Lately I've had the pleasure of mentoring some freshly-minted UXers to learn interaction design. Helping them to learn the fundamentals of wireframing and prototyping has been very exciting and gratifying. Each have returned to our sessions with enthusiasm and are anxious to continue learning. It took me a minute to understand how to teach and admittedly; I'm still just okay-ish.
The paradigm shift that I had to make was to take what I know and understand about interaction design and reformat it so that students with less experience could understand it. At first I was really bad at this because a lot of how I operate is on feeling at this point.
Feelings to an outside spectator are quite intangible and do not transfer well to those who need to get into the nitty-gritty details to uncover the mechanics around the 'why' of design when learning. I continued to evaluate my approach and made some adjustments.
I have been in the position of 'teaching' a few times over the last few years. Each time I started way too advanced and wondered why my methods always led to looks of bewilderment. For example, I would 'test the waters' of a student with a design exercise where the outcome would be building a prototype. I call this 'cart before the horse' and it really put too much pressure on the learner.
I quickly understood from my students that they needed to focus on fundamentals first and changed the approach to building a static wireframe using pre-defined elements. With this change it was much easier to point out the details that were glossed over when pushing them to initially build an advanced design before they knew how to make a static one.
Things that may seem obvious to a veteran are not always concrete for someone who is new. Ideas such as: call to actions need to be primary and secondary, links need to be blue and sections need to have headers were good places to start and provided a way to discuss the 'why' pertaining to the fundamentals of IxD.
I found this to be really successful in communicating the overall structure of putting a design together. Rather than working with a finished product we are first focused on the static wireframes and why they are important for the overall design.
Another way to continue the process that has worked is slowly unpeeling the onion rather than chopping it all at once and watching your student's tears flow. With this in mind, the idea of continually building on the wireframe foundation has worked well. In this case the prompt is to hone into each separate section and make it more usable and obvious.
The overall goal of this is to give them a chance to modify the pre-design components into their vision and start the process of learning on how to improve page elements. For example, giving the ability to add in buttons or remove elements allows them to experiment with iterative design in a safe space.
As the comfort level increases move away from pre-defined and open design-centric aspects up while moving from static wireframes to page flows to prototypes.
One of the most important and sometimes undersold aspects of IxD is understanding process and interactions. What happens after you leave the homepage and click the Contact link? What does it look like after searching for an item? The idea of continuing to build in interactions comes after sufficient time has been spent in static design mode.
The interactions can be the true differentiator for excellent of IxDs but you need a good foundation to do them well. Starting small here such as adding in hover states, links that underline when you hover, small animations and mapping out the page flows are important here.
With the continual building of both learning and challenge people typically stay engaged through the process.
Overall, I've seen success starting at a basic-level and consistently ramping up the complexity from a learning perspective. You should provide adequate challenge which means you should always be listening and adapting to those who are learning as much as possible.
Once someone is ready for the next step of learning do not delay, keep moving. There is a give and take when it comes to learning that should always be adhered to as well. The idea of this overall approach is to start foundational and consistently but gradually build up to more and more complexity.
Hopefully this is helpful as you explore methods to help people learn!
