Citation
Khoo, B. K. S. (2010). User interface design pedagogy: A constructionist approach. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education, 6 (1), 96-105. doi: 10.4018/jicte.2010091108
Main Points
– A major limitation in traditional class lectures that uses textbooks, handouts, transparencies and assignments is that students often are unable to “experience” user interface design.
— This limitation can be overcome by using the constructionist approach that allow students to experience user interface design by allowing them to “do” or “construct” so that they can understand and remember.
– This paper describes an effort to harness the strengths of hypertext markup language (HTML) and utilize it to develop an interactive virtual menu system that is an Internet-based interactive case scenario.
— It was developed, based on the constructionist approach, to teach students user interface design concepts in conjunction with the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS). The QUIS was used primarily as a teaching tool to illustrate to the students what basic design features to look for in a good interface design.
— Two facets to constructionism is that learning takes place as a result of actively constructing new knowledge and that learning is effective when doing activities that are personally meaningful.
– A proof of concept evaluation was conducted and the results indicate that this approach is effective in user interface design pedagogy.
Analysis
The article starts by describing the evolution of the terminology from user interface, those aspects of a system that a user comes into contact with, to user friendly, a system that a user can easily interact through its interfaces, to a broader term of human-computer interaction (HCI), the broader meaning which includes organizational issues, work practices, design, implementation, and evaluation. The author saw the internet as a perfect vehicle to deliver the interactive virtual menu system due to its prevalence and technologies. The author used HTML in order to utilize the linkage structures of hypertext and image maps to create a menu that actually works when the user performs a direct manipulation of the metaphors on the screen. In this study, the author created pushbuttons to mimic the metaphors. The QUIS survey enabled clear and reflective feedback to determine usefulness of the menu tool. The study reinforced the essential need to gain feedback when designing user applications for the Internet otherwise even the best intentions could result in unusable systems.
I was intrigued by this article, as the experiment described provides good guidance on focusing the user’s interest on the actual interface alone, without the distractions of content. I can see this working as a good introduction to the process of usability testing, too.