I finally got off my bum this month to tackle the third season of Dear Instructional Designers! What does this mean for you? This season will be dedicated to breaking down real instructional design-type projects to get at what makes them work. I’ve got interviews coming up, centered around case study-type questions. I’ve also got a special series planned (wait for the real first episode release to learn more!) and, more to the point of this blog post, my solo episodes this season will center on project teardowns. The concept of the design teardown is the same as other kinds of analysis or reverse engineering: it’s breaking apart a whole into its parts to see what makes it tick. I was introduced to design teardowns on a site called UserOnboard, an amazing resource by the UX Designer Samuel Hulick. Hulick has been tearing down app onboarding experiences screen-by-screen for a couple of years. Given this season’s theme, this seemed like a good process to try. I’ll admit I’m a little worried that the audio-only, podcast version of these won’t work, but I’m trying it anyway. To hedge my bets, I’m also trying to produce teardown videos to co-release with the podcast episodes, the very first of which, you’ll see below:

Got Suggestions?

The podcast version is a little bit longer because it includes an intro and an outro, but actual teardown part is the same. I was trying to avoid recording two versions of this, so I’m using the same audio for both. My question to all youse out there is: Is this useful? Would you like to see more of these? Is there anything you would change? (Worry not, captions will be forthcoming.) I’d love to hear from you! I’m hoping to do at least half a dozen teardowns this season, and I’ll be putting them in a playlist on my YouTube channel. Let me know what you think!