An interview assignment became an opportunity to examine the many small decisions through which a course begins to take the shape of a learning experience.

On September 2, 2025, I received an email from Firefly inviting me to complete a design challenge. I was nearing the end of the interview process, and the team wanted to see how I would approach a learning experience for new managers in an engineering-driven organization. There were three possible subjects: leading team meetings, giving feedback, and building relationships across technical teams. I chose feedback that builds trust and drives performance.

The invitation allowed considerable freedom. An outline, a storyboard, an interaction, a worksheet, or a video script could serve as a representative sample; a full eLearning course was explicitly beyond what was expected. The team was asking for evidence of my thinking, and this gave me a design problem within the design problem: how to make the reasoning available to someone who would encounter only the work I submitted.

Five days later, my reply contained links to Feedback That Fuels, a designer journal, an annotated walkthrough, and a separate practice activity. A job aid was also part of the learning package. The course offered an experience to move through, while the other materials allowed a reviewer to pause over its construction and examine particular decisions more closely.

Between those two emails lay the work I want to explore here. If we were looking through the project together, I would begin with the people it was intended for, because they were both central to the assignment and, in important respects, still unknown to me.

Getting acquainted with an audience I had not met

The brief supplied a setting and a role: new managers at Firefly, working in a fast-paced technical environment. It did not include detailed audience demographics or a completed needs analysis. I could design toward the broad responsibility of giving feedback, but I could not know which conversations these managers found difficult, what preparation they had received, or what their employees might say about the feedback already taking place.

I developed two provisional personas, one for a novice manager and another for an experienced manager. The second was an exploratory comparison; the brief named new managers, and my decision to consider someone more experienced did not establish that the actual audience extended beyond them. It gave me another way to examine the material. A first-time manager might need help finding a structure for a conversation, while someone familiar with the framework might need to reconsider what happened when they put it into practice.

A persona has a curious capacity to look more substantial than the information behind it. Give it a name, arrange its goals and difficulties in orderly sections, and describe them in confident sentences, and the profile begins to resemble an account of someone the designer has met. An assumption about confidence or motivation can quietly acquire the appearance of a finding. If this were your project, which part of that imagined person would you want to verify first?

I could use these profiles to consider different needs, provided I kept their provisional nature in view. They helped me examine how much explanation a newcomer might require and whether the practice offered a useful challenge to someone with more experience. In a live project, those ideas would need to meet actual managers and be revised in response to what they revealed. The journal gave me somewhere to preserve that uncertainty, even as the prototype became increasingly definite in its appearance.

Following a learning objective into a conversation

There was another kind of uncertainty to address: the brief identified a skill, but supplied little of the instructional content needed to teach it. I drew on the Center for Creative Leadership’s Feedback That Works: How to Build and Deliver Your Message, connecting its discussions of effective feedback, the SBI method, and further skill development to the course modules.

The research section of the journal makes these connections visible. Material about effective feedback informed the orientation and early analysis; the explanation of SBI informed the work on its components; guidance on further practice informed application and reflection. This is a modest record, but an important one, because it lets someone follow the content from its source into the experience I designed.

The journal connects source chapters to specific modules, showing where the content informed orientation, application, and reflection.

When a brief or subject-matter expert provides very little starting material, the responsibility for content quality remains. The designer still needs to find credible guidance, understand its distinctions, and preserve them in the explanation and practice. In this project, one distinction was especially important: an observable behavior and a judgment about a person are different kinds of statements. A polished video or interaction could easily conceal confusion between them if the underlying language were careless.

SBI, or Situation, Behavior, Impact, gave the content a structure: identify the situation, describe the observable behavior, and explain its impact. I created course video assets in Synthesia and compiled them in Canva, using narrated introductions and fictionalized employee stories alongside the other materials. The employee stories were illustrative prototype content, not testimony from actual Firefly staff. Captions and downloadable transcripts provided additional ways to access the video material.

The separate Storyline 360 activity brought the framework into a fictional conversation with an employee named Rachel. On the first decision screen, Rachel appears on one side, with three possible openings for the learner’s feedback on the other. She explains that a report was unfinished and that she thought she could complete the rest later. The learner must decide how to begin.

The first decision asks learners how to open a feedback conversation. Compare the specific situation with the broader judgments in the other responses.

One response starts, “In yesterday’s client meeting, when the team needed your report…” Another says, “You keep letting the team down.” The first locates an event that can be discussed; the second makes a broader judgment. Placed beside one another, these few words make the instructional distinction tangible. The learner has to attend to the language, select a response, and encounter Rachel’s reaction within the scenario.

