reworking the core

I’m coming back to this idea of a core heuristic – of a basic set of assumptions we come to interfaces with. I seem to remember bumping into this a few years ago working through some text on visual rhetoric. I also think there's something to be co-opted from work that Louise Phelps and Janice Lauer have done in regard to heuristics.

I’ve been working on a small project with SUNY Upstate Medical University. They were looking for someone familiar with Blackboard (they also run the SUNY Learning Network, but the faculty seem to prefer Blackboard). After an initial meeting, they realized they needed someone to do design and development and Blackboard configuration. They have about 200 PPT slides with progress checks in the notes, which are used to supplement an ass-in-seats course on evidence-based medicine. The project: convert the PPTs (the only “content” available for the course, of course) into Blackboard-compatible files.

Phase one was a predictable mess -- but a clean mess, if you know what I mean -- a straight conversion of slides to Dreamweaver-templated HTML. Coursebuilder pop-ups present the progress checks. Lots of white-space. The “modules” are accessed from the Blackboard nav bar. Inter-course nav is a simple Next/Back sequence. Nothing crazy and the only script used is in the progress checks.

We invited six second-year medical interns into a computer lab and had them work through the content, making it clear that the product is far from a complete online course. Without exception, each of the reviewers commented on the inability to “see” where they were within the space of the course. This one point was present in almost all of their feedback, which gets me back to my point.

These reviewers – all well-educated and articulate – were unable to clearly explain what it is they wanted out of the interface. They used words like “file view” and “bookmarking” to explain the inability to located themselves spatially within the course content. It’s a phenomenon that I think is part of this universal heuristic that most users bring to an interface. Maybe it’s our familiarity with book-bound texts and the way we come to use TOCs, indexes, and x-refs within a text. Maybe it’s based on our exposure to directory structures and file relationships in our personal computing. Or maybe it’s just a human requirement to be able to locate oneself within a space – be it a textual, visual, physical, or emotional space. There’s something here that converges with a range of disciplines. Now if I could just (re)focus my efforts on my exams, I might have time to work through this a bit more.