Design of Mobile Interface for Vula Learning Management System

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Honours Project Report

Design of Mobile Interface for Vula

Learning Management System

Tatenda Shumba

Supervised by Professor Sonia Berman

Category Min Max Chosen

1 Requirements Analysis and Design 0 20 20

2 Theoretical Analysis 0 25 0

3 Experiment Design and Execution 0 20 17

4 System Development and Implementation 0 15 3

5 Results, Findings and Conclusion 10 20 10

6 Aim Formulation and Background Work 10 15 10

7 Quality of Report Writing and Presentation 10 10

8 Adherence to Project Proposal and Quality of Deliverables 10 10

9 Overall General Project Evaluation 0 10 0

Total Marks 80 80

Department of Computer Science

University of Cape Town

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Abstract

This report outlines the steps taken by the researcher in implementing a new mobile interface for access to the Institutional Learning Management System at the University of Cape Town named Vula. As the number of students with internet enabled mobile phones grows there is an increased interest to find meaningful ways to apply them to education. However, the mobile platform presents several challenges which call for careful application of new and traditional user interface design techniques.

Utilizing user-‐centered design approaches the researcher aims to produce an interface that provides useful and effective access to learning tools that students may want to access on mobiles. The design starts by gathering data using interviews and questionnaires to identify which learning tools students would want to interact with from a mobile phone. After the researcher has gained insight on what is to be designed he will use participatory design techniques and interaction design

techniques to involve students in the design process as co-‐designers. The aim is to work closely with users’ to produce an interface with high usability.

The interface produced was evaluated using usability tests that measured the users’ performance in terms of error rate when performing specially designed tasks the system was intended for. User satisfaction interviews were also used which gave data on the usability of the system. When the results were collected and analysed it was found that the interface was usable and useful but needed more work to be considered as a full system as it only included a minimum of tools. If similar design approaches could be used with the Vula SAKAI mobile access portal more students would use mobile phones to access learning resources.

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Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Sonia Berman for the guidance and support throughout the duration of the project. Mr Stephen Marquard for his helping us understand how Vula works. I would also like to thank my group members George, Sascha and Don. I am grateful to have worked with such a group of enthusiastic people who liked coffee too.

I would also like to thank Samsung for providing us with the test phones for developing and testing our project.

Thanks to my family who made all the sacrifices for me to be here and for the support that helped me stay here. Anda for being Anda and keeping the ship steady. Last and most importantly I would like to thank God for being there from before I can remember.

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1. Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Electronic resources and course material have come to play a central role in education. Universities the world over have started to provide course materials and academic support materials on the internet. However, most Universities in developing countries are unable to fully support access to these resources on their campuses[1]. The challenges in providing access can be attributed to the high bandwidth costs and difficulty in attaining space and funds to build expensive computer labs. For instance, at the University of Cape Town computer labs are at times unable to cope with the demand for students needing internet access. Mobile phones are increasingly able to carry media rich content, and allow greater interaction with educational material[2]. This increase in capability, coupled with the high global mobile adoption rate[1] presents an opportunity to solve the problem of limited internet access by using mobile phones to access educational resources. This project aims to develop a new mobile interface for the University of Cape Town’s Learning Management System (LMS) named Vula.

Learning Management System (LMS) is a broad term used for systems that organize and provide access to online learning materials to students, educators, organizations and administrators. These systems typically support access control, information sharing, communication tools, and

administration of user groups[3].

The interface we developed for this project presents a subset of the Vula functionality available on

the desktop but geared towards mobile access. This subset was chosen by investigating the way students at the University of Cape Town access or would envision accessing resources on mobile devices. The existing SAKAI mobile interface available is a ‘barebones implementation’ which ports desktop Vula functionality to a mobile device without giving significant consideration to the way people use mobile devices. It can be argued that the existing interface focuses on functionality as opposed to usability.

Studies have shown that users are no longer satisfied with systems that simply work but if long term adoption and frequent use is to be achieved systems need to have high usability and effectiveness in helping users to complete tasks of interest given their context of use[2]. This project will try and produce an interface that takes into account the users context and the peculiarities of mobile phones when accessing information. The design methodology will employ an iterative user centred design methodology in an attempt to create an interface that has high usability and allows users to act as co-‐designers.

