Interactions and Design

Here at UMUC, our LMS uses a couple of different methods that facilitate communication between instructor and student. The two primary vehicles for communication are the announcement area and the discussion board. The announcement area is used as a ‘one way’ communication from the faculty to the student, while the conference area is used as a discussion area for both student and faculty. The former is a ‘push’ medium where the latter facilitates participation in a conversation.

I suggest making the announcement area more like a blog. Breaking the paradigm of one way communication in the announcement area will help facilitate interaction between faculty and student. What if a student has a question about something in an announcement? Currently, we force the student to post this question inside a ‘questions’ conference, away from where the inquiry originated. Adding a comments area, a common blogging feature, to each post in the announcement area allows students to question and comment at the original point of communication. Keeping both the announcement and response interface on the same page works to reduce the student’s cognitive load—they don’t have to remember the text in question because it is adjacent to where the comment is being posted. It also encourages questions and comments by students which enriches the communication for all.

Adding the ability to categorize announcements, as do most blogs, would allow instructors a wider variety of information on the front page of the class without having to resort to the conference area. I see instructors do this all the time. They have materials they want to post, but want to categorize it. Sometimes responses are required by students, sometimes they are not. By providing blogging elements such as categorization of posts and comments, instructors can post such materials in way that better fits the genre of the information.

I am convinced that adding blogging features to the announcement area would create a rich environment of communication that is currently lacking in our classrooms at UMUC. Blogging is popular because it serves a certain genre of information and interaction. I believe that WebTycho’s announcement area is a similar genre of information as blogging, thus incorporating blogging feature seems an ideal solution.

Thought this was some interesting information.

Apparently, the company that owns BlackBoard now has a patent on the Learning Management System. From the plain language version of the patent, http://tinyurl.com/g29ao , it appears BlackBoard can now claim intellectual property rights to the functionality of nearly every LMS that has been created since the early 1980s. Note that almost every aspect of the patent applies to the current iteration of WebTycho (announcements, discussion board, chat, assignment drop box, etc.). It is also interesting that one day after securing this patent, BlackBoard filed suit against http://www.desire2learn.com/ , for copyright infringement. It seems unlikely that this patent will stand, as there is a lot of prior art that can invalidate BlackBoards’ claims to these LMS features. But, with the US Patent and Trademark Office recent track record of allowing patents for such obvious things as Amazon’s 1-click purchase, who knows what will become of this.

I have collected a series of links on the subject, if you are interested in reading more. There is also a Boycott BlackBoard website where you can add your name to a petition.

In Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” and “About Face 2.0“, he talks about how the user’s goals are the most important thing to consider when making design decisions. He also mentions the need to consider the person who is buying the product as well. If you can’t sell the product to the customer, then designing for the end user becomes a moot point.

In the situation that I am currently in (see previous post), we have a problem where instructors are not using the course modules that are being provided for them. In this case, they are like the ‘customer’ that Cooper refers too. If we cannot sell the module to the instructor, then fulfilling the user’s goals, again, becomes a moot point.

During the research phase of this redesign, I will be very interested to see why these instructors are ‘working around’ these course modules. What is it about the current product that frustrates them? What goals does the instructor have that are not being met?

It will be interesting to see how the importance of the instructor’s goals compares with the importance attributed to the customer in Cooper’s texts. Will the instructor be treated as the ‘customer’ in the research and modeling process, or will he become another primary persona that needs to be considered in the design process?

A response from someone I was having a conversation with at lunch. I was trying to describe to my fellow conventioners what I did. I told them I was an interaction designer, and proceeded to explain the methodology of user centered design. The responses? “Oh, we just usually skip over that part.”

Classic.

So, I am at the CFUnited conference here in DC. Sitting in the ‘Flex Coding Kitchen’ presentation, I realized that I am truly hanging out with 1000 of the brightest, most talented inmates in the asylum. It is interesting to hang out and hear them talk, and I am glad I am able to get a better insight as to what makes them tick.

I just got done listening to a guy from Microsoft who was talking to us about “User Experience”. He proceeded to describe some elements of what user experience design is. They included: it works well, it looks good, etc.

I know that we have to consider the audience: mostly Coldfusion developers. But, his ‘elements’ of the user experience were not explained well (let alone NAMED very well), and he did not fully connect how they relate to the product he was featuring: Atlas.

