Ubiquity, Testing, Experience

Ubiquity: that is perhaps the one word contrast between the context of the previous generation of OWL testing and this new iteration. In my last post, I wrote about designing the students' experience of the class. This blog is perhaps clearest evidence of the transition from an OWL redesign project dedicated to Usability and one meant to focus on UxD. In 2006-2007, there were elementary blog hosting services, but now these template-driven hosting services (like this blogger site) are quite sophisticated. The design and function are "good enough" to support our class needs, as well as the demands of documenting and recording the project itself. I think about all the time saved both by students and me, and that time can be spent on reading more recent research as well in articulating this content. The blogging tools are ubiquitous. They're simply here: free, useful, and most importantly, usable.

Just as the resources available on the OWL and the different methods of accessing the information are changing, the methods we use for analysis need to change too. —Kaitlyn

I would be wasting my energy and students' time if we spent this class concentrating on usability to the exclusion of experience architecture. There are limits to the utility of revisiting usability precisely because usability has been so successful. In the middle 1990s, we were making arguments about including usability precisely because so many emergent designs were unusable, either pet projects not meant for widespread adoption or examples of what Norman refers to as "next bench" design, the design solutions engineers come up with that prove a concept at their workbenches but really aren't meant for general, mass use. Usability has broken that scheme and practice, and moved from emergent design (as Bjiker named it) and towards recognizable genres (which Spinuzzi has traced for some time in his work). Bob Johnson has recognized this Ubiquity Paradox and questions insistence on older usability, user-centered, and participatory lexical fixations. 

The OWL needs to make sense. Not just for me, a tech-savvy college student, but also my mom, a middle aged music teacher who does not work with a lot of technologies on a daily basis. It shouldn't make users wonder why they must take certain steps, it should be self-evident. —Jessica

Blogger is a tool we are employing to help create the communication environment of the OWL UxD project. Similarly, Purdue provides access to a sophisticated survey tool, Qualtrics. Other similar tools exist, some at low or no cost for educational use. I've been asked if I might be making students dependent on this tool: what happens when their first professional position requires data gathering and there is no access to Qualtrics? Putting aside whether this or another tool might be better to address the need, it seems silly to deny students use of a powerful tool for fear it might not be available at some unknown future point. Further, comparison with free tools allows students to decide: perhaps Survey Monkey has all the power and flexibility they need. Or perhaps they can then begin the challenging but necessary task of articulating need and gathering materials. 

What makes the Purdue OWL a great tool/resource is that it can be accessed by anyone with a computer and reliable Internet connection. Not only is it easily accessible, it's free. And while it contains the overarching theme of guidelines for writing, many different people access the site for different reasons. How the user experiences the site and his or her satisfaction with it depends heavily on whether or not the site helps in achieving there goals. Therefore, by redesigning the site, we are redesigning the user experience of the site so that it fulfills their needs and helps them achieve their goals. —Kristin

Besides blogging and surveying tools, students have numerous computing devices they carry with them to class, including a variety of smartphones, tablets, phablets, netbooks, laptops, and other writing tools. Most students log on to the classroom computers—which are last-generation iMacs with gigantic integrated screens. But many students rarely if ever log on to these computers, and by extension, also eschew resources like software and storage space available through the wired campus network. Students access materials through the less robust but more flexible wireless connectivity available just about everywhere on campus. WiFi is like oxygen on campus: everywhere and seemingly free, and only noticed in its absence. That is, ubiquitous.

There will be a wide range of things we have to consider while we are creating the user experience to accommodate all OWL users because they have so many different types of users with different access to certain technologies. —Kira

Behavior surrounding the campus network and computing resources has convinced me that one response to ubiquity needs to be a reconfiguration of campus computing facilities. I favor replacing the 20+ student machines with 5 or 6 higher end machines capable of and equipped for HD video editing, 3D sound editing and recording, and student- as well as teacher- controlled image projection. This is how we are reimagining our multimedia production space. And have proposed for our main technology rich classrooms. But I digress. 

The purpose of redesigning the Purdue OWL has shifted from usability to UXD design. I find it interesting ... that usability has come so far and that this is a major reason why we focus more on UXD design... I agree that some major changes could be made to the room. On our redesign of the room, we included more tables and more computers, which will definitely help shape a user's experience. —Andrew

Blogging and surveying tools are part of this new age of ubiquity. Similarly, students' own mobile technologies are part of a literate context that seems to define this new era. That these technologies can be seamlessly accessed and used interchangeably—that they are useful and usable—are part as well of the environmental dimension of technology. That WiFi is not only present but robust, but more importantly expected. In this context, usability testing is much less pressing than attention to the users' experience within this techno-cultural space and place.

We need to begin taking into account all of the different devices that were mentioned in this post. Looking at some of the network statistics from the OWL, very few hits are actually coming from the mobile devices that students carry with them everywhere. While this could be that the content may only be relevant when they are working on an actual computer, I think we need to begin considering how users would interact with a mobile app and what information they may need access to from a device that fits in their hand. Rather than just re-sizing the OWL to pocket form, we need to start thinking ahead to what the needs of the users are. —Tanner

Blogger and other Google docs; email and instant messaging; Qualtrics; the physical classroom itself with its installed computers and full suite of software; campus WiFi; mobile and laptop computers: this mix of devices, software, services, and places all contribute to the instructional technology—they are available to students but can become invisible, transparent—as technologies. These technologies are for the most part looked through to the work at hand precisely because usability as a movement has been so effective. These things just work. So what's at stake?

There are many systems that "just work" without a second thought for me. But as I read this post, I began to wonder whether technologies truly "just work" or if I, as a user, have adapted my interaction with a technology so that it can work. —Jessica

Well, the continued invention and design of new services, and of new categories of devices (I did mention phablets above, which are certainly evolutionary and not revolutionary, but still, a new micro-category). These are important. But I think the bigger rewards lie in taking successful processes and knowledge making from the software and web worlds and putting them to work in new contexts: from workplaces to architecture to manufacturing, there are innumerable contexts where knowledge and core competencies developed in the service of creating these now-ubiquitous technologies and literacy practices make training in technical communication very valuable. In an age of ubiquity, experience architecture is an important and valuable specialty in a wide variety of workplaces.

So, my question is: as different tools for increasing/measurability usability increase, does the assumption that these users immediately know how to use them increase as well? And how do we negotiate these kinds of expectations? How do we need to think more critically about accessibility and, indeed, willingness, to work with and learn from these types of technologies? — Mary

This classroom is the experience of UxD for these students. I have designed it in order to teach these students about usability, user-centered design theory, as well as involve them in ongoing research. I also ask them to think with me, and sometime struggle to make clear what we are doing ... precisely because  I do not yet know. But that's what I take to be my responsibility in this class: I share with students what I know (what I think I know) at this moment about UxD, offer access to ongoing discussions as well as a balanced mix of new, groundbreaking, and foundational research. I bring with me the expectation that their other teachers and the curriculum have prepared them to move from what they have been taught to  the challenges that lie ahead of them. As these quotes I've pulled from their responses show, they have prepared themselves not just to respond to the challenges of Purdue's OWL and its user experience needs, but to address a wider range of challenges posed by valuing user-involved research.