Designing for understandability

Right after reaching a reasonable knowledge in a particular technology or framework, I generally try to read as many articles and watch as many sessions as I can on the internet to understand how people try to explain the basics.

Explaining the basics is not as easy as it seems. Teaching style takes more credit than it took yesterday because if you are boring anyhow people will listen to what you say as long as they are in your classroom. However, today the audience is powerful, they can skip your lecture or rewind your video, change your playback speed, etc.

Sometimes in MOOC videos, you come across with funny guys throwing jokes at you. Sometimes you watch videos of people talking in a monotonous way, boring as hell. Most of the time I follow those authors who don’t miss the point explaining the main idea but also injecting intellectual, entertaining and enlighting information to make pinpoints in memory.

This is an awesome trick, human touch. Maybe you won’t be remembering the most little details of what you learned in their class or article but you’ll remember that you enjoyed it so the big picture stays with you.

Designing knowledge transfer in the most understandable way takes a lot of effort. There are lots of topics to be explained for example in Docker world, Cloud Orchestration, Configuration Automation. Starting by first explaining its history, how it all started or what made that technology to show up is a nice way to make the audience build their initial knowledge. For example, the benefits of cgroups on Linux is a foundational technical detail that makes the container world thrive today. What a pity that I learned it after I got my way through Docker and then Kubernetes… None of those online courses or articles told me about it while I was learning the basics.

It’s better when we do not limit designing for understandability just about recording MOOCs and writing articles.

Preparing a presentation, writing some code or configuration need building blocks and sometimes quite humour to be understandable in the very easiest way.