10 Key Considerations When Creating Effective L&D Animations
December 1, 2020 by The Bearded Team
How Do You Create Effective L&D Animations?
Starting to delve into the vast world of learning and development animations, but a little stuck ensuring they’re as effective as possible? As a creative animation agency in Manchester, we’ve got a wealth of experience in our field. Therefore, we’ve collated our top 10 tips to ensure you can create the best ROI for everyone involved. Keep reading to level up your animation game.
How to Create Effective L&D Animations
1 – Invest in the Design
Invest time and resources in the design and execution of the content. Providing your learners with high quality learning resources will help your learners feel respected and regard the experience as positive. This will encourage motivation and support more learners to finish the course.
2 – Keep it simple
Ensure that the animation connects with your learners at an appropriate learning level and make sure you present the information to them simply. The content should avoid any abstract concepts, images or language.
If you’re wondering what the importance of effective L&D animation is, we suggest checking out our previous blog: The number 1 e-learning mistake which delves into it’s value, and common mistakes to avoid.
3 – Engage, don’t distract
Here at Bearded Fellows, a creative video agency based in Manchester, we create learning and development resources that are interesting enough to hold the learners attention, but that are not distracting. It’s vital to add variety to the tone of delivery of the animation with the use of carefully planned gestures and movement to keep the viewer engaged. Do not over complicate the content with movement – a well thought out learning resource with little (or no) animation will always be more successful than a badly designed animation with lots of movement.
4 – Keep momentum with a well paced script
Work with a professional learning and development scriptwriter or agency to create a well written, well paced script. This should include key messages only and will have just the right amount of repetition to aid learning.
5 – Offer visual and audio cues
Learners have a greater chance of recalling information if they have stored it both visually and verbally. If you’re not already familiar with the dual-coding theory, take a moment to familiarise yourself – it’s something we always keep in mind as a video and animation studio serving Manchester and London.
Provide your learner with both verbal associations and visual imagery but be aware not to bombard them with too much information. Keep the detail of what you want them to learn in the audio and use text to highlight key messages that are spoken. This will support the learner to commit both visual and verbal information to long term memory and encourage deep learning to occur.
6 – Use conversational voice
Commission an experienced voiceover artist that your audience can relate to and that fits with the theme of the animation and/or the chosen character. The voiceover should be brief and to the point but delivered in a conversational, likable manner to allow the audience to feel comfortable and trust the source.
7 – Support active learning
Offering active learning content will motivate and engage learners and will help them to take control of their own learning journey. There are many ways you can do this, some of our favourite as a Manchester creative video agency include: playback/pause options on the content will help learners progress at their own pace and re-learn content they want to go back over, simple gamification techniques such as clicking on trigger objects or encouraging team learning to drive engagement, and introducing questions and reflection time into the learning programme will encourage critical thinking skills. This helps the learner evaluate where they are in their learning journey.
8 – Put things into context
Deep learning is the goal, and as learning and development animators in Manchester, we know that facilitating this can be tricky. Deep learning has a greater chance when a learner is able to associate the information provided with something they already know. They are able to put it into context and make sense of it. Ensure the content you provide is meaningful to your learners by offering it to them after they have already learnt basic principles about a subject, for example, displaying the animation after other learning opportunities. Offer alternative opportunities for context by setting learning goals for the content. Show exactly what the learner will gain from the animation, and where in the learning journey they are.
9 – Embed inclusive co-design from the start
This goes without saying, but the learning and development content must be easily accessible to all learners of all ages with a range of needs. Begin each project by considering the needs of users with different abilities and engage a wide range of stakeholders in all elements of the design process. This will ensure you co-design content that can support all learning needs. A good learning designer will explore practical considerations such as content navigation, colour contrast, size of text, accessibility options etc. As a learning and development animation agency in Manchester, we ensure no corners are cut during this integral part of the process.
10 – Make the most of your assets
Animated content is an incredibly versatile and high value comms tool. It can have a huge lifespan and be edited for a range of mediums and iterations. When planned in advance, it can last beyond live action content.
Content that uses pre-prepared brand assets or that is created to follow a brands guidelines can be scaled and templated and used for many years to come. Alternatively, content can be created to stand out from the rest of the brand content and given its own look and feel. Discuss this with your L&D content team who will present multiple options to help you gain the most value out of your content.
Roche | Online Learning Animation | Building a Case for Change from Bearded Fellows on Vimeo.
This learning and development animation started with a creative consultation process. This allowed us to explore the real needs of the project and the complex messaging it entailed. The result allowed us to condense the message to ensure it was clear, concise and easy-to-follow through the use of a single animation. As it was a single animation with clear messaging, it meant that the audience could digest the information easily, enabling effective retention.
Flow Hospitality | Learning & Development Animation | COSHH from Bearded Fellows on Vimeo.
For this project, the team at Bearded Fellows played with contrasting colours, themes and motion decipher the perfect balance between engaging action and scenario-based scenes to allow the viewer to ‘relate’ to the animation. By creating the animations to be visually appealing and engaging, this meant that a wider range of individuals could access and embed the learning aspect of the animation.
METTLER TOLEDO | Animation | Gravity Fall Systems from Bearded Fellows on Vimeo.
Mettler Toledo required learning and development animations from our creative video agency to support their sales teams to efficiently understand and communicate the solutions that each of their products could solve for a range of customers needs.
We created strong, on-brand assets that were reusable and easily translatable into other languages for ultimate versatility. Our 2D, training animations provided simple, instant sales insights and prompts to enable remote teams to hand objections, clarify niche and technical elements of their products in a bid to increase sales.
In conclusion, creating effective learning and development (L&D) animations requires careful consideration and strategic planning. By following these top 10 tips, you can ensure that your L&D animations are engaging, impactful, and provide a positive return on investment for everyone involved. If you need further support to enhance your learning and development animation delivery, please get in touch with one of our friendly team who will be more than happy to assist you.
– Click here to read another one of our blogs: ‘Renew your Marketing Assets with Animated Copy’
👉🏼 If you would like to discuss a Learning & Development project with us please Get in touch!
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