A Conception of Usability and Educational Usability
The concept of Usability is a complex one that is heavily influenced by the realm of product design and engineering design which has in-turn affected the realm of technological development and education by their association. A simple conception of usability as studied here is:
The conscious process of including and testing a designer’s control over the experience of use of an object or process.
This concept of usability is actually easy to bridge into the educational realm using the educational equivalent, Task Design.(Galileo Educational Network, 2015) One paragraph that is particularly pertinent to this connection is: “people will leave the website [if]:
(a) if is difficult to use;
(b) if the users get lost on a website;
(c) the information is hard to read;
(d) it does not answer users’ key questions;
(e) and lastly, if the homepage fails to define the purpose and the goals of the website.” (Issa, Isaias, 2015)
Likewise, students will disengage with lessons and learning activities if the activities are difficult to use, cause them to get lost conceptually, are difficult to understand due to language or other reading barriers, does not provide adequate feedback, and does not speak to the student’s need to know the information or skill. One common activity in both teaching schools and professional development time is having teachers sit in a variety of places in their classroom. It is a small exercise that speaks to the basics of communicating a concept such as sight lines and classroom acoustics (the real-world analog to information being hard to read on a website)
One difficulty in the on-the-ground experience of K-12 teachers is the fact that we can’t stop everything and do a usability test before releasing a product(lesson) to the customers. The process by which we navigate usability is actually more akin to the Design Thinking model than the formal process Woolgar lays out.
Figure 1: Design Thinking (IDEO, n.d.)
The examples of usability in the readings would occur during the prototyping phase of this process (“Test to Learn” in Figure 1), whereas in a classroom it may be happening during the Sharing of the Story (the Test phase in the d.School model of Design Thinking).
Does testing on the fly affect the parameters of usability testing? Probably not. It likely just creates lightning fast cycles through Norman’s Interaction Model (Figure 2) with less of a formal usability testing phase. A personal example of this is in a day-to-day teaching feedback cycle: The lesson and/or assignment are delivered, an assessment is given, the assessment is graded providing quantitative feedback to go with any qualitative feedback gained during the course of this lesson. In most cases the feedback gained in that cycle will then inform the next lesson as the class calibrates the teacher (to play on the phrase from Woolgar) into the next day’s feedback loop.
Figure 2: Norman’s Interaction Model (from Issa, 2015)
Usability Examples
Two examples of configuring the user in the Woolgar reading include the perception of the user by the Technical Support team and the attempts by the usability test to calibrate (we might say train) the user to operate the machine.
One example revolves around an engineering visiting a school and noting:
“And pinned above [the computers] were very very simple instructions for what to do. And they weren't, they looked like they'd been used, you know? It was almost as if they'd been unpinned, taken down and pinned up again and again so that someone had had them right by the machine.” (Woolgar, 1990, pg. 72)
The usability testing should identify that schools have specific Learnability and Robustness needs and that a “cheat sheet” is a really common way to bridge that gap with students.
The observers also provide a level of calibration that, while likely unintentional, detracts from truly testing the product effectively and instead just smooths the fears of the user, thus calibrating them.
“Observers frequently intervened to explain the origin of a problem in terms of a machine fault, where this prevented (or made difficult) the completion of the task by the subject:
4. (SPIAIS 29:05)
A: It's a hardware error (3.0) probably a loose connection(3.5) you always have these problems on pre-production. But why did it have to happen in the middle of a trial!” (Woologar, 1990, pg. 85)
These are examples of the usability testing process can calibrate the user, but technology can do this by itself. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than seeing the contrast in how I learned to understand technology as a 6-9 year old and how my daughters are doing the same thing now. I grew up with an MS-DOS OS and a Treasure Mountain game on a 3.5” floppy disc. If I wanted to play it I needed to navigate the series of text based commands needed to open the exe file and then begin playing; my children start their game playing workflow with a negotiation with their father for either technology time or to approve their game download. My children’s technology experience is calibrated for them by the devices they use as much as mine was to MS-DOS. Neither me nor my daughters at 9 years old could operate each others’ technologies if we swapped. I would not understand the concept of a GUI any more than she would be with having a paper manual next to her computer; we were both calibrated for our technological surroundings.
Quotation Discussion
"…the usability evaluation stage is an effective method by which a software development team can establish the positive and negative aspects of its prototype releases, and make the required changes before the system is delivered to the target users" (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 29).
“…the design and production of a new entity…amounts to a process of configuring its user, where 'configuring' includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions” (Woolgar, 1990).
To be honest, I find a lot of the examples here to be a great exercises in configuring the user in a world where every computer required a user guide. The discussion of the machine as a text is apt here because how someone in 1990 would address a text is not the same as I am doing now from a process or context view 30 years later. Since looking at the Woolgar reading, I have searched the history of the Stratus 286 as well as drifting between a variety of web based sources in this exploration. Many of these were written by a democratic diaspora of digital natives who now maintain the knowledge infrastructure the world runs on.
Figure 3: XKCD - Dependency (Munroe, 2020)
It leads to a really strange question in usability which is not “how do I configure the user once my text leaves the walls of this company?” In this both sides of that usability argument are present as the product must be usable AND the user must be configured,
In 2022 it lies somewhere in the middle and is best summed up as:
“how is the internet going to interpret this text(machine?) once they get ahold of it? Will the media that they (the crowdsourced internet) create configure the user in the way that I, the product designer, want for usability?”
References
d.School(n.d.) Getting Started with Design Thinking, Retrieved from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/getting-started-with-design-thinking
Galileo Educational Network (2015) Focus on Inquiry - Chapter 2: Designing Great Tasks, University of Calgary, Retrieved from https://inquiry.galileo.org/ch2/designing-great-tasks/
IDEO (n.d.) Design Thinking, Retrieved from https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking
Munroe, R., (2020) Dependability [comic], xkcd, Retrieved from https://xkcd.com/2347/
Norman, D., (1986) Seven-stage model of (individual) interaction. Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Lulea University. Bai Guohua, Sweden
Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015) Usability and human computer interaction (HCI). In Sustainable Design (pp. 19-35). Springer.Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials, The Sociological Review, 38(1, Suppl.), S58-S99.
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