The User Experience

Previous Chapter

Short Answer

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

  • Herbert Simon (1971)

Being a teacher also means being a designer. Materials extend and enhance your teaching and communication.

If it already works, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Time is your most valuable resource.

When in doubt, design for clarity and simplicity over consistency. Designing goes for templates, assignments, tests, projects, activities, etc. The more clarity an assignment has, the more likely a student will do it with fewer issues.

Some notable exceptions would be:

  • An assignment explicitly testing reading comprehension and analysis
  • Research articles
  • Practicing writing sentences (longer → shorter versions or in general)
  • State testing and specialized testing
  • This book!

Long Answer

Before continuing, recognize that:

  1. Someone probably did what you want to do.
  2. Someone probably did it better.

Reread those two things, then continue.

This isn’t a means to dissuade you from creativity or teaching; it’s a reality and something people may call “product research.” Go ahead and do a Google search on any topic you want to do if you don’t believe me.

Did a Google search and found your goal? Take a closer look, see how they did the topic, then guesstimate if you can do a better job than they did. What if you found something, but of poor quality, or you didn’t find your topic? That’s when you can flex your ability and creativity.

If you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to teach your topic(s), then don’t reinvent the wheel.

If someone did something extremely well for a topic you’re covering, it may be OK to use that and apply it in your setting. It’s valid and reasonable, in the interest of time, to stand upon the shoulders of giants. You can still cover that same topic if your approach is objectively better or increases accessibility.

Busineses also showcase delivery of ideas: one business may have a fantastic idea, but fail to capitalize on it. Another business finds that same idea but capitalizes on it well and makes millions to billions of dollars in profit. Sometimes all you need is better delivery over a better idea.

You don’t always need to invent ideas. You need to be good at teaching ideas and understanding what you’re teaching about.

  • Sometimes “good enough” today beats “perfect” tomorrow, especially with time constraints.

The User (Student) Experience

Imagine you’re using a website or playing a video game for the first time. You may not know how to use it to its full potential, or you’re going in with some knowledge of conventions and standards about how this website or game should operate. Some conventions are commonly known and understand, like what a stop sign is at a road interaction, and other conventions are less known.

It’s an easy assumption to think students know how to navigate through the content like the designer/teacher does. In reality, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. You may find your students, and maybe you, doing any of the following (Krug, 2014):

  • Scanning text instead of reading text
  • Settling on a reasonable first solution
  • Stumbling through how something works

Does this mean they’re wrong? Not necessarily; it means the material and work you’re giving them is something they want to get through quickly or there’s potentially an error in how the work, assignment, etc. is designed.

You’ll find students go in with a goal in mind. That goal may be getting through the material as fast as possible. Another goal could be “What does X do?” In either case, they’ll focus on that goal and tend to avoid materials that don’t meet or satisfy their goal. To expand on what I mentioned earlier:

  • If they want to get done quickly, they’ll opt for scanning rather than reading instructions, figuring out the best solution, or just brute-forcing their way through.
  • If they’re figuring out how to perform a specific action, expect them to focus only on tasks that help them do that and potentially ignore everything else.

A misaligned goal is something you can mitigate to an extent. Any form of thinking takes up energy; if you can spend less energy thinking about something, then you’ll likely do that. Your material could be the best and most fun in the world, but viewed as nothing more than work, which takes up time and energy that students would rather spend elsewhere. Put another way, imagine a student has a fuel tank where every thought, action, etc. uses up fuel and they have a limited supply for the day.

  • This is formally called cognitive load theory, as coined by Sweller (1988).

When in doubt, design materials to minimize unnecessary effort. Conventional templates, multiple choice questions, and familiar formats may not look the best design-wise, but require less mental effort to meet their goal and give back more time to do what you want. By extension, this means you get more time to have them focus on what you want them to learn; all by making it easier to meet their goal(s).

You can also teach new conventions and methods, but it may take students several iterations and exposures before they require less mental effort to think about how to do it correctly.

The Pareto Principle

You may have heard of the 80/20 rule before. That’s what the Pareto Principle is. It’s applied to many different scenarios and situations, but for a valid reason: ~80% of the consequences come from ~20% of the causes is a commonly observed event. It’s a generally accepted rule (NOT law) (Pareto, 1896).

There are some misconceptions to correct. The Pareto Principle describes a commonly seen distribution of events. Again, it is not a law, but a pattern. How this applies to you as a teacher is this: focus first on the serious problems before tackling the not-so-serious issues.

If you don’t know where to start identifying serious problems:

  1. Make a list of all potential issues
  2. Rate the items in order of significance
  3. Make solutions starting with the most significant issues

Solutions don’t have to be perfect; just good enough to effectively solve the problem.

Accessibility

Outside of legal requirements like IEPs and 504s, you want to make sure your teaching material is accessible. Does this mean more work? Yes, but it also means potentially great improvements with relatively little effort.

If you want two examples, think about blind and deaf people. As an example, you can use Braille to accommodate learning for blind people or with vision loss (U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, 2020). Because these demographics have these methods to communicate and learn, they’re now on a similar stage of learning compared to peers without those disabilities.

You might also claim that accessibility will harm the design and content of whatever you’re teaching. Accessibility typically doesn’t compromise design, but instead improves clarity for all users (Krug, 2014). It significantly improves the curriculum and made things simpler to understand for all students. It also eliminates, or heavily mitigates, issues where students without disabilities likely encountered difficulties in one area and students with disabilities experienced similar problems in the same area.

Bibliography

  1. Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
    • Future Reading Source

  2. Simon, H. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37–52.

  3. Krug, S. (2014). Don’t make me think. Sensible. https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/

  4. Open Source Initiative. (n.d.). The MIT license. https://opensource.org/license/mit
    • Future Reading Source
  5. Pareto, Vilfredo (1898). “Cours d’economie politique”. Journal of Political Economy. 6. doi:10.1086/250536.
    • The original source is from 1896, but the above is for journal publication.

  6. Sweller, J. (April 1988). Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science. 12 (2): 257–285. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.459.9126. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4. S2CID 9585835.

  7. U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. (2020, February 28). ADA Requirements - Effective Communication. ADA.gov. https://www.ada.gov/resources/effective-communication/

Next Chapter