General design principles
When designing teaching/learning materials of any kind, it is helpful to follow the design principles according to Mayer (2017):
- Coherence principle: Remove irrelevant or decorative elements that have no relation to the teaching content.
- Signal principle: Highlight key elements to draw learners' attention to them (e.g. through color, italics or bold print).
- Redundancy principle: Avoid excessive repetition of information to prevent cognitive overload for students.
- Spatial and temporal contiguity: Present related elements in spatial and temporal proximity to each other.
- Segmentation principle: Divide learning content into small portions so that students can individually control the speed and pauses in the learning process.
- Modality principle: Present explanations of visualizations in spoken rather than written form to avoid overloading the visual channel.
- Multimedia principle: Vary the media used to keep the learners' attention.
- Personalization principle: Address students directly to increase their motivation and attention.
You can find illustrative examples of the above principles as well as other design principles in the blog post "How to use Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia"