After reading Shneiderman’s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design”, I was immediately reminded of the shortcomings of my online Spanish course. Half of the class I am enrolled in this quarter exists online, with online tutorials and lectures, homework assignments, and study guides. However, I constantly find myself frustrated with the layout of the website, as the location of certain things within the site is not the most intuitive. I have to waste so much time just trying to find certain parts of the website in order to complete my work, when it could be much more streamlined and time efficient. I have decided to compare Shneiderman’s rules to my Spanish course website and see if its shortcomings can be attributed to the breakage of them. The following rules are broken:
(One can only see the website if you are enrolled in the class, so I have provided a screenshot of the page a student spends most of their time on [but ironically is NOT the homepage] to hopefully better understand what I am talking about.)
1 – The website is not consistent with the way it words it’s items. For example, I can reach certain tutorials under the “Tutorials” tab on the bar, but not all tutorials are listed there. To view others, you have to go under “Course Materials” and then try and remember what specific chapter your question falls under, then look under that file in order to find the rest of them. This splitting of all tutorials makes it very difficult when searching for help on something specific.
2 – There is no opportunity for the user to create shortcuts to best suit his need. He has to go through a few pages in order to reach the homework section each time, and from there click on the specific activity each time to complete it. There is also no bookmark feature to save helpful tutorials to review again. You have to go through the painstaking process of searching for it (described above) every time you need it.
3/4 –When completing a homework series, one completes different activities that are independent of each other. Only when every activity is complete is the assignment complete. However, nothing notifies you when you have completed the assignment, so you must constantly go back and check that you did not miss any activity. Also, the activities are designed to be in sequence with each other by building off the tutorials and increasing in difficulty. However, it is up to the individual teacher to assign the sequence of activities, and many times it is inconsistent with how the activities were designed. As a result, the topics of the activities jump around and there is no set beginning, middle, and end.
5/6 – There is a big possibility to make serious error as a user, such as exiting out of an activity before you are done. There is no opportunity to reverse this action once its complete, and therefore you are unfortunately stuck having to do the entire activity again.
Since I am so familiar with the downsides of having a poorly-designed interface, hopefully I can help my group avoid these errors when we design our own!