It's About the Experience

Usability, findability, and visual design are critical aspects of the way your students experience your course. Just as you try to set a certain tone in your classroom to support student learning, your online class also has a tone and a feel to it. A good student experience requires a functional and usable course. A great student experience also needs thoughtfulness. Think about how your students may feel when beginning a task or trying to navigate the course. Imagine someone close to you doing these things. Would they find it interesting and enjoyable, or would they be frustrated and lose motivation?

Usability refers to the ease with which an individual can navigate, understand, learn, and use something. In this case, the something is your course, and the individuals are your students. Usability is not something commonly considered in face-to-face courses, but it is a critical component of online course success. It is defined as the ability of the user to "do what he or she wants to do, the way he or she expects to be able to do it, without hindrance, hesitation, or questions" (Rubin, Chisnell & Spool, 2008). It also tends to be an umbrella term that includes other components such as findability, accessibility, readability, etc. - all important aspects in supporting a positive student experience.

There are several versions of usability principles for online learning - most stemming from the work of Jakob Nielsen. Some of the major principles that faculty have control over include:

Accessibility

Discussed in detail in the accessibility section of this module.

Consistency

Includes consistency of layout, navigation, images, and terminology use.

You'll notice throughout these pages, the content is displayed consistently from page to page, and the images and graphics are similar in appearance, size, and shape. The intent is to make these pages approachable and easy to navigate. Contrast these pages to many commercial news websites like Yahoo or MSN where the pages are cluttered with a mix of story links, pictures, video, notices, and advertisements which makes it more difficult to navigate. The less time your students are hunting for information or spending energy trying to distinguish the important information from the decoration or side notes, the more time and energy they have to learn what you want them to learn. (See Findability below)

Visual Clarity

Includes using legible fonts, color contrast, white space, headings, and indents to visually organize text as well as eliminating distracting animations and most purely decorative graphics

Readability

Includes writing in active voice and at an approachable reading level. To check readability you can paste in a sample of your text into a Readability Checker. You can also check readability within MS Word.

Findability: A key component of usability

If your students can't find what they are looking for, don't understand the instructions to an assignment, or aren't able to download an article or worksheet, they can't do what you are asking them to do or learn what you are asking them to learn. Lack of findability impacts student self-efficacy, motivation, and learning. Robins, Simunich, and Kelly (2013) found that students experienced frustration and reduced motivation when findability was reduced due to:

Lack of use of logical categories for organizing content and activities
Poor labeling, including use of file names as labels
Deeply buried content such as placing a syllabus in a folder in instead of using the syllabus tool
Lack of visual contrast among page elements

The Modules tool in Canvas can make organization and navigation easier for yourself and your students. Modules allows you to aggregate your content, activities, and assignments for the module in one easy-to-find place and put things in the order that you want your students to work through them.

Example of Course Organizational Map - see outline after image

Course Organizational Map Outline

By placing all your content, assignments, quizzes/tests, discussions, etc. in Modules, you can hide the Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions, Pages, and Files tools in the left navigation list from student view. This provides students with one place to look for everything. That means fewer "where is ____?" questions for you and less frustration for your students. Starting each module with an overview including what the students are to read, watch, and explore as well as a brief description of the assignment(s) for that module also improves usability. If you have several content pages explaining different concepts within a module, you can indent the subpages under the overview page, so students can see the hierarchy of the pages. Think about it as if you are providing an outline of the concepts in the module.

When moving a course online or revising from a previous online course, organizing with Modules also allows you to see where there may be too much material for the students to work through in the time provided as well as where there may be gaps in content that need to be filled in order for students to complete required assignments.

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