UC Week 11
22nd of April 2010
This session consisted of:
- discussion of the user’s perspective of online resources
- identifying design and visual standards for online resources
- locating ways to gather data about the user’s experience
The User’s Perspective
In the end, all of this discussion about online teaching and learning boils down to one idea – how can the learner achieve the best outcome?
This is where seeing online teaching from the user’s perspective matters – if the user doesn’t get out of the online teaching the same thing that the teacher puts in, there is a problem. A useful website which lists a large number of links to websites which discuss this topic is Instructional Design for Online Learning. It is a bit old, having been last updated in December 2008, but does have a good range of resources. The first entry contains the authors criteria for success in designing course for online teaching. They are:
Clearly articulated objectives and expectations An easily navigable web site A course structure that facilitates collaborative learning Assignments and activities that facilitate participation and communication among students Timely feedback for students from the Instructor An appropriate use of technologies to enhance learning A discussion space for learners to talk openly about the course (expectations, uncertainty, what they like, dislike, their participation, progress etc.)
So, it is apparent that a balance between the use of technology and content is the hardest to strike, summed up nicely as:
“How do you merge clean, accessible design with sound pedagogical principles?”
There is an online course you can take, Designing Kick Butt Quality Online Courses, to answer this exact question (you do need to log in: the user name and password is bbworld07, which logs you in as someone called Kevin World o7 – thanks Kevin).
The first thing I noticed is that the login page colour scheme is terrible, and the navigation icons are hard to find ((the little green arrows hiding in the top right corner – although later on the course points out that large icons are a feature of bad design…) After a little while I found the Course Tools pane on the left (it is hidden by default) which allows an overview of the whole course – there are a lot of “dead ends” if you use the arrows to navigate, and the overview map is necessary to get back to the main index page to look at the next module – the Course Tools pane closes itself every time you switch to a different module; a bit irritating really, and ironic for a course like this!
There is useful info there, like Eye Candy – it’s got to look good too and ideas on structuring folders. I especially like the way they promote a institution-wide approach to layout and organisation – this appeals to me and creates a strong identity and consistency between courses. This is more an administrative decision to be made by the institution than the individual teacher though.
Even in my own discipline, the different units Moodle sites look quite different, with some obviously being assembled with little attention to this kind of detail. Although these are not online courses, and we have never asked the students about this, I suspect that a disorganised site, with spelling errors, inconsistent layout and no thought given to navigation impairs its usefulness.
The Sloan C Effective Practices Site represents A Consortium of Institutions and Organizations Committed to Quality Online Education, promoting five pillars of quality in online education: student satisfaction, access, learning effectiveness, faculty satisfaction and institutional cost effectiveness. Very usefully, and in a generous collaborative way exemplifying their philosophy, they provide access that “shares techniques, strategies, and practices in online education that have worked for them. All effective practices are peer reviewed to insure quality and to give submitters some documentation for tenure and promotion files.” They are obviously a pragmatic group, and the focus on the teacher’s needs is refreshing.
The Reluctant Online Professor gives an encouraging example of a new online course, with quite well detailed descriptions of the things that worked. Interestingly, one of the authors main mentors is highly regarded for their work in online pharmacy education in the US. Although not everyone agrees this is a good development.
Jesse James Garrett’s book, The Elements of User Experience is a well regarded guide to creating a website that “…fulfills your strategic objectives while meeting the needs of your users.” It is based on an apparently famous diagram he created, which describes the ideas and relationships upon which websites are built. He also has an engaging writing style, as exemplified in the introduction below:
From the Introduction:
This is not a how-to book. There are many, many books out there that explain how Web sites get made. This is not one of them.
This is not a book about technology. There is not a single line of code to be found between these covers.
This is not a book of answers. Instead, this book is about asking the right questions.
This book will tell you what you need to know before you go read those other books. If you need the big picture, if you need to understand the context for the decisions that user experience practitioners make, this book is for you.
