The importance of feedback

I'm going through design feedback. I'm grateful for this part of the process actually. It's helpful for me to see what the "learner" would be doing, despite my design idea.

Watching the instructor get "frustrated" and "confused" with items that I included text for but he didn't read was good for me to see. It's true, then. You can have the directions right there in front of someone, but I knew they were instructions because I put them there. Now, is it that I should make it simpler or expect learners not to read a slide before they go clicking around. Or, perhaps by that point there were already so many "issues" with the course that the learner expected what's going wrong to be because of design and not user experience.

UX is vital to design planning. I can think all day in my mind what I want to do and the ways things should be done. But If the learner doesn't make that connection, I have to go back to my design.

Instead of fixing everything, I've decided to delete some slides. I tried holding onto them because at this point I've spent a lot of time on deep-dive interactions within a slide. However, from the feedback it appears I've gone to deep and thus complicated the slides, the triggers, and the module.

Some of the issues I was able to correct by going directly to the pain of frustration. But some are just too far beyond me scrapping and rebuilding. The edits were taking longer than the initial build. Oh feedback. It's good though. With each one, I'm getting better. 

Within the videos or suggestions, I get an idea or see how to do something that wasn't intentional but helped me. So, as painful as it is to watch -- because responding to the screen is fruitless -- feedback is helping my project and my design work be stronger.

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Design change. 

I'm deleting days of work simply because I don't have the time to perfect the triggers and visuals the way I imagine. Best not to turn in sloppy work. So I can't use and do everything on this first go-round. That's OK. 

This final wrapup for the course has been a tremendous learning lesson for me, with so many sub-lessons!

1. Time

    I'm running out of time. What I envisioned for this course is not coming as easily as anticipated. The final prototype is due, but it doesn't look nearly where I'd expected it would be by now.

2. Design

I didn't stick with the initial plan, and that's where the issues started developing. I'd design with "simple" in mind, but when I got into Storyline and started playing around I 1) had fun trying advanced features and 2) took longer to build than I thought.

I'm a novice at design. I need to accept and lead with that. But my tendency to want anything I do to be as near to great as can be has gotten in the way of producing a functioning, simple module. Go with simple until you've learned the ropes. I spent far more time on corrections that I can build an interaction for quickly and easily now.

3. Product

I'm afraid my final design doesn't demonstrate the effort I put into the course, and that's something the client will never see. They don't ee you confusion and frustration, just the final product. This makes me more empathetic as a designer as well as a learner. I think it's also important for others to develop designer empathy, because no one is perfect. Perhaps the "glitches" a learner experiences were the entire afternoon headache of an unknown designer who just couldn't get the system to work the way it wanted.

...and so many more!

Time Stamp:

I thought I was just going to "wrap this up" when I couldn't sleep this morning at 5 a.m.

It's now 1:25 p.m. I'm hitting publish. There are still other steps to complete after finishing the module.