What is ‘Usability’?

The understanding of ‘usability’ in Issa & Isaias (2015) chapter was mainly based in the context of business – how to keep a customer by making sure their website/system is easy to use and comprehensible. In a broader sense, usability is about ensuring that a person can use a system in such a way that it allows them to find the information that they are looking for, use the website to perform the task that they are interested in completing, and be engaged or entertained if that is the ultimate outcome of the venture.

 

What is Missing from an Educator’s Standpoint

Missing from Issa & Isaias’ definition of usability is the added layer of gaining new knowledge or skills. True, they mention needing to learn the commands to complete a task, though it was more related to the development of these systems using HCI, rather than the usability. Once those commands are understood, however, there is no change to them. The usability becomes easier due to familiarity. For an education system, there needs to be some sort of advancement for the user.

Therefore, my definition of ‘educational usability’ is dependent on the task that the students are engaging in. If it’s simply to find information for a research project, the above definition could be used. However, if the task is steeped in gaining new insight or skills, then usability is about developing the necessary knowledge or skills to complete the task and show their understanding. A system cannot simply give them the answer or be too easy to use, the students need to actively learn the process as it evolves and be engaged with it.

 

Woolgar’s Examples

In one of Woolgar’s (1990) examples of configuring users, Technical Support and Services used past experiences of their own or the stories they heard from other workers to create their concept of the ‘user’. We do something similar for class composition. We ask our colleagues about the students they taught the previous year and refer to their student file. We can find ourselves developing an opinion of a student based on someone else’s experience without giving them a chance to make a proper first impression for themselves. In a similar way, we can use our past experiences with familiar behaviours and observations to make assumptions about a student before truly getting to know them. In doing this, much like the Tech Support, we are configuring our class based on stories rather than allowing everyone to show their uniqueness and figuring it out for ourselves.

In the same study, the users that tested the product were chosen from within the company that built it. This configuration of the users skewed the trials by allowing people with prior knowledge of the product and experience with similar technology to test out the usability. In the section on Engineering’s configuration of the user, Woolgar (1990) notes that they believed in looking at what the user would need in the future, rather than looking at what they would need that could be provided by another company now. Since the average person would not necessarily have the capability of imagining what they would need in the future, the company took it upon themselves to “[define] users’ future requirements” (Woolgar, 1990, p. 75).

 

Quotation Discussion

“…the usability evaluation stage is an effective method by which a software development team can establish the positive and negative aspects of its prototype releases, and make the required changes before the system is delivered to the target users”  (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 29).

“…the design and production of a new entity…amounts to a process of configuring its user, where ‘configuring’ includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions” (Woolgar, 1990).

In Woolgar’s (1990) study, the user is an equally developed construct as the machine that the company was creating. They put so much thought and energy into who the user was, and what they thought they would want in the future, that it became an additional part. Their idea of usability was greatly influenced by this idea of ‘the user’, whom was more themselves than the average person.

Whereas in Issa & Isaias’ (2015) chapter, the developers did not create a parameter for the type of user that would be using the system. Their approach is more holistic, allowing any designer to adapt their idea of the evaluation of usability to their system and their target audience instead.

 

References

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Usability and human computer interaction (HCI). Sustainable Design, 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6753-2_2

Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38(1_suppl), 58–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1990.tb03349.x