The activity continued through three decisions, corresponding to Situation, Behavior, and Impact. I kept the branching within that scope so that each component received attention without allowing the simulation to consume the entire development effort. It offered one bounded opportunity to practice, supported by explanations, reflection, and assessment elsewhere in the course. A real conversation would contain ambiguities and responses beyond those available in the prototype; the activity gave the learner a particular decision to examine closely.

Learn by exploring

Try the feedback scenario and pause over the response choices before selecting one. Which words keep the feedback tied to something observable? Notice how Rachel reacts, then consider what you would revise before the next decision.

Explore the full course to follow its sequence, paying attention to where explanation becomes practice and how the job aid could support a later conversation. Coursebox requires a free learner account to enter the course.

In the designer journal, start with the Design section’s research notes, then move to the simulation rationale. Follow the connection between the source material, the learning objective, and the choices the learner is asked to make. That connection is the part I invite you to look for.

Deciding where to spend the five days

The short turnaround also shaped the form of the work. I normally use Figma wireframes when they help stakeholders understand structure and navigation before development. Here, I moved directly into a Coursebox prototype, where I could bring the sequence, resources, and activities together for review.

This gave the reviewer something concrete to encounter. A proposed video or interaction, described in an outline, still leaves its relationship to the surrounding material partly to the imagination. Inside the prototype, those relationships could be inspected: an explanation had a place, a practice activity followed it, and resources belonged to a larger sequence. The annotated walkthrough provided another route through the same work, with screenshots and notes describing the structure and learning flow.

Building directly in the platform had its tradeoffs. Some structural decisions were being resolved during development, and I had omitted a separate artifact that I might have used in another project. Recording that choice made it available for discussion. A reviewer could see where I had compressed the process and why, instead of having to infer my reasoning from the finished screens.

The journal was useful in this way throughout the assignment. It held the explanations that did not belong in front of the learner, but that someone examining the design would need in order to understand it: why a persona remained provisional, why the simulation contained three main decisions, and why a particular stage of the usual workflow had been shortened. The experience and the account of its construction could then be considered together.

Looking past the last screen

Imagine a manager returning to the subject later, when a feedback conversation is approaching and the course is no longer open. The framework has already been explained, and there has been an opportunity to practice, but a new occasion brings its own particulars. What could they reach for at that moment, and how much would they need to retrieve before beginning?

The job aid was intended to offer support in that later interval. As a resource to return to outside the course, it connected the learning package with the situation in which the skill would eventually be used. Its inclusion asked me to consider the experience over time: an initial encounter with an idea, a chance to try it, and a means of returning to it when the need arose.

The proposed implementation plan extended that consideration further. I explored how launch communications might explain the course’s relevance, how a microcredential could form part of a broader leadership-development pathway, and how a Slack-based space might allow managers to revisit resources and discuss their experiences. These were plans for a possible rollout, rather than activities carried out with a live learner population.

They made visible some of the work that would remain after a course was ready. Someone would have to introduce it, explain its purpose, and support its continued use. Even in an interview artifact, it seemed important to include those questions in the design, while being clear about which parts of the proposed experience I could actually demonstrate.

Evaluation followed the same line of inquiry. My plan considered learner reactions, knowledge, workplace behavior, and organizational outcomes, with possible evidence from course analytics, surveys, manager interviews, and peer discussions. Each would illuminate a different part of the experience. A response selected in the simulation could tell us something about a learner’s understanding within that activity; finding out whether feedback conversations were improving would require attention to what happened beyond it.

Because this was an interview prototype, that investigation remained a plan. I could describe the evidence I would want to gather and how it might inform another iteration, while leaving the eventual findings open. Thinking through those next steps was part of designing the experience from end to end, even when the assignment could take me only so far along that path.

Making the thinking available

In my submission email, I directed the reviewer to the journal to explore my design thinking and to the course to experience the learning deliverable. A person could move through the prototype, then return to the account of a decision that interested them, following it back to a source, an assumption, or a constraint. The annotated walkthrough and separate simulation link offered other ways of approaching the same work.

Looking back, I believe pairing the prototype with those explanations gave me an advantage in the interview. It allowed me to show the experience I had in mind while opening its construction to review. I would hesitate to turn that into a prescription that every candidate should build a full course, especially when this brief explicitly allowed a representative sample. The lesson I carried forward was to choose a form that makes the thinking understandable and to provide enough context for someone else to examine it thoughtfully.

Feedback That Fuels gave me a way to demonstrate multimedia and authoring skills, but its smaller decisions lead into a broader consideration of the people we design for: what we know about them, what we still need to learn, and what might help them carry an idea into their work. The course gives those decisions a tangible form. The journal, the job aid, and the plans around it reveal how much of the experience begins before the first screen and continues after the last. If a prject has ever asked you to see beyond the deliverable, I’d be glad to hear what it taught you.