Atlas is Microsoft’s Ajax framework. It is designed to primarily work with .NET technologies, but also interfaces to other platforms as well. I am sure there are probably more bells and whistles when using Microsoft platforms, which is certainly why they are giving it away for free. But, exactly how does Atlas support and improve the user experience?

This is where the danger of using technology blindly can occur. Ajax is fun for developers to use, because it allows them to make user interfaces do things that they could not do before. This is also why interaction designers like it as well. Yet, without implementing user centered design techniques, using Ajax has the potential of creating an equally bad user experience as plain old HTML. The main issue that comes up is breaking the user’s mental model of how web pages normally work by implementing asycrounous data calls to the server and displaying them in the user interface– before the user hits the ‘Submit’ button. So, letting the inmates run loose with the design of these new types of interactions is dangerous.

Now, some of the questions of usable Ajax interaction have been solved since I was made aware of them at User Experience Week 2005. For example, if you have an e-commerce site that allows you to customize a product, and you are using Ajax to dynamically update the product view to reflect these customizations, Atlas creates a simple way to incorporate those attributes into URL variables so you can send a friend a direct link to a page that represents the same state the page is currently in.

Ajax itself is no different than html was in the early ’90s. In the wrong hands, it can cause major frustration for users. Interaction designers applying user centered design techniques can embrace these tools and use them to create great user experiences.

I just hope we can convince the inmates, and get them to trust the designers to create usably pleasant interactions.

This guy’s blog is all about what he calls ‘Connectivism’ in learning. He sees, as I do, a role for ‘Learning Communities’ in the future of distance education. In this post, he talks about adaptive learning and the ways to achieve it through the use of Bogs, Wikis and RSS. I particularly like his take on implementation of these technologies into a curriculum:

This is obviously a very simple way to add some adaptability into a course, but at least it’s a start. We need to start having this important discussion. We have many resources available that can create a richer learning experience. We don’t need to rely on learning management systems as our primary learning tool. We can start the learning experience by focusing on connections first and content second. Our most limiting challenge is our existing views of learning. I think I’m going to make a New Year’s resolution to spend 2006 being discontent with existing approaches to learning…and to stop accepting notions of learning that have little to do with the instructors and even less to do with learners. We can do better. We have the tools for change.

Education is changing, and in a BIG way.

Traditionally, education has been a top-down information delivery system with knowledge locked behind the doors of educational institutions. This knowledge is disseminated as a curriculum through courses conducted by instructors. The act of learning and acquiring this information requires a large commitment of time from the learner, which is usually spent at the institutions harboring this knowledge.

Then, along comes the web. Now the whole paradigm of education and learning is beginning to shift. A massive conversation is taking place on the web. This conversation is not merely an exchange of words, but a communication of information in all forms. The culture of information, as found on the web, has become a bottom-up construct where individuals contribute to a larger conversation. This type of phenomenon is illustrated vividly in the realm of political blogs.

Here is an image that represents a large number of the political blogs that link to each other. You can probably figure out what the red and blue colors represent.

http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf

These blogs connect to each other through linking. This mass amount of linking creates a collective consciousness facilitating conversations of political philosophies inherent to the group.

This is how I see education manifesting itself in the future: learning facilitated through a mass conversation. The representation of this conversation will be similar to, for example, the conversation of the ‘blue state’ blogs that have formed a community around their beliefs and ideas. This network of knowledge and conversation, centered on a common topic and interest, is a powerful construct where the individuals have control of the discourse. The tools of this conversation are blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. The power of this conversation is the network created through the linking of what is essentially personal publication platforms.

I predict there will be great resistance to this fundamental change in education, especially from the major stake holders of the institutions. A bottom up model of learning is not controlled by Presidents, Provosts, Deans and Program Directors. It may still be guided by them, and definitely will benefit from their influence, but the future of e-learning will transfer more control of the learning process into the hands of the learner.

And that, I think, is a good thing.

This is possibly one of the hardest things for me to explain to the people I work for. WHY a design process that includes the usability engineering is so IMPORTANT. Reading the forward to Alan Coopers 2004 edition of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” has given me some greater insight into why the old ways of creating software/web applications are still prevalent today.

