Lessons on usability from The Guardian iPad app

One of the things I've been enjoying on my new iPad is the Guardian app, which I think I can now say I find both easier and more enjoyable to read than the print edition of the newspaper. It's easier to handle, of course, being smaller, but I also find that I browse more and find myself reading more items than I used to do. (I don't use it at the breakfast table though, to avoid marmalade on the screen.)

But the improved readability and usability is down to some great information design, not solely the change of medium. Each issue is clearly divided into sections, and it's easy to switch between them or pop up to the whole-issue level. Within each section, the items are presented to you with a headline, a standfirst, and often a photograph. The photographs are strong, and look really striking on the iPad's retina display, and provide fixation points for each item. But what is more critical in determining whether or not you tap on one of these to read it is the quality of the standfirsts: those short paragraphs before the article proper, which both explain what the article is about and give you a reason to read it (as explained here and here).

Now all of these elements - sections, signature photographs, headlines and standfirsts - are features of the print edition also. They are part of the standard information design repertoire of journalism, and their quality is probably the most critical contribution to the usability of the iPad edition. In a sense all that's needed for the iPad edition is for these to be put on the screen appropriately - not a trivial design task, and one which they could easily get wrong, but one which is made considerably easier by those elements existing in the first place.

To write online learning materials as compellingly and addictively browseable as the iPad edition of the Guardian we may need to adopt some of the same techniques, to focus on that same point in time when a reader is scanning the screen and wondering what to do next. Pictures need to be interesting and relevant, titles need to be meaningful, and any introductory matters equivalent to a standfirst needs to sell the item not merely describe it, because it exists in competition with all the other things the reader or learner might be doing instead. We don't need to be apologetic about this; if we have materials which are good and interesting we shouldn't feel embarrassed about promoting them.

Why IT is bad for education

For my work, I make it my responsibility to know the drawbacks and downsides of IT, as well as its benefits and advantages. Since reading a magazine article by Marcus du Sautoy two years ago, I've been aware of a particularly insidious side-effect of IT's use in education, which has the potential to degrade and undermine the educational enterprise. That side-effect wasn't mentioned or discussed in the article: it was visible only in one particular phrase, the implications of which Marcus du Sautoy seemed only dimly aware.

That phrase was his summary statement of “what it is that I do as a mathematician and a writer”:

My job is, as the jargon goes, to “deliver content” in as many different forms and to as many different people as possible.

What he was doing was explaining how his venture into e-books and smartphone apps was simply an extension of  his work as a professional mathematician (“I prove theorems”), his formal teaching (lecturing in universities, schools and prisons), his informal teaching through books and programmes on television and radio, his collaboration with theatre companies and musicians on art pieces to explore mathematical themes, and his work on internet maths games. He was showing how all this work formed part of a single domain. But to do so, he used a phrase  - "deliver content" - which (as the scare quotes and the distancing "as the jargon goes" showed he was aware) came from quite a different and specialist domain: that of IT.

Now the word "content" sounds quite innocuous. Teachers or academics may use it and suppose that it means "course content" or "teaching content", roughly equivalent to "subject matter" or "subject knowledge". "Delivering content" sounds very like delivering a lecture, a class or a training course. Academics may also understand “content” as being opposed to “form, or perhaps to “structure”, allowing them to think of how essentially the same subject matter can be presented in different ways.

In IT, however, “content” has a different meaning. It means the information contained in a website, a database, or a computer file – as in the expression “content management system”. Delivering content means moving information from one place to another, irrespective of what that information, that content, actually represents. If you're emailing a digital photograph to a friend, it may matter to the IT system what format the file is in and how big it is, but the system does not know and does not care what the photograph shows. If you want to put some learning materials on a website, the IT people will want to know how many words there are, and whether you’ve got audio or video, but they won’t care what the words say or what’s in the audio and video or what students are supposed to do with it in order to learn.

Delivering content is what the IT industry does. It is the practical and commercial application of the central premise of information theory: that complex problems can be solved by reducing them to issues of signal, channel, noise and gain. The IT industry’s strength and success rests on the extraordinary degree to which real-world problems really are susceptible of treatment in terms of information flow: of not knowing and not caring what the information or content actually is, and focusing solely on whether it is delivered correctly. Just like postal services or courier companies, IT people's responsibility is limited to delivery on time and in good condition, and their relationship with sender or receiver need go no further than that. (You may be lucky enough to have a web developer who is actually interested in what you are trying to say and do with your web content, just as you may be lucky enough to have a courier or postal worker who is actually interested in you as a person, but this is not something which you should expect.)