1.2 Problem Definition

Vula is the name of the SAKAI[4] LMS currently used at the University of Cape Town(UCT). It is used to distribute course material and spread course information to students and staff and is integral in every course offered at the university.

To help increase the availability of the LMS to students a SAKAI mobile access portal allows students and staff to access Vula on mobile devices. This portal is a simple implementation which ports desktop functionality to the mobile device: only the very top level menu is customised for mobile, and as soon as a top-‐level tool is selected the conventional (desktop) interface is presented on all other devices. This approach however, raises issues of usability and effectiveness as due

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consideration of the limitations and peculiarities of mobile phones was not considered. Issues of usability, user context, and effectiveness need to be taken into consideration when migrating services to mobile devices to ensure adoption and use.

Interface designers recognize that to produce interfaces with good usability it is important to have an understanding of the ergonomics, organisational and social factors that determine how people operate[2]. Users want systems with well-‐designed interfaces and functionality, it is no longer sufficient that a system works but the presentation and function of the system must compel people to want to use it[5].

This project outlines steps taken by the designer in an attempt to produce a mobile interface for accessing the most effective subset of Vula tools on a mobile device. The design will follow

methodologies which have been shown to produce systems with high usability and that effectively help support users in performing tasks of interest.

1.3 Scope and Objectives

This project explores a new mobile interface for the Vula system at UCT to encourage students to access educational materials and LMS services more frequently from their mobile devices. The ubiquity of mobile phones and their mobility aspect could assist users to perform educational functions more easily and quickly from their mobile devices[6]. The benefits of increased mobile access would not only be limited to saving students time but would also help alleviate the crowding problem in computer labs by allowing users to access materials without needing to enter a computer lab.

However, there are features and limitations associated with mobile phones as compared to desktop computers that must be taken into consideration when designing systems for these devices. These features and limitations limit the number of activities users would want to engage in on the mobile phone and also constrain the kind of effective interactions that are possible on such devices. If interfaces to these systems are not well designed no one may want to use the services available to them on the platform.

The new interface we aim to develop will focus on the functions and features of Vula that users would most want to interact with on mobile devices and present them to the mobile user in a way that has high usability and encourages the user to access the system on a mobile more frequently. The interface will focus on the display of course related material only.

Vula is a system that is used extensively by both students and staff. The project seeks to extend the learning management system to incorporate camera functionality and a student feedback system. These two components were developed by other group members; the focus of this work is on determining the most useful Vula functionalities for mobile use and improving student interaction with those Vula tools on mobile devices. In addition, it had to accommodate the camera and feedback tools and ensure that a single integrated interface resulted.

1.4 Vula

Vula is the learning management system used at the University of Cape Town built on top of SAKAI. Vula is used to support UCT courses as well as group and society based activities. The system is intended to be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. The Vula system is flexible and has functions that help foster collaboration and creation of learning opportunities in a networked environment [7].

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Figure 1 below shows the Vula homepage available after a student logs into the system on a desktop machine. The courses associated with that particular account are displayed as tabs near the top of the window.

Figure 1: Vula Home Screen

The tools available for a course vary depending on what the course convenor expects students enrolled in the course to do. The possibilities include custom-‐built tools (e.g. the automated marker in Computer Science) and the standard Sakai tools. There are over 20 tools available some of which are shown in Figure 2, for a full list please see Appendix 1.

Figure 2: Sample Tools Available for a Vula site

1.5 Project Aims

The main objectives of the study are as follows.

i. To investigate how students at UCT would want to interact with Vula on mobile devices and which Vula tools would be the most effective to provide for student interaction on mobile devices

ii. To produce a mobile interface that facilitates access to Vula from a smartphone.

The first aim involves getting an understanding of which tools students interact with as part of their course experience. By conducting workshops and interviews information on the tools students’ would most likely want to use was on mobile devices was gathered. In this process we attempt to identify candidate tools and functionality to incorporate in our mobile interface.

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The second aim is to capitalise on the insight gained to produce an effective mobile interface. The effectiveness of this interface will be measured by how well it supports users in performing tasks desired tasks on mobiles. The usability of the system will be measured by how easily users’ can perform given tasks, measured in terms of time taken, number of errors and number of successfully completed steps.

1.6 Success Criteria

The project will be deemed successful if

i. Users’ performance at the given tasks improves when given the new interface compared with the existing Sakai mobile interface, in terms of speed and accuracy.

ii. Users react positively to the design of the interface and navigate the system successfully without training.

The interface we present does not represent a replacement for the current Vula site. It will only support a portion of the Vula functionality and can be viewed as ideally working in conjunction with existing Vula systems on desktop. The interface is meant to allow users to perform small and

frequent tasks quicker than using the SAKAI mobile portal. This can also extend to allowing the users to quickly check course status allowing them to make decisions on what kind of tasks they may need to pursue further in the full desktop environment.

The new mobile interface should be able to interact with and display data provided by the existing Vula LMS without any alterations being made to the existing Vula infrastructure. The

implementations of the screens supporting the selected tools should take advantage of mobile phone features where applicable and employ strategies and mechanisms to reduce the impact of mobile device inadequacies as compared to desktop computers when considering access to the Vula system.

As the interface is being designed for existing users who have already had some exposure to the Vula system on desktop or on mobile devices, the interface must have a clear pattern of navigation that is familiar to current users.

1.7 Project Importance

Over 98% of students at UCT own cell phones, of which 85% are smart phones[8]. As courses are moving towards ‘paperless’ administration more content is being moved to Vula. This puts a greater load on University computer labs as students’ access various course related information and

material from them. If mobile phones could be used more frequently to access some of this information then the load on the desktop resources on campus could be reduced. This would also allow students to perform some tasks faster. The project does not necessarily seek to change the way people learn but to give them a viable and quick alternative to logging on to a desktop machine to get course information.

Mobile devices have become more viable ways to access and create digital information. This viability warrants a further investigation into how usability can be increased on these previously specialised platforms. Traditional desktop computer user interface knowledge is not sufficient to design effective and usable interfaces for mobile devices[2].

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Desktop user interface design approaches must be adapted to the mobile context by addressing peculiar aspects of mobile interaction that distinguish it from interaction with the desktop and design constraints and issues that affect visual mobile user interfaces.

If UCT is to benefit from the ubiquity of mobile devices amongst students in terms of education the mobile interfaces that access University materials must have high usability to increase adoption and frequent use.

1.8 System Overview

Figure 3: VulaMobi System Overview

Figure 3 above shows an architectural diagram of the system we developed.

The interface that has been discussed in this document is part of a larger four member project aiming to extend the functionality of the Vula system using mobile devices. This report describes the task of providing a new interface for students to have access to chosen Vula functionality and tools with increased usability on mobile devices.

In addition to the chosen existing Vula tools and functionality the interface will also support two new tools that are being developed by fellow group members to take advantage of the opportunities mobile phones present in sharing multimedia and anytime access. These two additional tools were developed independently but presented to the users on one interface.

The interface and additional tools interact with Vula through an intermediary server which then forwards the request to the Vula system and returns appropriately formatted data to the mobile interface. This intermediary server was developed by the fourth member of our group.

1.9 Chapter Summary

In this chapter the project was introduced and its importance was discussed. The chapter highlights how mobile devices have become ubiquitous the world over and how their increase in functionality has made them viable means of accessing information.

The project aims to investigate how mobile phones can be used to support learning activities at the University of Cape Town when applied to access to its LMS named Vula. By designing and

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students will use their mobile phones more frequently to access Vula functions and tools where possible.

The next chapter looks at why mobile phones have become a viable technology platform in

supporting educational activities. It also looks at how care must be taken in designing interfaces for mobile devices as they have features, functions and limitations that differentiate how people use them from the desktop computer. The chapter will also look at other mobile LMS offerings in use in Educational Institutions around the world. The chapter will end of by a discussion on the current Vula mobile interface that is built on top of SAKAI.

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2. Chapter 2: Literature Review

2.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter the project was introduced and reasons for its importance were put forward. This chapter looks at related work that will help motivate some of the approaches followed in the design of the project solution. This chapter touches on mobile learning then gives a summary of why mobile phones are suited for mobile learning. The characteristics that differentiate mobile devices from desktops are discussed and examples of interfaces available for other LMS systems are presented. The chapter will end with a discussion of the current Vula SAKAI mobile interface.

