Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability

Exercise 6.1: Design rules and your CSU forum experience

My first subject at CSU was ‘INF440 Introduction to Information Architecture’.  As someone who was in the middle of a career change to a specialisation that was new and uncommon, the forum for this subject invoked a sense of belonging, worth and satisfaction as well as a sense of loss when it closed.

• Purpose: As the introductory subject for a new masters course, it was unique for the participants as almost everyone was starting a Masters of Information Architecture.  This was in contrast to the other more general subjects that would make up the course over the next 3 years as they contained students from varying courses and degree types.  Because of the unique purpose of this subject, everyone’s introduction was interesting.  Each unique background and reason for taking the course fed into the group’s understanding of what Information Architecture was and what could be done with it.
• People: The course was primarily made up of students with some type of background in the library/information sciences.  As someone from an ITC background who had only ever worked with Information Architects in a web development environment, this was actually surprising to me.  In hindsight however, perhaps the fact that it was offered by the school of Information Studies should have given that away.
• Community size: With around 20 participants (not including any lurkers that may have been lurking!), the size was small enough that you could remember previous contributions and construct a mental image of most of the participants.  It was also large enough to ensure that a steady stream of conversation was maintained.

Exercise 6.2: Wiki and Moodle design

Visually, the interface had a very ‘old-school’ appearance and it took me a few minutes to work out how the site hung together.  From an interaction design perspective I don’t think that the interface did enough to surface recent activity – instead this lay buried under various categories – which would have provided more dynamism to the interface and in turn encouraged more participation.   On reflection however, the concept of housing a number of powerful paradigms for social interaction together in one interface (wiki, blog, forum, calendar) has a great deal of potential.    I had a poke around the forums, which were a little dusty with the last activity being from 2007!  I then added a blog entry and tagged it with the existing tag of ‘OLR exercises’.

Although a Moodle shares the common attribute with a wiki of being able to anonymously edit content, a Moodle also brings a sense of the individual that a wiki does not.  A Moodle seems to be a meta-tool which incorporates a number of paradigms for social interaction, including those of the wiki, whereas the wiki focuses only on the creation of content without a sense of contributor.  If I could sum it up succinctly – a wiki is about content, a Moodle is about people, content and conversations.

I think that the presence of “likeable” features is a combination of good usability, sociability and sustainability as advocated by Preece and Kim.  Ultimately, what is likeable is that which is useful to someone in achieving their goals, which are of course closely related to the broader goals of the community.  This was illustrated in the reading material for topic 6 by the robustness principle of ‘Task conformance’ which is the measure to which the system’s features completely and adequately support the user’s tasks.  If the features of a system are closely aligned to this goal-directed behaviour then those features will be deemed “likeable” by its users.

Exercise 6.3: Trust and reputation, how is it achieved?

I will consider this question in regard to Google and YouTube.  Don Norman addresses trust in his landmark book Emotional Design (2004, pp. 141-143).  He lists reliance, confidence and integrity as the qualities of trust.  Both Google and YouTube are platforms that service a massive amount of requests, so reliance and confidence are established over many successful interactions over an extended period of time.  For Google, trust is built each time someone types in a query and finds what they were looking for in the first few results.  This trust is what they then so cleverly use to sell pay-per-click traffic to advertisers.  YouTube similarly build trust through the qualities of reliance and confidence by firstly having relevant content for most searches and then allowing users to find that content.  Norman’s final quality of integrity is satisfied differently by these two platforms.  Google clearly demarcates their paid traffic with its ‘Sponsored Links’ label, this provides transparency to users which prevents trust from being eroded by the presence of these paid links.  YouTube resists the temptation to promote their ‘Featured Videos’ first on the homepage and instead gives the slot to ‘Videos being watched now’.  They also keep paid-for content clearly separate further down in the site.

Google has done such a good job in the quality of its search results and usability of its results pages that people actually talk about “Googling” something.  Once something gets enough momentum it almost becomes accepted wisdom.  YouTube is a more socially-based platform which relies on content submitted by members so is heavily dependent on the early adopters and technology enthusiasts to ensure that a base of content is gathered that can then appeal to the pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics.  This makes sociability an important attribute and as well as the usual social features of comments and user-generated content, features such as ‘Videos being watched now’ add a dynamic community element.

Usability, sociability and sustainability draw mainstream users by creating accessible and dynamic systems with low barriers to entry that clearly satisfy the goals and concerns that these mainstream users have.

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. New York: Basic Books.