Picking the Best Fruit
A Practical Guide for Fruit Shopping
This fun, useful module helps shoppers quickly and reliably select fresh, ripe, and flavorful strawberries, cantaloupe, pineapple, and watermelon - fruits that can be tricky to choose correctly. Users navigate through brief interactive slides to learn how to determine the ripeness of each fruit and can complete a short quiz to reinforce their learning.
Audience: Anyone wanting to buy the best-tasting, freshest fruit
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Visual Design, Storyboard
Tools Used: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Illustrator
Overview
Inspiration for this project came from a craving for summertime strawberries. After choosing berries I thought looked ripe at the supermarket, I was disappointed when they ended up tasting tart and lacking flavor. This had happened to me more than once, and, based on similar complaints over the years from friends and family, was a common problem. It was not just strawberries — other fruits seemed to have few telltale signs for flavor or ripeness, making choosing them a roll of the dice. I thought that creating a practical module for shoppers would help solve the problem by giving people the confidence to select these fruit quickly and reliably using tried-and-true methods.
Process
Instructional Design Analysis
I decided to start from two learning theories that resonated with my teaching experience and focused on capturing learner engagement: Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction and Keller’s ARCS model. Putting the steps of each in a table, I was able to identify learning activities I could include in the module to match each element of both models. In particular, I decided to gain users’ attention with an introduction that whets users’ appetites with “glamor shots” of each fruit, juxtaposed with the following slide that activates prior experiences of disappointment with flavorless fruit.
Storyboard & Development
Once I was clear about the elements of the module I wanted to include in my design, I created a storyboard with text, animation notes, and visuals to guide the development process. I was excited about using my recent learning about slider interactions on Storyline to create slides where learners could explore the varying stages of ripeness for each fruit. That way, I could provide visuals of both examples and non-examples of perfectly ripe fruit.
By writing the text and planning the animations and transitions ahead of time, I was able to develop the module in Storyline in a more efficient way and avoid making time-consuming changes to many slides at the end.
Storyboard Images
Slide Images
Results
This project was a learning process, and I definitely gained important skills in Articulate Storyline by developing some of the more complex elements: slider interactions with revealed layers, variables with triggers for slides viewed, and creating free form question slides. The experience has inspired me to explore making apps for mobile and to make a project using Articulate Rise. I, for one, feel much more confident choosing delicious, perfectly ripe strawberries, cantaloupe, pineapple, and watermelon.