Some thoughts on Ken's July 17th posting:
Many online learning groups also have a process in which learner experience is captured throughevaluation. This is pretty much the case at Penn State World Campus, and was also true at theOpen Polytechnic of New Zealand. In the case of the World Campus we will be developing andrevising dozens of courses and delivering & teaching hundreds of courses at any point in time.It would seem to me that the knowledge gathered through the process of designing, developing,authoring, and offering courses, could be well leveraged by an OSS community to enhance UI/UX,which points back to my question. What can OSS projects and communities do to capture thisknowledge from application users who will not directly contribute code to a project? This isbased on the assumption that the type of knowledge that could be captured and generatedthrough design, development and teaching processes would be useful to user interface design andsupporting improved user experience.
So one distinction that is useful is between the evaluation of the teaching and learning experience taking place and the user experience in interacting with the software. These can get blurry sometimes, especially in completely online courses. However, a problem with appropriate online instruction techniques are different than usability problems. I think of usability problems as when the software gets in the way of someone achieving their goals (such as submitting a quiz, sending email to an instructor, tracking their grades, etc.). An ineffective online learning experience might include UI issues such as too much on screen reading, not enough examples or doing, but it is not inherently poor usability.
In higher ed, IF we have the right roles on board, the UI team working on any sort of learning tool absolutely has to engage the team of instructional designers to make effective OSS learning environments. The incentive for Instructional designers is that they influence the direction of the learning environment and they can directly declare success to their faculty who have been asking for these things. Small fixes and successes matter and create a positive reinforcement between UI, ID, and instructors. In a commercial environment, those quick iterations and customizations were either impossible or incredibly far a few in between releases.
We have IDs and UI folks under the same umbrella (mine!) at UCB. Each release is a discussion (the “bSpace Council”) between ID, UI, Development, Operations, and Sponsor (me). We have a rubric that we use to rate potential new tools which ranks user need and support the highest, then usability, then technical and operations. The rubric is a guideline and open for discussion. We consider tools based on user feedback (coming in from the ID and support team), technical improvements, administration needs, and needs from other stakeholders such as the Registrar, Library, and profession schools.
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