Bread Baking 101

Bread Baking 101

Audience: Novice bread bakers

Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Storyboard, Visual Design, Mockups, Subject Matter Expert  

Tools:  Articulate Storyline, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, WeVideo

To experience the course yourself click here.

Overview

I acted as the subject matter expert, designer and developer for this course.  I proposed a hypothetical problem that a local bakery may have encountered during the pandemic.

Problem

A local bakery has provided a live, in-person course on bread baking for many years, but with the pandemic it has had a rising demand for virtual, self-paced courses for first-time bread bakers. Many customers are interested in learning these new skills, but aren't comfortable coming to the in-person courses offered.  

Solution

A self-paced, on demand eLearning course, teaching participants the basics of bread baking and to bake their first loaf of bread. This course will increase accessibility to the content and the bakery's reach in the local community and beyond.  Since this course is for beginning bread bakers, I decided to include some general overviews of bread types and the differences between them to help learners better understand the type of bread they would be learning to bake in this course as well as other types of breads they may want to try baking in the future.

Design & Development

After working through the problem and potential solutions for the bakery, I developed some visual mockups and a text-based storyboard to outline the course.

Storyboard

I created a text-based storyboard to guide me during course development in Storyline.  Outlining the content, programming steps and sourcing assets before moving into Storyline helped me work more efficiently during full development of the course.

Visual Mockups

I started out looking for images of bread/bread baking that I might like to use in the mockups for the course.  I found two, but ultimately chose the second based on feedback from potential users.  It also provided more variety of colors to pull from to create a color palette for the course and it allowed me to use the image for 1/3 of the slide as opposed to having the image behind the main text.  

Next, I tried creating a title screen that would include an avatar character who would lead the learner through the entire course, but after some feedback, I decided that it would be best to remove the character to give the title screen a cleaner look and instead use an icon of a “chef” that would appear once learners were ready to start reviewing and practicing the steps to bake the yeast rising bread.  Users thought the icon looked more cohesive in terms of design and theme choice. I used the chef to prompt the learner to complete activities associated with the steps and to provide the learner with tips and helpful videos throughout the process.

Color Palette

After deciding on the main image for the visual mockups and the chef icon to guide learners, I used the Coolors tool to pull corresponding colors from the main image to use as the color palette for the course.  I researched accessibility parameters in order to choose a color palette and font types and sizes that would meet the needs of all learners.  In addition, I used an accessible color palette builder tool to verify that the color combinations I chose had adequate contrast. 

Full Development

Once I finalized the main image, color palette and fonts, I created master slides and added a custom color palette and fonts to the course to streamline the full development process.  I sourced icons and images from the Articulate libraries and utilized Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to adjust images and change icon colors to match the color palette.

Master Slides

I added a knowledge check about bread types part way through the course so that learners could verify their own knowledge before moving on to the bread baking steps.  I wanted this knowledge check to be interactive, but also wanted to be sure it would be accessible to all learners.  So, instead of using a drag and drop interaction, I designed and created my own interaction using states and motion paths that would automatically match when the user selected the correct choices to pair.  This provided accessibility for both keyboard and mouse users. 

Takeaways 

I learned so much throughout this course creation process.  I challenged myself to use animations, layers and a wide variety of triggers, variables, states, motion paths and conditions to learn as much as I could within Storyline when creating my first course.   I deepened my learning of graphic design (position, color choice, contrast, font & sizing choice) and honed my skills within Adobe suite as I utilized both Illustrator and Photoshop to help me adjust images and icons. After completing this course, I watched a Youtube course on using Adobe XD to create visual mock-ups and prototypes before moving into Storyline.  I plan to utilize this tool in the future when I work through iterations of visual design and prototypes as opposed to designing in Articulate first since the tool allows for quicker changes and manipulation as you iterate.