Forum Discussion
How do you make complex designs faster?
Hey folks! I'm on the hunt for advice, stories, and templates for complex design projects, like branching scenarios or general narratives. I'd love to hear from you all about how long it takes you t...
If you'll forgive the shameless self-promotion, I have two blog posts about this.
Managing the Complexity of Branching Scenarios is like the title says: tips for managing the complexity and keeping it from getting out of control.
I also have a post breaking down the time to create branching scenarios. Like a lot of things in ID, the answer is always "it depends," but the examples show how the size, multimedia, and other factors affect the writing and development time.
Christy, I know! Your post inspired me to write this! I've found Twine to be challenging, though. Do you have any like "tried and trues" for how you initially set up the branching scenario? Like, how would you guide your SME through it--do you already have an end-goal first?
Has anything changed for you since you've written the post?
Hah! Well, glad to know my post got you thinking. I don't know how many of my other posts on branching scenarios you have read, but everything starts from having a clear learning objective. For branching scenarios, you may need to narrow it further than usual. It's like microlearning in that respect: you have to narrow the focus to a single behavior to change or task to practice. Based on that objective, the ideal ending is the successful completion of that behavior or task.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "guide your SME through it." I don't write branching scenarios collaboratively with SMEs. Writing isn't their job, and directly involving them makes everything more frustrating and time consuming for both me and them. Instead, I interview them first to gather information on ideal performance, mistakes, and consequences. I use that interview as the basis to write the scenario.
If by "guide your SME through it" you mean during the review process, you can do a walkthrough with them in a meeting. I usually go through the ideal path from start to finish first, then go back to the beginning to show various alternate paths. If I provide the written transcript of the scenario (and I usually do provide the plain text export from Twine, in addition to the prototype), then my directions tell them to review the prototype first, going through several times to make different choices. Then, they can review the text for any needed wordsmithing.
Does that help?
That helps immensely! It's so interesting, the different styles of working. I'm pretty green to branching scenarios (you can probably tell :D), so my assumption was that the ID would write the scenario along with the SME.
Do you have a go-to Twine template that you like to use when building out your paths, or do you generally start from scratch?
I've got all these questions basically because I'm toying with doing a microlearning that's a branching scenario. Reducing the choices and getting straight to the ideal path is gonna be the real challenge, I think.
Thanks so much, Christy!
