Articles

Tanner Kohler

Tanner Kohler is a Principal Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Tanner's studies have focused on social psychology, and he has researched theories of human motivation and the gamification of learning. He has developed, taught, and evaluated curricula for thousands of full-time volunteers for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He has an MS degree in instructional psychology and technology.

@tbkohler

Articles and Videos

  • Facilitating AI-Enhanced Workshops: From Ideation to Action

    Improve AI-enhanced workshops by narrowing ideas with clear criteria, allowing time to prompt, encouraging collaboration, and documenting results.

  • 4 Tips for Preparing AI-Enhanced Workshops

    Plan AI-enhanced workshops by preparing warmup activities involving AI, uploading context files, creating custom AIs, and providing adaptable sample prompts.

  • AI as a Creative Teammate

    AI acts as a creative teammate in group settings as it does for solo work. Thoughtful facilitation ensures teams leverage AI effectively in workshops and critiques.

  • Direct Phrases for Managing Problematic Workshop Participants

    Adapt these phrases to address domination, tangents, negativity, and distractions while facilitating workshops.

  • How AI Models Are Trained

    Training modern LLMs is a costly process that shapes the model’s outputs and involves unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning.

  • Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: Why Direct Is Better

    Sequential access frustrates users. Consider these examples to help you find ways to give them more direct access wherever possible.

  • Alt Text: Avoid Redundancy to Improve Usability

    Use alt text strategically to enhance both accessibility and usability by being cautious of redundancy.

  • The Danger of Defaults

    Assume that users will not change defaults and plan for this in your designs. Ask yourself 3 questions to create good defaults.

  • Alt Text: What to Write

    Images are decorative, functional, or informative. Skip alt text for decorative. Describe the action for functional. Convey the message for informative.

  • Alt Text: Not Always Needed

    Write alt text that communicates an image's purpose without repeating page content. Focus on meaning rather than visual description.