2.2 Mobile learning

It is widely believed that innovative applications of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be employed to increase the quality of education by facilitating information sharing and

supporting administrative processes [9].Learning management systems (LMS) are one such innovation that has been developed to help achieve the goal of increasing quality of education. Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and cheaper[6] The popularity of mobile devices has made people eager to find a way to apply these portable and personal handhelds for educational

purposes[10].

Mobile learning is when mobile computing and electronic learning come together to present access to learning materials at any time and independent of location[11]. As mobile devices have become more powerful they can now be considered as low cost internet enabled computing devices able to support rich interactions with educational materials[10].The large mobile phone user base[6], and presence of an Institutional LMS give UCT an opportunity to increase student access to educational materials and reduce load on existing computer labs.

2.2 Allure of mobile technology to Learning

Initially most mobile technologies had a small set of functions – acting as a camera, phone, personal digital assistant, et cetera[12]. These functions have now been merged making mobile devices platforms for entertainment and commerce and tools for information management and media consumption.

According to Woodill [13], mobiles have the following affordances which make them attractive platforms for education: mobility, ubiquity, accessibility, connectivity, context sensitivity,

individuality and creativity. Even though mobile technologies were not designed as an educational device, Institutions continue to try to use them to support institutional learning[12].

There are various favourable characteristics of mobile devices that have motivated the research into the area of mobile learning. Some of these are shown in Table 1 shown below adapted from[6].

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Table 1: Favourable Characteristics of Mobile devices in M-learning

In spite of all the potential and advantages to users of mobile learning and the large number of projects available, mobile learning has not been largely adopted in the long term. An explanation for this has been put forward by Wagner[11], she says the following, “… complicated key controls and difficult-‐to-‐read screen presentations will be tolerated only under certain very limited conditions. The rest of us aren’t willing to risk having a bad experience. For broad and long-‐term adoption, the experience really does matter”.

To be able to take advantage of these favourable characteristics mobile learning applications need to be designed with high usability to compel stakeholders to use their mobile devices for learning purposes. Good usability means that learning can proceed without obstacles and might even be enhanced by the availability of certain features[14].

The current mobile portal for the Vula system was designed with the goal of making it functional on mobile devices with small screens. This adaptation has overlooked issues of usability which are of great importance to users and stakeholders. The concept of a mobile LMS is to extend the current functionality of the LMS and provide users with a system that allows them to access course information using a mobile device.

If the University of Cape Town is to reap the full benefit of mobile devices as a support for learning activities, the usability of the system must be increased and tools that take advantage of the characteristics[15] of the mobile devices must be added.

2.3 Mobile Learning Management Systems

There are many mobile learning management systems in use in Universities around the world. We will be focusing on those we found to be most widely used. We will discuss Moodle[16] Sakai[4], Blackboard[17], Desire2Learn[18], and eCollege[19].

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The discussion will be limited to visual user interfaces available to the user on mobiles and the aims or focuses of these interfaces in terms of the kind of tasks they are meant or support the user in performing successfully.

As these University implementations need student credentials to access the full functionality the researcher will only be able to report on features that are made publicly available by the Universities themselves or the particular LMS provider in question.

The goal is to get an insight into how other Universities around the world are using mobile devices to display and share educational material and to attempt to get a reference point on how we can proceed to design, develop and implement a new interface for mobile access to the Vula system here at UCT.

2.3.1 Moodle

Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-‐based courses and web sites. It is a global development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely under open source license. Since its creation in 2002 by Martin

Dougiamas, the Moodle community has grown to over 67000 users who can interact and collaborate on courses[16]

Moodle is an open source community based LMS there are a great number of attempts at making a mobile interface for the LMS.

In the section that follows I will present the implementations that seemed representative of the display styles or theme shared by all the others.