The consequence of this is that when IT people approach the subject of education, they tend to see it in terms of transmission of information, because that's what they're good at. The technology which they design and build, therefore, tends to focus on the flow of information between teacher and student - and also, in these days of social media, between students - rather than any other aspect of teaching and learning. For example, when “virtual learning environments” or VLEs were first created for university teaching, they were designed on the assumption that their purpose was to get information - lecture notes, PowerPoints, articles to read - from teachers to students, and so that was the way in which university teachers found it easiest to use them (Britain and Liber, 2004, p. 4).

And this is the problem: that information theoretical thinking does not stay within the domain of IT, but through the widespread use of the technology and the surrounding vocabulary it bleeds out into the language and thinking of teachers, so that they too start conceiving their work in terms of information transmission instead of teaching. So even a good teacher such as Marcus du Sautoy can come to believe that his job is to "deliver content".

Why is it a problem to conceive of teaching as the transmission of information? Three reasons.

The first is that it’s bad teaching. Learning, even memorisation or assimilation, is an active process, and to treat students as though they're a passive receiver of information like a radio set or a hard disk is to encourage them to work at too low a level, not trying to do anything more than remember and repeat it.

The second is that it widens social divisions. If teaching only delivers information, it favours those with the educational experience and intellectual capital to make good use of it, disadvantaging those with less privileged backgrounds. This may not be a problem if you are happy to focus on the education of elites, but if you have a mission for social justice, as we do at the Open University, this most definitely is a problem.

The third problem with seeing teaching as the delivery of information - a problem for universities and other educational institutions at least - is that it threatens their existence. Information is cheap, or thought of as such thanks to the internet; there are no fees for the MOOCs or Massive Online Open Courses which a few leading institutions have started to provide (see here, here and here). If all universities do is provide access to information, they have no economic or moral basis for continuing in their present form.

But of course, even focusing solely on their teaching function, that is not all that universities do.
Those of us who work in such institutions and believe that we do have a social role to play may need to remind ourselves, and keep reminding others, that the business of a university is not the delivery of content but the transformation of lives.

Seen and heard: December 2012

"Tapestry: Weaving the Century at Dovecot Studio 1912-2012" - exhibition at Compton Verney. Extraordinary story of how a group of arts and crafts weavers, assembled to make tapestries for a Scottish aristocrat, created a future for themselves by collaboration with modern artists such as Graham Sutherland and Henry More.
The Nativity - lovely illustrated book, with the story sensitively told by Geraldine Elschner to accompany paintings by Giotto.
A Very Peculiar Practice - both TV series (1986 and 1988), written by Andrew Davies, on DVD. Classic black comedy set in a university medical practice, basically about trying to do a decent job while the seismic shifts in the higher education system make it almost impossible. Timely re-viewing!
Cinderella - pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Annual treat for our grand-daughter.
Strictly Come Dancing final - won by Louis and Flavia, whom we're proud to say that we supported from the start. Not only an impressive showdance (where the other contestants went for fast and flashy, they went for slow and strong), but also massively improved performances of their salsa and Charleston.
Sister Wendy and the Art of the Gospel - a Christmas meditation from the unlikeliest of TV stars, whom her producer persuaded to leave her hermitage for what may be the last time.
Climbed Every Mountain: The Story Behind the Sound of Music - surprisingly profound BBC documentary by Sue Perkins, tracing the problematic relationship with the film of both the Von Trapp family in particular and Austrians in general, culminating in the first ever Salzburg performance of the stage show (in German), which seems to make some kind of reconciliation.
LATER ADDITION: Jacquie Lawson advent calendar -  excellently conceived animated e-card, with daily reveals through December, which we sent to our grand-daughter when the month began. Only later did I realise, watching her playing with the snowman-building, wreath-tying and tree-decorating animations, just how good it is: rich and rewarding and well within the capabilities of a five-year-old.

