As you begin mapping how your course will best function in a digital space, it is important to consider the site's usability and accessibility. The goal is to reduce the cognitive load it takes students to navigate the digital space by deliberately designing with efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction in mind.

The “it” refers to anything that you intend the students to use and do online. This includes accessing and acquiring course materials and technology, receiving feedback, reviewing assignment instructions and expectations; essentially, navigating the course. Do your best to create a user-friendly environment so all students can get what they need when they need it. If your digital space is not user-friendly, you may get a lot of unhappy students and an inbox full of student questions. You can import a Canvas template that offers a simple and sophisticated design based on best practices in online design. You can also use our accessibility checklist for courses to guide your design.

Delivering information in an organized way that has a clear hierarchy and utilizes accessible text formatting, leads to the intuitiveness of the site as well as the ease of learning. It is important to "chunk" information in a layout that makes it easy for our eyes and our brains to process it. Design elements like font size, high contrast colors, repetition, alignment, proximity and white space not only aid in building digital accessibility into our work, but they also ease the cognitive load as we acclimate to new information.

For text-heavy content pages, design your content in an "F-pattern" (see example below) which aligns with the research suggesting our eyes scan from left-right along the top and then from the left margin down. It is important to consider the implications of the F-pattern, in which eyetracking research suggests that the first few lines of the page and the first few words on the left of each line get the most views. After the first few text blocks, the reader goes into "scanning mode" and spends less times on the details of the page. Keep this in mind when crafting your text and be mindful to keep the most important information toward the top. 

Rather than pasting a decontextualized link or resource on a webpage, each resource should be complemented with a brief description or the link itself should have a descriptive name. This sometimes requires us to rename our PDF readings prior to importing them into the Files tab on the Canvas site. By contextualizing all of the resources, this allows your mind to set the reading or viewing purpose prior to engaging in the text. Without easy-to-understand information that can be quickly processed, the student becomes overwhelmed and often avoids the page altogether.  A quick and easy way to to make sure that you provide the right guideposts for your students as well as our machine users (e.g., screen readers), is to label hyperlinks using descriptive and salient text.

While the content will vary, your design across your Canvas site should stay the same, so that your learners grow to know what to expect and your site acts as a predictable roadmap for their experience. By maintaining consistency throughout the design of your Canvas site, you increase the site's intuitiveness to reduce cognitive load and allow students to focus on what is truly important: their learning. We recommend you organize your content into learning modules that maintain the same structure.