Moodle4iPhones Project

This application[20] is an open source community project to create a mobile interface for the Moodle system. The project is still underway and is still being community tested and adapted based on user feedback. The interface is shown below in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Moodle4Iphones two screens showing sample screens

Official iPhone Mobile app

This application is a project being run by Moodle HQ to produce a mobile application for the Moodle LMS. This project is still underway and has not yet been released and is still being tested. It still only

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supports the iOs platform. The interface is shown below in Figures 5 below. This interface used icons and inly shows a subset of all the tools based on what the provider has found to be more useful to the user in the mobile context.

Figure 5: Official Iphone Mobile app course display and gallery function screen

2.3.2 Blackboard

Blackboard is an enterprise company mainly dealing in the LMS field for both education and other applications. Since its creation in 1997 by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky, the number of organisations using the system has grown to over 9300 institutions in over 60 countries. The Figure 6 below shows the interface for blackboard.

Figure 6: Blackboard Mobile enrolled courses page and tool site for a particular course

2.3.3 Desire2Learn

Desire2learn is an enterprise company involved in e-‐learning dealing in the LMS field for education. Since its creation in 1999 by John Baker, the number of institutions using the system has grown to over 450[18]. The interface is shown in Figure 7 below.

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Figure 7: Desire2learn Event details page and course screen

2.3.4 eCollege

eCollege[19] is an on-‐demand, provider of eLearning software and to learning institutions. Founded in 1996, It is used in prominent Universities in the USA. Figure 8 show a sample of the interface.

Figure 8: eCollege Welcome page and Events page

2.3.5 SAKAI

In the early 2000s several major institutions in the USA most prominent amongst these being the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium chose to release their LMS under open source rather than commercial licenses. These were where gathered together to form the SAKAI Project[4]. There are now more than 350 organisations and Institutions worldwide using SAKAI to support teaching, learning research and collaboration.

Since its formation the SAKAI Project has been managed by the SAKAI foundation. The SAKAI foundation is in place to facilitate the success of the community and the software. This is done by coordinating software development, quality assurance and distribution activities for the community. Sakai’s goal is to develop and distribute a “complete course management system that incorporates the best features of the participants’ existing systems and experiences.”

Oxford Mobile

Oxford University[21] has released a new interface that works on top of the SAKAI platform. Their interface tries to bring all the tools that the user would want to use closer to the user. The

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represented by icons that give affordances to their function. Figure 9 contains pictures of the interface presented to users.

Figure 9: Oxford Mobile showing map functionality(left) and Home page

2.3.6 Mobile Learning Management System Summary

Various institutions have shown great interest in adapting their learning Management Systems to work better on mobile devices. The SAKAI community[4] that UCT is a part of is aware of the

importance of mobile devices in education. This awareness started the “Mobile SAKAI” Collaboration Project[4] which is actively working to expand upon current, limited mobile functionality and to develop frameworks usable by institutions to integrate Sakai into their own mobile initiatives.

All these recent developments show the importance of mobile support and in the case of the SAKAI based systems can act as points of reference in designing the UCT mobile Vula experience. Oxford mobile[21] which was launched recently is built on top of the SAKAI architecture and extends the functionality of the underlying LMS by adding support for more functions for example bus schedules, library searches webcams, et cetera.

This move by Oxford shows that the Vula mobile portal that comes packaged with SAKAI may not be able to fully utilize the power of available mobile technology and this may warrant an investigation into steps that can be taken to improve and extend the functionality of the Vula mobile interface available here at school.

The researcher did note that most mobile LMS adaptations made added support for cameras(upload function with iPhone Moodle app) and location based information (with Oxford mobile). The layout of the tools was either in lists or using icons or a combination of both. It was also noticed that most of the course related tools were a subset of the full system tools available. The researcher will aim to make use of these observations as a starting point when pursuing the design for this project.

2.4 Vula PDA Portal

Vula is UCT's online collaboration and learning environment, used to support UCT courses as well as other UCT-‐related groups and communities[22]. Vula is built on the SAKAI framework and is part of the SAKAI project.

Vula mobile access is made possible through the SAKAI mobile access portal which is part of the SAKAI framework. It was first incorporated into SAKAI at version 2.4. This PDA portal has since been

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improved but still works on the same premise of porting as much of the full desktop functionality as possible onto the mobile device.

