Iterative design process

The iterative design process is a commitment to continually improving an educational product through regular evaluation and testing of how well a product works as expected.

Definition

After an educational product is implemented, iterative design is when the instructional designers continually improve the educational product based on how implementation went and how people used the product as expected.

Iterative design is performed in multiple cycles of "design-implement-evaluate", often in rapid succession. Much like the conventional design process, or the ADDIE model, an iterative design process simply repeats the design process multiple times so that the product is improved based on the evaluation data that has been generated. The end result of one cycle feeds the analysis and design phases of the next cycle.

Rapid iteration is the process of rapidly evaluating and changing the product in short cycles, often when the product is actively being used.

Additional Information

The goal of iterative design is to make small, frequent changes to a product based on actual data that are collected during implementation. By performing rapid changes, the instructional designers can hypothesize ways to improve the product's performance and to improve participation with the product. This requires a robust evaluation plan that collects many sources of data, particularly data of how people participate with the product. Participants' actual performance is compared to the expectations of the designer, with any deviation from the expectation indicating areas that can be improved.

In iterative design, sometimes the emphasis is on rapid cycles of change (or rapid iteration). In this approach, the quicker that the team can collect and analyze data on performance, the quicker they can attempt to make an improvement to the product, such as changes to activities, interfaces and navigation, usability, and technology functionality. Some design teams aim to complete a single cycle of iterative improvement within weeks to even just a few days. By aiming to rapidly improve a product while people are using it, the design team seeks to improve the value of the experience for participants, as well as to create valuable hypotheses and theory as to how and why people learn with the product.

Within iterative design, the design team may also conduct experimentation with small changes to an educational product, which is often called iterative experimentation or A/B testing. In this approach, small experiments are conducted that compare two groups of participants' performance, with each group having only small differences between them so that the higher performing design will be identified and adopted in the design.

With each A/B test, evaluators should try to generate a hypothesis or theory that explains why they think one outperforms the other. This gives the design and evaluation team a set of principles that emerge that can be used for better design, as well as perhaps explain more broadly as to how and why people learn with the product.

Common aspects that are analyzed during rapid iterative design

• Competency, particularly through monitoring and formative assessment
• Participation levels and types
• Usability and feasibility of use
• Navigation of software and user control
• Aesthetic value (i.e., look and feel of the product)
• Participant perceptions and emotions (e.g., satisfaction, frustration, perceived value)

Tips and Tricks

• Consider how you might evaluate your product through formative assessment so that you can identify ways to improve your product. Consider measuring how people use the product and whether this meets the level of expectation that you have. If not, it is possible that changes could be made to improve the level of interaction from the participants.
• By coming up with hypotheses for why a design feature or aspect of the product is underperforming based on evaluation (both summative and formative), you can make rapid changes to the product to see whether the situation improves.

Related Concepts

• The Design Process
• Evaluation and assessment
• Intention of designer
• Summative assessment
• Formative assessment
• Usability

Examples

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External Resources

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