Cooper talks about how it is the ‘old economy’ thinking that equates programmers in the same way that it classifies variable costs. In business, there are two strategies for increasing profits: reduce costs, or increase revenues. In the old economy of manufacturing physical goods, reducing variable costs became the best way to increase profits. If I can build widget A with cheaper materials and less labor, then I can produce it at a lower cost per widget. Building and distributing software/web applications is a completely different animal than creating a physical good. Increasing revenues through higher sales is the preferred way to increase profits because the cost of distributing software after it is design is, for all practical purposes, zero. Sure there is support to provide, packaging to design, salesman to hire, etc. But, the actual good itself, the code, does no incur further costs as sales increase. If you make widget A out of steal, widget A will always incur a cost for the amount of steel needed to create it. Code does not incur cost for each time it is reproduced. Therefore, it is desirable to SELL MORE to increase revenue, rather than reduce the variable costs.

This is an important distinction to make. Since old economy thinking strives to reduce variable costs, it tends to group development resources into these variable costs. Since you cannot create software/web applications without programmers, they are often left to design the interfaces and interactions as well. This is where the danger of old economic thinking comes in. Would a building project, needing to cut costs, cut out the architect and leave the building design to the people swinging the hammers and laying the pipes for the plumbing? This would be recipe for disaster. In fact, I would be surprised if a building could be built this way at all. Yet, software IS often built in this way. Leaving out the Information Architect, Interaction Designer, or what ever you want to call it, is like building a building with out the Architect– a recipe for disaster in anybody’s book.

I have only read the forward for this book so far, but I am excited to read the rest so that I can arm myself with the knowledge the can change the minds of the business leaders in my organization.

My colleague Yulia Nemchinova and I have had a significant breakthrough that will begin to make user centered design a common practice at UMUC. We have found an ally in our department who just happens to be the newly hired director. We had a meeting with him yesterday, and we did not need to sell the idea of user centered design to him at ALL. He is already a believer, and is willing to support us in our efforts. I see exciting times ahead. I am now in a position to change UMUC for the better. Only time will tell how implementing user centered design at UMUC will impact the organization as a whole. I think that it has the potential to take what is now a poor user experience and turn it into an excellent one.

Corporate Usability Steps 1-4
Corporate Usability Steps 5-8

These two links outline the typical cycle of the acceptance of usability practices within an organization. I believe that UMUC is currently in Step 2: Developer Centered Usability. The next logical step is Step 3: Skunkworks Usability, which was discussed yesterday. Yet, even though, as the article outlines, there is typically no ‘official’ recognition of the practice and no budget for the activities, this level of usability acceptance is the point where the practice actually shows RESULTS. It is these results that can allow me and my colleagues to move UMUC through the next steps of the usability life cycle. I believe a goal of moving to Step 4, having dedicated budget usability, by the start the next fiscal year will be necessary to be successful in this Endeavour. To accomplish this, we need to make sure we can begin to show the results of our efforts SOON so that this can be justified when budget proposals come around next year.

I am excited about this project.

…or, a user experience designer, interaction designer……maybe a usability engineer? I have discovered that there are many titles that permeate this field of practice. I am in the process of finding the title that best suits me.

Currently, I am an instructional support specialist at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). Eighty percent of our class sections are conducted online using our home grown Learning Management System (LMS), known as WebTycho. This LMS was designed sometime in the late 90’s, and it suffers from some extremely poor interaction design on both the student and administration side. WebTycho is currently being overhauled. My fear is that the new design will be decided by a committee and designed from what I like to call the “ivory tower”. I am taking it upon myself to be an advocate for user centered design as this process commences. My immediate supervisor has promised to put me on the committees that handle these issues. Hopefully I will be able to help UMUC create a better user experience for our students, faculty, and staff.

I have started my first project here at UMUC that is based upon user centered design principles. The project is a website for the Masters of Distance Education program at UMUC. The techniques I will be using include research into the business goals of the organization, goal and task analysis of the users, an evaluation of the content, an iterative design process including rapid prototyping and testing, deliverables of site maps and wire frames, and formal usability testing of an implemented prototype.

Jakob Neilson has said that a successful usability program in an organization typically start small and grow as it achieves more and more buy in from the higher stakeholders. This is my plan: start small. Sprinkle the goodness of the usability lifecycle where ever I can.

I will keep you posted as to my successes and failures. Buy the ticket, take the ride.