Understanding of usability
My understanding of usability after reading the chapter written by Issa & Isaias (2015) has come down to the following aspects. Good usability indicates that the product should be ease of use (intuitive, in another word) for people coming from different backgrounds with similar needs. It is also reasonable to expect a product with good usability to be effective, efficient, and safe to use. Proper design, implementation, ongoing evaluation, and an effective feedback system are needed for better user-oriented iteration of the product.
What’s missing from an “educational” perspective?
The education-related usability that Issa & Isaias (2015) failed to emphasize are “the ability to set permissions” and “the options to see from the other side”.
The ability to set permissions helps the school or administrators to limit the number of accesses to sensitive user information and student (or student families) privacy. The ability of customizing permission, in some senses, indicates the capabilities of the school to manipulate the data. There is no one-fits-all product, thus, the opportunity to re-organize and manipulate the data exported is important for educational analysis.
In an educational setting, a product not only pertains to two parties but multiple instead; including at least the administrators, teachers, students, and parents. Issa & Isaias (2015) discussed the importance of interactivity between learners and computers. Therefore, having an idea of what information is being shared as well as the opportunity to see it from the other side is critical for ensuring a healthy yet sufficient home-to-school communication. This also allows the school/ administrator to make sure the content is educationally and age appropriate.
Discuss two of Woolgar’s examples
Example 1: The Background
Woolgar (1990, p. 76) mentioned in his article that when a tester encountered trouble understanding a diagram in the trail, it was quickly resolved by the technical writer redrawing the diagram. This example shows that not only the users were configured, but the content the user should be configuring got configured as well. Instead of allowing the users to deduce the solution, the tester interfered with the original information passed on to the user and failed to test the real capability of the product.
Example 2: The Manuals
The very existence of the Manuals states the fact that the product is not designed to work for the users; instead, the users are expected to behave in a proper way to work the product. As Woolgar (1990) repeatedly tries to make the point that meaning differs bound to the individual entities and the environments at a specific moment. Therefore, judging whether the texts from the manual is clear or not by whether the users can perform the task successfully is flawed. Especially, when the identity and the ability of the user is uncertain , having a manual is going to confuse the overall authenticity of the usability trails.
Discuss the two excerpts
The first excerpt focuses on the usability evaluation from a user-oriented point of view. It highlights that conducting a usability evaluation is a necessary and beneficial process to gather initial thoughts so that to help the development team identify positive and negative feedback for the prototype releases. The end goal reveals by Issa and Isaias is to improve the users’ experience when the product gets released to market.
The second excerpt, on the contrary, explores the concept of “assumed users” and bases the design and product construction on that. The sentence also indicates that instead of trying to understand the needs of the user, the designer wants to make sure the products are used in a restricted way so that the product is performed as designed.
Both excerpts touch on the human computer interaction. They both acknowledge that one can affect or restrain one another. In real-world situations, it comes down to whether the developer thinks they are smarter and knows better than the user (Woolgar, 1990) and whether feedback is used in the development process (Issa and Isaias, 2015).
References:
Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Usability and human computer interaction (HCI). In Sustainable Design (pp. 19-35). Springer.
Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38 (1_Suppl.), 58-99.