Using templates to create eLearning
By
Cath Ellis
In this episode of The Learning Pro Live, I sat down with the incredibly talented Shirleen Wong (known to her friends as Lin). Lin is not only a visual design powerhouse but was also crowned “Learning Designer of 2020” at The Learning Conference.
We spent the session geeking out over a tool that is fast becoming indispensable for digital learning professionals: Adobe XD. While many instructional designers stick to PowerPoint or Word for storyboarding, Lin and I discussed why moving to a prototyping tool like XD can revolutionise your workflow, impress your clients, and bridge the gap between design and development.
Here are the key takeaways from our chat on why you should add Adobe XD to your toolkit.
One of the biggest challenges in eLearning development is the “surprise” factor. You spend weeks building a course in Storyline, only for the client to say, “Oh, I don’t like that button style” or “Can we change the layout?”
Lin and I both advocate for using Adobe XD to create high-fidelity visual mockups before touching a single slide in an authoring tool. By showing a client exactly what the splash screen, menu, and interaction slides will look like early in the process, you get buy-in on the visual identity upfront. This saves countless hours of reworking later on. Plus, presenting a sleek, interactive prototype makes you look incredibly professional.
A standout feature of Adobe XD is its sharing capabilities. You can generate a web link for your prototype and send it to stakeholders. They can then leave comments directly on specific elements of the design, like a digital sticky note.
This replaces the clunky process of emailing static PDFs or spreadsheets back and forth. It keeps all feedback in one place and allows clients to see the flow of the experience, rather than just isolated screens.
For those who find Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop intimidating, XD is a breath of fresh air. As Emma mentioned in the chat, it is arguably the easiest Adobe tool to pick up.
We demonstrated how quickly you can drag and drop SVG assets (from sites like Freepik or Undraw), recolour them to match a client’s brand, and create reusable components. If you create a button and turn it into a “component,” changing its colour once will update every instance of that button across your entire project. That is a massive time-saver compared to updating slides one by one in Storyline.
When it comes time to build, XD plays nicely with other tools. I shared my tip of setting up the XD artboard to the exact pixel dimensions of my Storyline project. This allows me to export assets (like backgrounds, buttons, and icons) as PNGs or SVGs and drop them straight into the authoring tool with perfect alignment.
Lin also highlighted the Creative Cloud Libraries feature, which lets you sync colours and assets between Illustrator and XD seamlessly. If you tweak a vector illustration in Illustrator, it updates in your XD library, keeping your workflow fluid.
Finally, we talked about avoiding the “blank canvas” fear. Lin shared her go-to sources for UI/UX inspiration, including Dribbble, Instagram (specifically UI designers like Anastasia), and the Muzli plugin.
Looking outside the L&D bubble is crucial. By studying modern web and app design, we can bring fresh, contemporary layouts into our learning projects, moving away from the tired “next, next, next” templates of the past.
Watch the full interview above to see live demos of Adobe XD in action, including how to quickly recolour assets and create interactive prototypes.
