Design Boosting

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

This week we are doing a design workshop with a great new client. Our mission is to take one of their current learning needs and use that as our case study while we help them boost their design process.

Our design boost projects are collaborative and inspiring for everyone involved, including us. We stretch and try new design processes and techniques. We bring in lots of outside influences to get us thinking in new ways. And because we are redesigning a learning experience, we do all of this while tackling these five big design questions.

1. What is the user story?

We start by imagining the user actually going through this experience. We push beyond the typical user persona, leveraging product design ideas and marketing practices. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What is going on in their “real life”? And is there just one user story? No. We can’t get inside every user’s head, but we get creative about different audiences we are targeting and think through their stories so they become real as we are designing.

2. What is the tone?

Tone is everything. Subtle tone differences can have such a big impact on motivation and behavior. Each organization has a typical way of communicating — is it better to stay in step with that voice or do something different? We look at dozens of outside examples to help us all imagine the same thing. We try on different tones for size. We narrow them down to our favorites.

3. What are we inspired by visually?

This workshop is all about getting out of our comfort zone. Not every learning experience needs to look the same. We look at some fun examples. We share opinions, but we stay open-minded. This is not the time to shoot down ideas! The realities and constraints of the team are really important in this part of the workshop — but we also bring inspiring visual ideas that fit almost any organization’s budget.

4. How do we make it fun?

Instead of waiting until we get into the detailed course design, we spend time upfront thinking about how we want to engage learners and keep them hooked. How will we communicate and allow learners to preview and get excited about the experience? What techniques can we use to keep learners engaged throughout? We look at different engagement techniques as inspiration and establish some high-level goals.

5. How do we make the learning active?

This is where we start to get into the detailed design. In this case we already have our learning objectives, so we are taking some of those and brainstorming activities together. Focusing on active learning keeps us away from presentation-only design. Again, we have lots of fun active learning experiences to share as examples. The goal here is volume. We don’t want to fall in love with our first idea! Often, this brainstorming generates great ideas that are used in a completely different part of the course, or even gets picked up in a future program.

Every team needs a boost now and again. We are here to help you and bring some energy when you really want to get creative and innovate. Let us know how we can help your team!