In the next few sections we will explain how the SAKAI mobile access portal is structured. The goal is to attain an understanding of the limitations and constraints associated with mobile technology at the time when the first mobile access portal for the SAKAI service was first proposed. This may help explain why the interface presents information in the way it currently does.

2.4.1 Sakai Mobile Support

When the Sakai project began the Learning Management System produced from this collaboration was only accessible from desktop computers. As mobile devices became more prevalent an initiative was begun to start offering support for mobile devices. This initiative developed into what is now the SAKAI mobile access portal.

At the time of development mobile market was predominantly PDAs and PocketPCs that were limited in functionality and processing power. The challenges associated with displaying learning management systems on the mobile devices were as follows [23]:

Limited screen size: The 240x320 display presented a challenge for displaying static web elements without resizing. Users were then required to do a lot of scrolling to the view a page.

Limited functionality: Mobile devices did not support Cascading Style Sheets[24] and iFrame

tags[25], which are commonly used in LMS technology. If a tool was displayed using an iFrame tag, it could not be viewed on the mobile devices which also only had limited support for Javascript[26]. Interoperation between desktop web browsers and mobile browser: Web applications written for mobile devices were not fully functional on desktop machines and vice versa. The user needed to remember two different URLs to access two different versions of the web portal.

2.4.2 SAKAI Solution for Displaying Web Portal on PDA

This mobile Sakai access portal ports desktop functionality to the mobile device by flattening iframes and presenting only their titles in a list on mobile devices. Figure 10 below shows a sample course on Desktop (right) being mapped to the mobile portal (left). As soon as a user selects an option on the mobile version they are redirected to the same version of the option as would appear if accessed on the desktop Vula.

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Figure 10: Showing how Vula(right) is mapped to SAKAI mobile portal (left)

2.6 Chapter Summary

In this chapter we talked about the allure of the use of mobile devices to increase access to

educational materials. We also touched on how system usability plays a big role in whether or not a system is widely adopted.

Factors that differentiate desktop interface design from mobile interface design were investigated. Mobile learning applications currently in use around the world were discussed.

The chapter ended with a look at how the currently available mobile portal for SAKAI was developed and the limitations at the time that constrained the interface designers

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3. Design Methodology

3.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter we looked at factors that make mobile phones potentially good candidates for academic applications. We looked at how usability plays an important role in the adoption of electronic systems. An investigation into related work on mobile LMS was conducted and the chapter was concluded by a discussion on the construction of the first version of the SAKAI PDA portal.

This chapter introduces the design methodologies that will be used with the aim of producing a mobile interface with high usability. We will be using two user centered design approaches and will attempt to motivate why two approaches were chosen for this project.

The researcher would like to note that all work with users undertaken in this project was conducted with full signed consent forms and ethical clearance for the UCT Ethics committee.

3.2 User Centered Design

User centered design is a broad set of design processes that involve end-‐users directly in the design process of products to influence how the design takes shape[23]. Users can be involved to differing degrees depending on the design process chosen but the important aspect is that end-‐users are involved.

These processes place the user at the center of design. The designer then becomes a facilitator to the design process making sure that the user can make use of the product as intended and with minimum effort to learn how to use it[27]

This approach was chosen for this project as it has been found to lead to more effective, efficient and safer products and contributed to the acceptance and success

of products[28]. In the design of this project we will be using two User Centered Design approaches namely, participatory design and interaction design. These will be explained in the following section and the need for both approaches in this project will be substantiated.

3.3 Participatory Design

3.3.1 Introduction

Participatory design enables designers to learn user requirements and preferences early in the design process through a facilitated group design workshop. This methodology attempts to take advantage of the end-‐users collective generativity, when applied to design problems they may feel are associated with systems they use[28]. This approach is seen to provide more innovative solutions compared to relying solely on the designers creativity when solving design problems.

This design methodology when applied to this project, implies that students as the end-‐users of the interface should have a say in the decisions that affect the way it is used. This allows the researcher to get an insight on unmet needs by allowing users to create their own ideal interfaces. By analysing the interfaces designed by users the researcher aims to elicit the tacit needs of the users.

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Participatory design is used to design early prototypes which feed into overall project design. Participatory design workshops are most effective early in the design process when designs are less constrained by existing code or other infrastructure.

