To get started with this course, take about five minutes to do a little research and thinking. You have likely heard of the process of user-experience testing, or UX, where we observe a variety of people who are likely to use a given tool, asking them to experience the tool with minimal instructions or help.
Before you encounter the details for this course, examine a technology tool that many of us use every day: your email system.
Aim to spend one minute on each of the following test items (and stop if you get to three minutes with no resolution).
- How can you compose an email message now and have it sent at a later time?
- What process allows you to see only messages sent or received within the last five days?
- How would you move from the email inbox to another folder by using only the keyboard or mobile-device keypad?
- What steps would you need to take to see the application’s buttons and commands in a different language [hint: don’t actually switch it!]?
How many of the test questions were you able to answer? You likely found some questions easier, more challenging, or even impossible to answer within three minutes, depending on how often you regularly use those features or ones similar to them.
All of the questions have something in common: they ask you to discover features that most people seldom use. Few of us delay sending our messages, limit our view to a specific date range, use keyboard shortcuts, or switch display languages – even though these and hundreds of other features are built into nearly every email application. Email systems are typically the most complex technology tools that we use on a regular basis in higher education.
Regardless of the email system that you use, there are far more features in it than you will ever use. Most of us use a core of only one or two dozen functions on an everyday basis. Your email tool is designed for a wide variety of needs (different languages, access methods, and levels of display complexity), user profiles (business, government, medicine, education), and access scenarios (the full application on a desktop computer with a mouse, web-app access via a mobile phone keypad and touch screen).
Our technology systems offer two competing benefits: the ability to do anything versus the ability to understand the entire system. In this course, you will learn how to set up institutional processes that balance these two benefits, so that we allow the greatest number of our learners, designers, instructors, and administrators to understand and use our tools and systems well, while preserving the largest number of features for special use cases.