One of the responsibilities as a UX educator is keeping our learning design content up to date with industry standards and expectations. One of the workshops I worked on was Animation.
We noticed a pattern in our graduating students although their research and strategy skills were advanced, their UI was not. Most specifically, when looking at their interaction and animation design skills. Not only did the education team recognize this but we also received qualitative feedback directly from the students saying that their expectations were not met regarding what they would learn in this chapter and that the class was too difficult to follow.
The animation lab was in two parts, lecture and lab. We wanted Part One to preface what the students would be executing in he lab so we leaned on an article by Issara Willenskomer to outline the 12 principals of animation and how motion benefits UX designers.
I considered my own perspective as a learner; and realized that my initial solution to learn how to do something on Figma is always to watch a video. With this in mind, I proposed the idea of producing a series of tutorials so that instead of centering the lab around instructing the students, we could demonstrate the process through visualization. The series consisted of 15 different videos that covered the animation principles from the prior lecture. We also gave the students the freedom of choice to either follow along live with an educator or watch the videos at their own pace. This allowed varying levels of skillsets to work in ways that are best for them.
I also needed to think about what we would need to provide the students with in order for them to focus solely on animating and not general UI. I centered the file around different lessons, each set up in the same format that had a corresponding video lesson.
