Device-Aware Delivery

A video that will not load is not just annoying. It stops you learning.

Anyone who has tried to watch something on a slow connection knows the particular frustration of the spinning circle. The frustration itself is not the problem. The problem is what it does to your attention. By the time the video finally starts playing, you have drifted to another tab, replied to a message, forgotten what you were about to watch and why. The learning that was supposed to happen has quietly evaporated, replaced by a small residue of annoyance. Designers of learning platforms rarely think of this as their problem. They think of it as the user's problem, or the network's problem, or the device's problem. But cognition does not care whose problem it is. If waiting broke the flow, learning did not happen, and no amount of beautifully produced content matters if it never actually reached the person.

This is why a well designed learning system has to be aware of what is on the other end of the line. Not just whether the screen layout adjusts for a phone, which is only a visual fix, but whether the bandwidth can support a high resolution video, whether the device can play back the format, whether the user might be offline for part of the day, whether a lighter version of the same content would serve them better right now. These are pedagogical decisions dressed up as technical ones, because delivering the wrong thing at the wrong moment is the same as not delivering anything at all. When was the last time a small technical friction stopped you from learning something you actually wanted to learn?

Last week we said the dashboard often measures the easy thing instead of the real thing. This week we look at the way a slow connection or a tired tablet quietly stops learning happening at all.