If you get great feedback and your audience is excited, your instinct might be to jump right into creating your course before you lose momentum. As initiatives get larger and the stakes get higher, creating a rapid prototype to test your solution before getting into the thick of execution is critical. We will state this again: Test your solution, before execution!
Prototyping is hard, especially if you feel like you’re pressed for time and resources. By adding a few extra weeks and minimal resources to pre-production, you greatly reduce the risk of getting into Production Purgatory. Production Purgatory is the endless cycle of revisions and tweaks to the solution while you’re knee deep in the execution process.
An Interactive Content Outline is a great way to test your course. It should have final content, simple interactions, and of course, we should be able to see the consequences of the learners’ choices. This will allow key stakeholders to visualize how the course will generate the intended outcome established early on.
Some great tools that can help with prototyping are: Mural, Twine, InVision app, or even just linking PowerPoint slides together.

Just like in product design, by following all of the above steps, you will understand the challenge, can make an educated hypothesis, and you can check your assumptions. The problems the L&D industry faced in 2018 and will face again in 2019 can be solved by a design-thinking approach to learning experience design. If you don’t believe us, test it out!