This book is designed to be read easily in just a few hours. If you’re a newcomer to the world of user experience — maybe you’re an executive responsible for hiring a user experience team, or maybe you’re a writer or designer just finding your way into this field — this book will give you the foundation you need. If you’re already familiar with the methods and concerns of the field of user experience, this book will help you communicate them more effectively to the people you work with.
Design and Visual Standards for Online Resources
In an effort to improve the user’s experience, there are guidelines and standards for the way online resources look and work. Moodle takes care of this automatically, by limiting the number of ways things can look and standardising the way things work by using a core set of tools which a teacher can choose from. But, as discussed above, there are still some rather dysfunctional Moodle sites around (I was going to put up a screen shot but it is too hard to deidentify it…).
Standards discussed previously, like SCORM and Common Cartridge all help with this standardisation. Websites like webusability have checklist tools to measure the Success Criteria and Sufficient Techniques of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). On this same page is an apology which has a sense of fatalistic irony about it: ” I apologise for the lack of an accessible equivalent alternative and hope to make a HTML version available in the future.”
The WCAG standard is produced by W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, and described on their Web Accesibility Initiative page. The homepage for WCAG 2.0 is here.
This checklist allows a website to be rated in terms of the level of accessibility to users – it looks at elements of websites being:
- Principle 1: Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
- Principle 2: Operable – User interface components and navigation must be operable.
- Principle 3: Understandable – Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
- Principle 4: Robust – Content must be robust enough that it can interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.
with increasingly wide criteria to achieve A, AA or AAA ratings. Moodle complies with these, as do other content creation applications like Dreamweaver.
Total Validator “is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like”. It produces a compliance report about all of this, which is comprehensive but completely meaningless to me. I am exceptionally grateful that all this is taken care of by the Moodle people 
. I tried to validate one of my Moodle sites, but the validator got stuck at the login page – the report is below and really appears to be intended for someone other than me…
validator
How can we gather data about the user’s experience?
All of this discussion relies on actually knowing how users experience an online resource. Short of actually asking them, there are many ways to gather this type of information.
I did actually ask my students in 2 units I convene what they thought of some changes I had made to their Moodle sites – namely reversing the order of the weekly fields so that the most recent was at th e top, rather than at the bottom (a real pain to navigate when Week 18 comes around), using a “widescreen” version of the default Moodle page to reduce the need to scroll, and relocating several of the “blocks” which appear on the left and right side of the main content. The screen shot in my Week 2 post shows the final look and the link to the survey I used to do this – a very quick “choice” survey which is a Moodle activity. The introduction to the survey is below:
survey
I did this for 2 sites, with results below. I would really love to know what those 2 “haters” didn’t like but it was just a quick poll…
like it hate it
One of the main issues identified in class is reducing the need to scroll to access content – people just don’t scroll it seems. Even with these changes on my Moodle sites, there is still the need to scroll a bit. This is not unique to my Moodle sites, and I have recently had a very fruitful time with the UC library staff reorganising the Pharmacy and Clinical Trials library subject guide to reduce this. All of the key information is now visible when you open the page with well placed tabs to move to different sections -there are still some things I would like changed, like the large amount of space filled in the top half by banners and repeats of the same information, but apparently that is a university wide standard which I will probably have to accept.
library
There are many other applications which let you see what users are doing on your site – this can give you an idea of what works well and what to change. Some of these are:
Crazy Egg’s Confetti and Heatmap features are simple and affordable heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior. It’s a commercial program, so I haven’t used it but it looks useful – there was an example shown in class which highlighted common problems on a web page, especially people clicking on things that looked like, but weren’t, hyperlinks.
Kampyle Feedback Analytics offer to Turn Insight Into Action with Feedback Form Analytics Solutions. Again, it is a commercial program 
so I haven’t used it. Pity about the spelling mistake in their main tag line too…
bit.ly is The easiest way to make long links short, share and track them. The idea is that you convert links on your website to a “short” version which routes the link through bit.ly, where it is able to be counted. This can let you know which links on your site are the most popular.
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