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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996
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As part of a university HCI course, masters students used and evaluated Norman's CD-ROM Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine [1]. This paper reports on the advantages and disadvantages of the CD-ROM from the students' perspective, and reflects on the learning benefits of using this kind of interactive media. Problems with adapting existing books from paper to CD-ROM are discussed, and a number of suggestions are put forward of ways in which the interactivity of electronic media could be further exploited for teaching HCI and interface design.
Several publishers recently have begun to adapt successful educational books into CD-ROMs. For example, Voyager has produced a series of electronic books based on the work of eminent scientists, writers, composers and artists; one of which is Norman's books on interface design and HCI [1].
In addition to their large storage capacity (allowing several works to be included on one disk), CD-ROMs offer the potential for users to interact with information in a variety of ways. For example, text can be transformed into hypertext enabling flexible word searching and interactive glossaries; static diagrams and photos can be supplemented with animations and video/audio clips to provide dynamic explanations; and interactive simulations can be created with properties changing in response to user interaction. For CD-ROM books to succeed as an alternative educational medium requires that these kinds of electronic interactivity be designed to provide `added learning value' beyond that which is currently offered by books on paper [6]. In assessing the pedagogical value of CD-ROMs (as with paper books), full account should also be taken of the learning and teaching context in which they are to be used. In this paper we report the learning experiences of a cohort of university students taking a masters degree in human-centred design, who used and evaluated Norman's CD-ROM as one resource amongst several, during a course on HCI.
`Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine' [1] is the first comprehensive CD-ROM `book' to be published on interface design and HCI. It contains all three of Norman's well known paper books: `The Design of Everyday Things' [2], `Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles' [3] and `Things That Make us Smart' [4]. The electronic version of the texts has been enhanced with:
A general aim of our study was to explore the value of interactive media for teaching and learning about interface design. In particular, we wanted to find out how students could benefit from using a CD-ROM on interface design within an established multiple media curriculum on HCI. A further aim was to see whether interacting with the CD-ROM could help students apply the design principles that they were learning about.
Our specific objectives were to:
The 10-week HCI course forms part of a year-long, masters degree on human-centred design. It introduces the main concepts, developments and design frameworks in HCI, together with various methods of design and evaluation. A number of teaching methods are used, including computer conferencing, practical classes and discussion of video case studies. The 18 students who took the course this academic year (Fall 1995) came from a variety of backgrounds, including electrical engineering, psychology, information systems, cognitive science and computer science.
The students were initially introduced to Norman's ideas about design by reading the first chapter of his paper book `The Design of Everyday Things' [2]. In this chapter Norman introduces design issues including visibility, feedback, mappings, affordances and conceptual models, through both anecdotal and empirical evidence. After the assigned reading, a week long computer-based discussion followed (using the computer conferencing system FirstClass) in which students critiqued and discussed Norman's ideas. Practical exercises followed, in which students used the design principles to evaluate a range of technologies (e.g. VCR controls, mobile phones, photocopiers, web browsers, email and library applications).
Later on in the course the students were given Norman's CD-ROM to explore. They were asked to look at the texts and other material on the CD-ROM, paying particular attention to Chapter 1 again in its electronic form. They were also asked to answer some of the design test questions included in the CD-ROM, drawing on the list of "Useful Terms" provided, and guidance from "Don's Hint" where available. (An example design question is the now classic interface problem of how to design a bank teller interface to ensure customers do not walk off without taking their card.) Each student then wrote an evaluation of the CD-ROM, focusing on how the paper and electronic versions of Chapter 1 compared, what they thought was good and bad about the CD-ROM, and whether they felt that using it had helped them understand the design principles.
The findings reported below are based on the computer conference discussion, comments made by the students in written assignments, and a feedback session at the end of the course. In addition, two students were observed while interacting with the CD-ROM, and were subsequently interviewed about their approach to evaluating it.
Students initially explored the CD-ROM through a bottom-up discovery process, selecting options at the interface and seeing what happened. A general tendency was to search the screen for any clickable object, but in particular the Don Norman figures (see illustration at beginning of paper). These were hotspots that sometimes appeared at the interface, which when clicked on activated an auditory explanation by the author of some aspect of the interface or design principle. Most students spent one to two hours exploring the interface in this manner before planning their written evaluations and answering the design questions. Many of them then used the very design principles described in the CD-ROM to evaluate its own interface. Positive and negative responses identified by the students, together with their main recommendations, are summarised below.
Feedback from the students indicated that they generally felt that interacting with the CD-ROM had been a valuable learning experience. In particular they had been able to reflect on the design principles embodied in the interface of the CD-ROM while they interacted with it. Learning with the CD-ROM therefore had an immediacy which the paper books did not afford.