The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

The slot: establishing dialogue between teacher and learner

We were planning a new edition of some distance learning books, when it turned out that our new tagging system for page layout couldn't reproduce some of the tables quite as they'd appeared before. The tables in question were ones with blank cells, to create empty spaces for the students to fill in themselves as part of learning activities. The technical difficulty raised the question: did we really need these responses spaces in the printed books? And if so, why?

I remembered Fred Lockwood's list of recommended features of learning activities, in which a response space or grid was one - the others being a title, a rationale ("if you cannot think of a good reason why it is worth posing the activity perhaps it isn’t worth posing at all!"), an indicative time, instructions, a example, and feedback. Though a space or grid didn't seem to make much difference to whether students actually wrote a response to the activity (as distinct from just thinking about it - what Lockwood called "degradation" of the activity), research found that students did like and prefer having one. But why, if they often did not use it?

One thing which a response space provides is what discourse analysts call a "slot". This use of the term was coined by the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, to describe the way in which one speaker can create an occasion or opportunity for another speaker to take over or make a specific kind of response. Asking a question, of course, creates a slot; a more subtle example - the one which was the starting point for Sacks' analysis - is "This is Mr Smith, may I help you", which without actually asking the telephone caller their name (which would be inappropriate on a confidential helpline) provides a cue for them to do so. A blank response space on a printed page, in the midst of the teaching text, is in visual terms almost literally a slot, providing a cue and an opportunity for the reader to make a response.

And what a slot does is open up the possibility of dialogue. Presentational text on its own can become a monologue: a single teacherly voice telling the reader how things are. A learning activity, when embedded in the text, establishes the expectation that the reader can and will respond and that that response is a valuable and important thing. Whether or not there is a response grid on the page or screen, and whether or not a student actually writes a response in it or even thinks about a response more than perfunctorily, the slot is there: a response can be made. Even though the medium itself is one-way and non-interactive, there can still be multi-vocal dialogue: what is modelled to the student, and what is encouraged to take place in their mind, is a conversation which moves back and forth between two voices, between teacher and learner.

That back-and-forth conversation enables teaching materials to deliver what Derek Rowntree called a "tutorial in print", in which students are called on to be active participants in their learning. And it is one of the many respects in which teaching materials are not about transmission of information, but about the establishing of relationship and dialogue: the socio-cognitive environment in which learning can occur.

References

Fred Lockwood, Activities in Self-Instructional  Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1992, p. 122, p. 129

Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning; An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1994, p. 14

Seen and heard: November 2012

The Australian Voices - antipodean a capella choir, performing new (and fun) Australian music at a Milton Keynes church.

Graham Gibbs keynote address at faculty workshop - inspirational reminder of how assessment shapes student learning behaviour, unproductively or productively, from one of the gurus of learning design.

Secret State - Channel 4 drama, with Gabriel Byrne playing a decent and honest Prime Minister. The journey was better than the destination, and altogether not a patch on its predecessor A Very British Coup.

Last Tango in Halifax - BBC romantic comedy, with Derek Jacobi and Ann Reid as teenage would-be sweethearts reunited in their senior years. Great to see a drama in which the old folks are normal and its the younger  people who are in chaos.

The Hour, Series 2 - BBC drama set in (BBC) 1960s newsroom; no great depth, but full marks for style and performance.

Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) - video recording of David McVicar's hit 2005 Glyndebourne production of Handel's opera, shown at The Stables as a half-day event with a long interval for picnic lunch; definite added value over watching the DVD at home.

Turning junk into art: the Facebook song

One of the joys of television in my childhood was watching Tony Hart - first on Vision On and then on Take Hart - produce simple and beautiful drawings and paintings with apparent casualness and effortlessness. He had a trick of starting with a collection of rubbish - bits of paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, printed or plain, "any old load of junk" as he would say" - and then "get organised": arrange selected pieces on a backing sheet so that when he put a frame around them they looked great. A work of 'art, you might say.

The Australian composer Gordon Hamilton has done something similar, turning status updates from his Facebook friends into a vocal piece for his choir, The AustralianVoices. I had the pleasure last week of hearing them perform it live during a concert in Old Wolverton's Holy Trinity Church; they invited Polymnia, the choir I sing in, to do a guest spot in their concert, which was pretty cool too. The song takes its title from the first of the status updates: "Toy Story 3 =  Awesome".  Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, loved it, and you will too.


I'm not sure what the relevance for learning materials is, other than the obvious one: it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.