Instructional Designers should consider applying principles of design thinking to help them create more effective learning experiences. Design Thinking and Instructional Design can easily be seen as two sides of the same coin. To get started, focus on two key design thinking principles: empathy and prototyping.
Empathy. First, observe and interview high-performing, typical, and low-performing members of your target audience separately. You will discover meaningful insights that may not be exposed when investigating them as a whole. Second, interview people that use the product or service your audience creates in their typical performance context. The goal is to gain empathy from two perspectives: creators and users. Understanding both perspectives will help you design for actual needs.
Prototyping. Smart companies focus on learning about their users. Like smart companies, you want to invest your time designing, building, testing and iterating learning experiences to bring value to your users, which is why I always recommend prototyping. A process I’ve used in the past includes:
- Compare and contrast more than one design with users. Feedback will have more meaning when users compare different examples against each other.
- Ask your users “why”. Prototype to uncover what works and what doesn’t. Constantly ask your users what parts of the experience resonate more than others.
- Observe and discuss. You may create several prototypes, but the goal from each is to discover key learnings, and then iterate to avoid missing the mark on creating a great experience.
- It’s important to prototype quickly, and not worry about each iteration being perfect. Rapid prototyping will enable you to explore new ideas, build faster, and will have a huge impact on your end result.
Just by adding these two design thinking principles to your process, you will be able to gain richer insight into the challenge presented by the learning initiative, and quickly become an eLearning Pro!