For Educators: Attending to Design = New Media Readability

A few years ago, I was supposed to disregard Internet use as reading time and emphasize literature based reading with my students.  Then recently, even IMing became a rhetorical act and someone said that surfing the net counts as reading.  This little chart tells me that no one really likes to read online.  What's an English teacher to believe?

In any case, I learned a few things about how design can enhance readability and therefore usability.  Let's take my alternative school's website as an example--and put it next to Northwest Passage High School, also an ALC.





 

• Our HAP/OCP site is a solid wall of text that the blue bullets can't even mitigate.
  

• The only navigation buttons will take visitors back the the main high school site.
  

• The only graphic is the HHS school crest.  Go Royals.
  

• The NPHS site has an engaging but not overwhelming slide show as an introduction to the site.

• The navigation buttons are displayed within an appealing template and will take visitors to information about the program itself.

• At least one of the buttons has a drop down menu, suggesting that there is some logical hierarchy to the organization of the page.

• There is a "Lastest School News" feature that feels relevant and timely.

• The page subtitle includes a welcome.

A few years ago, I enlisted an interested student from the main high school building to come over and study OCP, then create a website for us.  Unfortunately, she was a walking case of senioritis just looking for a magic pass out of the high school parking lot a couple of times a week. The page she designed looked a lot like the one we have now, but at least it included some photos of students (and one rather uninspired piece of student art).  I think the problem with that doomed project was two-fold: 1) I asked an outsider to create a portrait of a community that she didn't care about, and 2)  The insiders I asked to help her had a lot of web experience but no internal motivation.  Without a structured web design curriculum, they floundered and gave up.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out that most teens really aren't as web savvy as we think they are.  They'll struggle with complicated graphics, obscure links, and dense text as much as the next adult user.  In a study of teen web use, Nielsen found  "Teens' poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level." (Somewhere in my reading this week, I learned that our wait time on the web averages about 10 seconds.)

So if I were to do the OCP web design project over again, how I would I teach it differently?

1. Embed more web reading in my everyday curriculum.
2. Use other platforms, like Power Point, to teach design principles.
3. Embed small hypertext writing assignments to introduce linking.
4. Create a webquest based completely on researching / observing design, particularly on websites for other alternative programs.
5. Continue to encourage modal revisions--make a poem into a painting/powerpoint/iMovie/persuasive argument/song/comic, etc., for example.
6. Practice differentiating between facts and ideas, how to distill ideas to key words and images.

Most importantly, I would recruit students to generate criteria for effective web design. Really, although there are hundreds if not thousands of creative minds around the world working on the same task, we don't quite have a standard yet. Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton explain in their Web Style Guide that

The "interface standards" of books in the English-speaking world are well established and widely agreed-upon, and detailed instructions for creating books may be found in such guides as The Chicago Manual of Style. Every feature of the book, from the contents page to the index, has evolved over the centuries, and readers of early books faced some of the same organizational problems that users of hypermedia documents confront today. Gutenberg's Bible of 1456 is often cited as the first modern book, yet even after the explosive growth of publishing that followed Gutenberg's invention of printing with movable type, more than a century passed before page numbering, indexes, tables of contents, and even title pages became expected and necessary features of books. Web documents are undergoing a similar evolution and standardization.

This Week's Conclusions

I've always been jealous of my husband, the ninth grade geometry teacher.  He gets to use manipulatives in his classroom all the time.  As an English teacher, I only get to pretend manipulation--legos are parts of speech, magents are vocabulary words, tables are paragraphs.  But here is web design offering a real chance at hands on manipulation of information and ideas.  I've tried to encourage my student essay writers to see themselves as designers, but most couldn't really visualize their ideas.  They were just blocks of words making up sentences which chunked haphazardly into paragraphs.  But with web design, I can ask them to literally visualize their ideas, chunk information, and distill ideas and arrange them in a physical, albeit cyber space.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola says in "The Essay and the Database" that "Authors are more like designers or deconstructivist information architects" (Writing New Media 222).  In one of my first blog entries this semester, I was uncomfortable with that notion.  I felt threatened, I thought by subversion and supplanting of traditional academic prose.  Really, I was threatened by what I didn't understand.  I'm still certainly no expert, but I've gained some knowledge of visual literacy and web design.  Here are some of my resources (from our Digital Writing course wiki):

Active learning with PowerPoint. (2006).

http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/powerpoint/

Lengel, J. (2006). Power pointless. Teaching with technology.

http://www.powertolearn.com/articles/teaching_with_technology/article.shtml?ID=25

Lynch, P., & Horton, S. (2002). Web style guide (2nd ed.).

http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html

Nielsen, J. (2005). Usability of websites for teenagers. 

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050131.html