3.3.2 Participatory Design Workshops

In participatory design workshops, users who represent the stakeholders in a product collaborate to come up with conceptual designs that reflect user preferences and user requirements[28]. These users need to be domain experts, for this project we can view our domain experts as students who have used the mobile Vula interface at UCT. These conceptual designs are created using generative tools. Generative tools are common materials like coloured pens, sticky notes, scissors, tape, white boards and other common types of low-‐tech objects[29]. These tools are kept simple to encourage communication and creativity. No participant feels intimidated by unfamiliar technology and this allows technical and non-‐technical participants to contribute equally. The low-‐tech objects also allow user designs to be created and edited quickly and easily.

The workshops are conducted by a facilitator who in this project will be the researcher. The goal of the facilitator is to stimulate discussion and support dialogue around a list of topics whilst also accommodating discussion of impromptu related topics. Participants are asked to brainstorm ideas individually or in small groups then present these ideas to the whole group. These ideas are discussed, evaluated and possibly refined by the larger group. The researcher moderates design presentations and asks follow-‐up questions and notes key points raised and user reactions to designs put forward.

The workshop produces one or more paper prototypes of a user interfaces and textual descriptions of interface elements and their behaviour. These may reveal new thoughts about application requirements or put forward unique solutions to design problems the users have been exposed to. Photographs of key stages in design can also be kept.

3.3.3 Why Participatory Design

As discussed in the previous chapter Vula already has a mobile access system set in place. The researcher felt that any exploration into the design of a new interface would need to learn from the experiences users had already encountered with the existing system.

This made participatory design an important choice as a starting point in the design as we would be able to evaluate how well the existing interface supported user desired tasks in a group setting. This evaluation of the existing interface will be done using conceptual model extraction. Conceptual model extraction works by showing users static images of a system and asking them how they would use screen elements to complete particular tasks[28]. This shows how well the current system performs and where design problems still hinder the usability with users. This may help reveal more user requirements which would not be apparent.

The collaborative nature of this approach also provides the researcher with an opportunity to get information on context of use by allowing users to cooperatively design user-‐stories[28] for how they interact with their mobiles when trying to perform tasks of interest. This is desirable as it can give the researcher an approximation of the users’ context and design requirements without running ethnographic studies[29] which can be long and costly.

Participatory design has been found to produce innovative solutions to design problems[28]. The use of participatory design can give the researcher a reasonable first approximation of what the users’

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needs and preferences may be when interacting with a system geared towards helping them perform specific tasks.

3.4 Interaction Design

3.4.1 Introduction

Interaction design according to Preece[28], “focuses on how to identify users’ needs and the context of their activities, and from this understanding move to designing usable, useful, and pleasurable interactive products”. Interaction seeks to address the question of how to optimize the users’ interactions with a product so that they match the users’ activities that they would want supported[28].

Interaction design focuses on making design decisions that help the system meet the users’ requirements and preferences on how certain tasks should be accomplished. This approach can be directed at aesthetic aspects of the system (is it pleasant to look at) or usability criteria like how efficiently it allows users’ to perform certain tasks of interest.

3.4.2 The Approach to Interaction design

In this project we chose to use iterative interaction design using feedback from users to make incremental improvements in the system. Users’ are involved throughout the design process to ensure that the interface meets their requirements and meets their expectations when performing desired tasks.

Effective interaction design can be separated into three activities[29].

1. Understanding users (requirements gathering) : having a sense of users’ capabilities, limitations, and how they interact with systems in different contexts

2. Developing prototype designs (interactive prototypes): presenting an interaction design in such a way that it can be discussed, demonstrated and changed

3. Evaluation (iterative evaluation of interactive prototypes): assess the strengths and weaknesses of designs with the results driving improvement or total redesign if necessary. The iterative nature of our approach makes the three activities shown above complement each other. This allows interface designs to adapt along with the researcher’s understanding of users, user experiences with prototypes and system strengths and weaknesses after evaluation. This means that outputs of one activity drive the next activity in a cycle until the final design is achieved.

Design of Mobile Interface for Vula Learning Management System

Honours Project Report