Was it REALLY that bad?

 Was it really that bad?  

 

I considered a lot of titles for this post... “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” “A Means to an End” “The Ending is Just the Beginning.” “But did you die?” But really my biggest take away is to eat the frog... As I worked on the paper prototype, I KNEW I was in over my head and was committing to things that I wasn’t going to easily be able to deliver in HTML and/or CSS, but I stuck with the “what’s best for the design” theory and continued to push.  


My testing with people around me went well, and I had a solid design, but really was still VERY unsure of how to get from point A (knowing what I wanted) to point B (getting it done!). All in all, I learned a ton about my tenacity – when to sacrifice my plan a bit to make it work.  


I was most concerned about the fillable fields – and I was able to find a insert tab that made Dreamweaver MUCH more user friendly, making me question how I missed it the first 6 weeks and wonder if I was truly doing everything the hard way. Then I remembered that we weren’t using templates so I’m choosing to believe that it is template related (it is) not ignorance related (it is this, too).  


Inserting the first photo easily made me smile, and finding other photos to insert had me believing that this coding thing wasn’t so bad... So we’ve got forms, we’ve got pictures, we’ve got font and buttons (that don’t go anywhere yet, but we’re getting there!) and we have content and linked videos. However I have this drag and drop exercise that is getting the best of me at the moment and still working to figure out how to make that user friendly – and also considering how to have an alternate activity that maintains the interactivity that I wanted while falling within my skill level.  


This is what instructional designers do... make it user friendly while maintaining the level of content and engagement – it's not as easy as putting content on a page, or knowing when to <div> and when to </p>, but how to find the right balance to get the job done. I know I’ve taken that for granted over and over throughout my educational career as a student and as an instructor. One of the nice things about creating this way is that every little detail has to be a choice and is intentional – nothing is by chance which allows me to include the best practices I know – to choose where to have a video and where to have an illustration.  


I took away a lot of things from this experience, but I haven’t worked this hard in a class in a long while, and had to really step outside my comfort zone to get there. I hope that it “works” and that all the links link, and all of the buttons connect, but regardless, the process has taught me a lot about instructional design, a little about coding, and about my own learning style.  

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