Can't be bothered to spend more time finding where to post so here goes!

[Anonymous]

Oh god I had no idea it was going to remove all my p aragraph breaks! Sorry again. Can’t find out how to edit it. Ran out of time  – have to go to work now.

[David Jennings]

Hi Anonymous,

Thanks for taking the time to post this, and I’m sorry for the formatting problems (I’ve done a little work to tidy up your post, involving several html paragraph tags, which I agree is a cludgy way of having to do things – sorry).

I’ve done a fair bit of usability work, and I also had a big hand in putting this course together, so I’d like to respond to your questions — and I hope won’t come across as being too defensive.

UX design is easiest when you have a clear definition of the user population, their characteristics and the finite set of tasks that they wish to accomplish with whatever it is you’re designing.

One of the challenges is that learning rarely comes down to a finite set of tasks (except rote and mechanical skills, and even then…). More often learning involves creating an environment for an inherently unpredictable and wide-ranging set of tasks. That introduced a complexity problem: if you try and keep everything simple, then you narrow down the range of things people can do, and annoy them that way; if you make everything possible, then navigation becomes complex, and you annoy people a different way.

Add to this that this is an open course. Which means when we were designing it we couldn’t predict who our users would be. We could say that it was people “teaching in Higher Education” but that still leaves the user population very uncertain. Some of our international participants, we’re finding, are not familiar with the term Higher Education. So trying to design with such a range of possibilities in mind further adds to complexity and navigation issues.

One last thing. Learning isn’t the same as using a bottle opener or a text editor. Sometimes it’s supposed to be hard and present challenges. OK, I don’t mean it’s supposed to be hard to find out how to format a paragraph break — that is annoying. But not everything should be intuitive all the time. If you don’t challenge your intuitions, are you really learning at a deep level.

So what you have here is a maybe a bit Version 1.0, maybe a bit beta in places. There are some things we can only really test with large numbers of users, and you can’t really organise iterative prototyping with 1,000 learners (or, put another way, maybe that’s partly what we’re doing right now).

To finish, I will be a little defensive. We do respect your time, honestly. Thank you for taking the time to articulate these thoughts, and I hope my reply does them justice, at least partly.

[Author]

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