Design Process: Instructional Design for Graphic Designers

For my first post I’ll be discussing everything that went into my latest piece, Graphic Design for Instructional Designers. I’ll start with the final product and work backwards from there.

What are the unique features of this piece?

This course is a click by click simulation for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator built in Captivate. The table of contents is an emphasized feature to allow the user to skip and jump around.

What need does this learning object serve?

In an ideal world, instructional designers should be focused solely on learning design and strategy. But in the real world, they are expected to know how to use the predominant graphic design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This course is designed teach an essential function for each program.

What tools were used?

Adobe Captivate

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Audition

Adobe Premiere Pro

Microsoft PowerPoint

What were the key design decisions for this piece?

Simulation/Job Aid Hybrid

I generally believe practice is the best way to get better at anything, so I’m inclined to develop simulations. My intention for this course is for the user to go through the entire course once, then revisit specific pages on an as needed basis.

If the user needs to find the location of a specific button or feature, they can use the table of contents to find it. Jumping around this course is faster than a conventional job aid where users would have to scan or scroll down a page to find what they’re looking for. Images would also have to be shrunk down in a job aid.

I also believe that it is important to discuss scope, course structure, and learning objectives with the learner. This allows them to determine if the course is relevant. For this course, I wanted the learner to see this information once and skip it on subsequent revisits.

No audio

Captivate simulations are not conducive to audio narration. Having a voice constantly repeat itself would sound pretty annoying anyway.

Since there was no sound in the simulation, I decided against sound in the video portions of the course. I thought it’d be jarring to jump from audio to silence throughout the course.

What were the development challenges did I encounter?

Uncertainly of approach

As a portfolio piece, I knew there were tools I wanted to target and play with. In this case, it was Premiere Pro and Audition. I thought long and hard about simply developing a video that covered this topic. There were already simulations in this portfolio. Ultimately, the learning objectives and “business needs” of the problem were prioritized over these desires.

Fortunately, I got to incorporate Premiere Pro and Audition elements in the introductory videos at the beginning each section.

Whether or not to use audio

I thought long and hard about hiring a professional voice actor for this project. I’m comfortable doing audio production for instructional videos and this would’ve been a good opportunity to once again show that skillset off. But as I alluded to earlier, once I settled on my simulation approach, this decision became a non-issue.

What was the development process like?

My first course of action was to create design documents. Even though I had no idea what my course was going to look like, I got started on an outline to at least establish a structure.

This outline allowed me a space to write down every step I would cover in this course, despite the ambiguity. The outline could either serve as on-screen text in a narration-free course or the starting point for a script if I were to create instructional videos. As I learned Photoshop and Illustrator, I added more and more content to the outline.

Outline Can Be Found Here

Once I settled on the structure, I used the text from the outline to bring into the course. It’s easier to build Captivate and Storyline simulations when you have all the steps written down and in front of you. The outline is great here as well.

I built the introduction videos in Audition and Premiere Pro. I used some free use music and the outline to list objectives, context, etc. I really like the idea of letting users skipping them after seeing the videos once.