iterativelearning

In a meeting today, we were talking about ideas for a workshop on DE pedagogy. During one part of our discussion, we were sharing stories about how we use the various tools to support our teaching strategies, when one of the faculty shared an interesting detail about the Announcements tool.

With our LMS tool, WebCT, you can configure an announcement to appear as a pop-up window when the user logs into the site. Of course, this is designed to make it practically impossible for students to miss the announcement, which in theory, is a good thing, especially if you want to alert them to something important like a change in deadline or crucial assignment detail. But here’s the interesting usability angle: this colleague mentioned that some students had indicated to her that they ignore pop-up windows because they view them in the same way they view pop-up ads in all other websites — spam. I wonder if this was really the case or if the students were just using it as an escape hatch for avoiding responsibility for whatever the announcement may have obligated them to. If legit, it would be interesting to know what the rough percentage is out there of student users who ignore them? Has ignoring pop-up windows become such an ingrained user behavior that it’s applied even if they’re in a LMS? Based on a recent study at NC State

students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs.

maybe …

Image credit: Swiss Bones

Twit gave some positive reviews to Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem so I decided to take a quick look at it. On Stephenson’s page, there’s a link to the publisher’s site where you can view some basic information about the book and read a couple sample chapters. What’s interesting from a UX standpoint is that you can’t enlarge or adjust the size of the text. On my MacBook Pro, visibility isn’t a problem, but I’d be curious to see the experience on the Kindle, iPhone, or other device. The text also looks like it’s been OCR’d rather than being transferred as a straight digital file, because the font serifs seem more blurry than they should otherwise be. This is still a beta version, though, and the Feedback tab is very visible.

Usability popped up in a recent Twit where Jason Calacanis described some interesting findings at the Mahalo usability lab. When using Ask.com, their test users perceived ads as actual content. This genuinely surprised me. Apparently, though, the shading was subtle enough and the font-size of the Sponsored Results was small and far enough out of the way that the distinction was all but invisible. Once again, I guess we see the value of that classic usability mantra: test, test, and test again.

When you read through any primer on web design, there’ll be a fair bit of discussion on making it as easy as possible for the user to get around the site. One common way to do this is, of course, is through breadcrumbs. Just yesterday, I was reminded of the real value behind this design principle, but interestingly enough, it didn’t happen with a website, but with an ordinary cable tv menu. More specifically, we’ve got Comcast’s OnDemand menu and after we would try and guess which category our desired program was under and then drill down several levels to find it, we would inevitably take the wrong path and would then have to slog our way back up through the same levels that we just went through. All too often, we’d run through this back-and-forth cycle several times before finally finding what we were looking for. It would be nice if Comcast would add a simple breadcrumbs trail that that could be activated through the remote control.

In one of the recent UIE podcasts, Jared Spool looks at some history and chats with Bill Verplank of Xerox PARC fame. When talking about some of the differences between then and now, Verplank explains his and Bill Moggridge’s decision to go with user interaction design rather than user interface design as a way to signal a move away from a computer-centric vision of interaction to one that incorporates a wider array of user contexts. Later on in the conversation, Verplank validates that more expansive view by pointing to the Rhode Island School of Design’s move to hire John Maeda as its new president whose background is not only in computer graphics but programming as well.

On the road at a conference and in the conference hotel is a Starbucks. Because this is a large conference (thousands of attendees), the queue for coffee can be pretty long.

After a long wait, I finally arrive at the cash register and as I hand the cashier my Starbucks card, she informs me that they don’t take them. When I ask her why, she explains that this particular hotel owns Starbucks and so presumably, they’ve opted out of this system. From a User Experience standpoint, it would be nice if they had a sign of some sort that alerted the customer. What if the customer is out of cash and would rather not charge just one coffee drink? Not a big deal, but one that could enhance the user experience a bit.