For instructional designers, the learner is our user. We have heard so much about user-centered design in the world of product design, but how does it apply to learning design? In this article, we provide a summary of a chapter on the user-centered design from Learner and User Experience Research edited by Schmidt and colleagues in 2020.
For starters, user-centered design does apply in developing learning products. The following steps and techniques of identifying learners’ needs and prototyping guide the process of designing learning products that are user-centered.
Step 1: Identifying learners’ needs and learning context
It is important for instructional designers to gather information about the learner such as their needs and the learning context before initiating the design process. Some common ways to gather information related to learner’s needs include collecting and analyzing learner data from surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observations.
1.1 Creating Personas
How do we use data from these sources to understand the learners? One popular approach is to create personas. Personas represent the features and descriptions of a specific learner group. Typically these features or descriptions may include a learner’s demographic information, their goals, needs, daily routines, and experiences.
1.2 Creating Scenarios
In terms of getting to know the learning context, it is helpful to create scenarios. Scenarios are narratives that describe a learner’s activity in a story format. For instance, In the table below, we can see the scenario of a learner with autism using a Virtual Reality (VR) tool to learn facial expressions. The scenario information includes the context, the goal, activity, and the outcome.
| Component | Description |
| Context | John is viewing images of faces showing different emotions in the collaborative virtual world. The teacher Carla asked him to make a face showing he is sad and share it with the group. |
| Goal | John’s goal is to take a picture of himself using the tools provided in the VR interface and share it with the teacher and the rest of the group. |
| Activity | 1.John learned to use the camera during the orientation, so he knows how to take a picture. 2.John tries to make a sad face and snaps a picture using the application. 3.His picture shows up automatically on a shared media board in the virtual world, which takes up a large portion of the board because it is the only picture. 4.Carla looks at the picture and suggests how John could better express sadness. 5.Carla asks John to try again and deletes the image. 6.John retakes the image and asks Carla if his face looks sad enough. 7.Carla provides compliment since John asks for her feedback and suggests asking the rest of the group. |
| Outcome | The whole group discusses John’s picture and shares their input. John asks if he can try again after collecting all the feedback. Carla deletes the image and John takes another picture to share. After everyone praises John, Carla deletes his image and asks Mary to try to take a picture of her surprised look. |
Step 2: Prototyping for User-Centered Design
Based on the information collected from Step 1, the next step is to prototype the digital environment for a learning product, which is further broken down into four techniques.
2.1 Rapid Prototyping
Prototyping is not new to the Instructional Design (ID) industry. Back in the early 1990s, rapid prototyping started to gain traction in the field. The goal is to focus on fast iterations of the instructional design which would allow instructional designers to gather learners’ feedback and implement iterative cycles of designing, developing, testing, and revising the learning product. Indeed, in order to know if the design of a course fulfills its goal, it is essential to test how learners react to it. Too often, instructional designers find out that their designs do not fulfill their target learner’s requirements when it’s too late (or only after numerous hours have been expended). Rapid prototyping often results in a low-fidelity (that is, the degree of detail, precision, and functionality is relatively low) product first but through rounds of iterations, a high-fidelity product may grow from it.
2.2 Paper Prototyping
One way to approach prototyping is to sketch on a paper as shown in the figure below. This is a low-fidelity method and is used to inform the design of learning interfaces. An example would be the web and mobile interfaces of online courses. Again, the goal is to gather feedback from stakeholders such as learners and product designers. In the context of creating an online course using Articulate, a paper prototyping could be drawing sketches of the animations and interactions needed for each page before putting in time and effort to actually develop the solid content and actualize the interactions in the environment.
2.3 Wireframing and Functional Prototyping
Between the stage of paper prototyping (low-fidelity) and functional prototyping (high-fidelity), there is the medium-fidelity stage called wireframing. At this stage, learning designers may generate simple interfaces using tools like PowerPoint, Google Drawings, Adobe XD, Figma, or Sketch with interface elements shown as placeholders. See the example below:
Functional prototyping is a high-fidelity prototype where links are generated to connect different interfaces so that it is more functional than wireframing and can be tested as a mock course by real learners to collect feedback. For instance, although the actual interface and website have not been built, learners can click on buttons in the functional mockup such as the Edit button in Figure 2 which allows the learner to interact with the course interface the same way they would experience the final learning product before it is developed. It can still be completed fairly quickly without focusing too much on the functionality and is very helpful to collect learners’ feedback in later stages of the learning design process. In this way, learning designers may implement small tweaks before expending a lot of time and effort on the development.
Conclusion
The purpose of user-centered design is to develop learning systems from the perspective of the end-user, in this case, the learner. Depending on the timelines and resources, learning designers may use personas and appropriate tools for prototyping to approach the learning design process and make sure the learning design process is iterative and that the design is responsive to the learner’s needs and their feedback.
Note: This article is a brief summary of the following chapter:
Schmidt, M., Earnshaw, Y., Tawfik, A. A., & Jahnke, I. (2020). Methods of user-centered design and evaluation for learning designers. In M. Schmidt, A. A. Tawfik, I. Jahnke, & Y. Earnshaw (Eds.), Learner and user experience research (pp. 21-53). EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/ux
References
Sigmund (2020). [An example of paper sketch] [Photograph] Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/4UGmm3WRUoQ
Pingback: How do you design gamification in learning? - elearningdesigners.org