Section Overview
This unit focuses on user experience in your courses. User experience, at its most basic, is how the person who is working in your course (the students in this case) experience the technology and content. Web accessibility is a core part of this, but user experience is also about navigation, content structures, writing for the web, and other related issues.
Activities
- Navigation and content structure
- Writing for the web
- Evaluating The Usability Of Your Courses
Objectives
- Understand ways that navigation and content structure can affect usability
- Learn about ways that writing for the web is different than writing for other media
- Know basic methods for usability evaluation
- Be able to perform basic usability evaluation on your course
Readings/Resources
Tools for Conducting Usability Reviews
The Usability.gov page is a great resource for learning to do basic usability review. Below I have included a few tools that are useful in working with courses.
Card Sorting
Card sorting is a way of evaluating the menus and navigation of your site. In card sorting you put all pages in a site onto cards (digital or analog) and then conduct work where evaluators sort them into different categories based on what works together. This can allow you to both evaluate current information structure, or to create new information structure when beginning a project.
Click Testing
Click testing (or First Click Testing) is a way of determining where a user would click first when navigating your site with a certain purpose in mind. Click testing gives you a sense of whether your interface is consistent with easy navigation given the task at hand.
System Usability Scale (SUS)
This is a basic tool for getting an initial take on the general usability of a site. It features 10 questions with a 1-5 rating scale that can be quickly answered by an evaluator after spending some time on the site.
- SUS page from Usability.gov
- Trymyui has a short description of how to analyze your results form an SUS rating
Dead Link Checking
One of the biggest barriers to usability and learning content are dead links. It can be difficult to do dead link checking on systems that are not fully public (e.g. where content is behind passwords) but if you are able to get public content to show you can use an automated tool such as Dead Link Checker.