Ironically, it was through discovering a number of inconsistencies in the design of the CD-ROM interface that students gained the greatest appreciation of the issues they had read and heard about during the course. For example, many noted that the page-turning functions onto which the arrow keys have been mapped are inconsistent with the way these keys are typically used in other Macintosh applications (an inconsistency caused by constraints imposed in the making of the CD-ROM(1)). Encountering such problems provided students with a powerful illustration of the design issues involved. This suggests that a valuable resource which CD-ROM books on HCI could offer would be interactive examples of poorly or inconsistently designed interfaces, as well as good examples, which students could experience firsthand.
The written answers students gave to the design questions posed by the CD-ROM were very comprehensive. In particular they showed a good grasp of trade-offs and difficulties involved in applying the various design principles, which appeared to have been enhanced through their interactions with the CD-ROM itself. One of the main benefits of using the CD-ROM in this learning context, therefore, was its ability to get students to think about interface design problems in a recursive manner.
Interacting with the CD-ROM clearly helped students to reflect on the design issues they were learning about. In this sense they had a greater opportunity to `learn through doing' than offered by a paper book. Many students were disappointed with the CD-ROM, however, having expected more interactivity than was provided.
This suggests that if the capabilities afforded by electronic interactivity were exploited more fully, much more could be done to help HCI students learn how to put theoretical ideas, models and design concepts into practice. For example, hands-on interactive exercises, requiring the user to design various interfaces using different design criteria and the various principles, would be valuable, as suggested by the students themselves. Auditory feedback by leading figures in HCI could be provided, commenting on the design decisions made by the user. Example interfaces could be included (both good and bad), which the student could experience, critique and modify. Animations and simulations could be constructed to help students understand difficult and abstract concepts, which are problematic to teach using existing media. For example, innovative ways could be devised to show the relations between user's and designer's conceptual models and interface metaphors. Different perspectives and points of view of various stakeholders involved in a given project (e.g. interface designers, business managers, content/interaction designers, programmers, software engineers, graphic artists) could also be shown through simulating design team meetings at the interface. The student could be asked to anticipate the contributions each team member will (or should) make initially and the kinds of compromises that have to be made on finding out about each others' contributions and under different project constraints. In designing these kinds of interactivity, the focus should be on finding ways to facilitate students' understanding of the process of turning `theory into practice' and `design as practiced' [cf. 5].
Finally, our study leads us to raise the question of whether, in general, it is more fruitful to design educational CD-ROMs from an analysis of student's problems with existing concepts in a domain, rather than trying to enhance existing texts through adapting and appending them. Alternatively, the aim would be to design CD-ROMs that complement existing paper texts, rather than replacing them. The challenge is to find more effective ways of representing ideas, concepts and processes for a given domain, through exploiting the electronic medium's interactive capabilities in ways that are not possible with paper books alone[6, 7].
We thank Don Norman and Victoria Bellotti for providing us with copies of the CD-ROMs. We gratefully acknowledge the donation of equipment to the school by the Advanced Technology Research Group, Apple Computer, Inc. We also thank the HCI students at the University of Sussex, particularly Peta Sheldrake and Paul Jermyn. This work was supported by the ESRC, UK (Cognitive Engineering Programme Award L12727251033) and we thank Mike Scaife and Matt Davies, our collaborators on this project (Eco-i), for useful discussions.
Yvonne Rogers is a lecturer at the University of Sussex, UK. She has been teaching and developing HCI courses since 1988. She is one of the co-authors of the internationally acclaimed textbook on `Human Computer Interaction' (with Preece, J., Sharp, H., Benyon, D., Holland, S. and Carey, T.) and published by Addison-Wesley in 1994. Her research interests include designing interactivity, graphical representations, educational software, distributed and external cognition and CSCW. She is currently on sabbatical at Stanford University, Computer Science Dept. and the Advanced Technology Group, Apple Computers Inc, USA.
Frances Aldrich is a research fellow at the University of Sussex, UK. She is currently working on a research project (Eco-i) to develop interactive CD-ROM based educational software. Coming from a background in experimental psychology she has been researching ways to facilitate learning for a number of years. Previous projects she has worked on include an investigation of ways to improve the study materials offered to visually-handicapped students, and an exploration of novel teaching methods for people with memory problems resulting from brain damage. She also has been trained and worked as a teacher.
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, UK.
email:
yvonner@cogs.susx.ac.uk
,
francesa@cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel: +44 1273 606755
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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996 |
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