own brain. That struggle is where the actual learning happens.
The Myth of Learning Styles
Let's just kill this right now. Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic—the VAK model. It’s bunk.
There is zero credible scientific evidence that teaching someone in their "preferred style" improves learning outcomes. People have preferences, sure. I might like watching videos more than reading. But that doesn't mean I learn better that way. The best way to teach something depends on the content, not the person. If you're teaching someone how to use a heart monitor, they need to see it and touch it. You wouldn't just read them a poem about it because they're an "auditory learner."
When you focus on design for how people learn, you focus on multimodal learning. Use images for spatial info. Use text for complex details. Use practice for skills. Don't segment your audience into buckets that don't actually exist in neurology.
Memory and the Forgetting Curve
Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the "Forgetting Curve" in the 1880s. He found that we lose about 70% of what we learn within 24 hours if we don't use it or review it.
Think about that.
If you send your team to a three-day "bootcamp" and then they don't use those skills for a month, you've effectively set a pile of cash on fire. To fight this, you need spaced repetition. Instead of one big event, do small "micro-learning" bursts over time. A five-minute refresher a week later is worth more than five hours of initial training.
Practical Steps for Better Design
You’ve got to get your hands dirty.
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If you’re building training, start by talking to the people who are actually doing the work. Don't just talk to the managers. The managers will tell you what should happen; the workers will tell you what actually happens.
- Define the "Do": Don't start with "The learner will understand..." Start with "The learner will do [X]." If you can't define a specific action, your training is just a lecture.
- Context is King: Try to make the learning environment look like the working environment. If they use a specific software, use screenshots of that software. Don't use generic stock photos.
- Give Feedback Immediately: In design for how people learn, the speed of feedback is everything. If someone makes a mistake in a simulation, tell them why it's a mistake right then. Don't wait until the end of the module.
- Use Stories, Not Bullet Points: Humans are wired for narratives. We've been telling stories around campfires for 50,000 years; we've been looking at PowerPoint for thirty. Which one do you think the brain prefers? Use case studies. Use "The time Bill almost blew up the lab because he skipped step four."
Social Learning and the 70-20-10 Rule
A lot of people cite the 70-20-10 model: 70% of learning happens through experience, 20% through others (social), and 10% through formal classes. While the exact percentages are debated, the core truth isn't. Formal training is the smallest part of the puzzle.
If your design for how people learn strategy doesn't include how people talk to each other, it's incomplete. Create Slack channels. Set up mentorships. Build "performance support" tools—like checklists or cheat sheets—that people can use while they work. Sometimes the best "training" is just a really well-designed job aid that means they don't have to memorize anything at all.
Honestly, the best designers are the ones who realize that less is more. We have this urge to include everything "just in case." Resist that. Be a curator. Be a filter. Your learners' brains will thank you.
Actionable Insights for Your Next Project
To move from "info-dumping" to actual instructional design, you need to change your workflow immediately.
First, identify the performance gap. Is this a "can't do" or a "won't do"? If it's a "won't do," training won't fix it—you need better incentives or better tools. If it's a "can't do," move to the next step.
Second, apply the Goldilocks Principle to your content. Not too much, not too little. Strip away everything that isn't essential for the "Do." Every extra word is an opportunity for the learner to tune out.
Third, build in retrieval practice. Instead of summarizing the lesson at the end, ask the learner to summarize it. Ask them how they would apply this to a specific problem they faced last Tuesday.
Finally, plan for the follow-up. Design the "booster" shots of information that will go out a week, a month, and three months after the initial training. This is how you move info from short-term "in one ear and out the other" memory into long-term, usable knowledge.
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Real learning is slow, it’s a bit messy, and it requires effort. If your design doesn't reflect that, you're not teaching—you're just talking.