Usability Testing | Kimberly Purvis

Usability Testing & Instructional Design Compilation

The course that I have built for my Innovation Plan focuses on the understanding and benefits of ePortfolios for adult educators in the online environment. In the course, learners navigate the key principles of COVA+CSLE and explore digital technology for ePortfolio creation. By the end of the course, learners should feel confident in their understanding of creating significant learning environments that incorporate choice, ownership, voice, and authentic learning. Learners should be knowledgeable on how to successfully apply the learned concepts with their students, in real-life situations, and in creating their professional ePortfolios (Purvis, 2022).

Lamar's ADL course 5318 guides the learner through the key components of effective instructional design. In this course, I completed three unique assignments to build the course that I will use alongside my innovation plan. Please follow the links to find both previous assignments (Instructional and Implementation Design) that lead to this Usability assignment. I encourage you to visit both assignments before continuing. After reviewing the previous assignments, please watch the video included here. This usability video provides a walkthrough of the usability test performed and shows the changes made to improve the course after reviewing the results.

To enroll and view the course:

https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/RX4DPF

If you check out the course, and would like to leave feedforward, I invite you to use the Usability Survey on this page to leave your thoughts. All feedforward is appreciated and will be used for the betterment of the course.

Before usability testing, the discussion board responses from this ADL class helped me to perfect my course. I received feedforward from classmates that suggested reducing my original plan for the course to last for months, to no more than 90days. I decided to make the course eight weeks and felt that would better fit the needs of adult learners than a longer time period. In addition to reducing the overall time schedule, it was suggested that I add a learner/mentor lounge area for learners to post general questions, chat with each other, and have a hangout board. I appreciated this suggestion as it was in my original plan and was forgotten when I was designing the course. I learned that sharing with others and being open to constructive criticism is valuable and necessary at multiple points throughout the process of design, implementation, and usability testing.

The survey and responses are included here for your review. Due to the regulation changes with our organization, I was not able to have current stakeholders participate in the usability testing. I did reach out to an online educator and an educator mentor/trainer from the organization to participate in testing of the course. Neither were able to screenrecord and share the recording, so I set up a Google form and did a follow-up phone call to discuss specifics. In the future, I can improve this by giving more time for participants to schedule and prepare for recording. I could also provide links for technology to use for screen recording or join them online to screen record from my own computer. I do believe that being in the testing room and watching as the course is being used will offer more insight into the design and how it can be improved for users. These are areas that have all been noted and will be applied for the next usability test.

The results I received aligned with feedforward received from assignment submissions in this ADL class which led me to believe these changes were needed. One recommended change was adding a "Start Here" button on the home page to make it clear where to begin in the course. The second major change was reducing the files included in the file folder so learners would have access only to the files needed for participation in the course. This feedforward opened my eyes to the importance of usability testing. Had this comment not been made, I would have missed the fact that all graphics I added to my course were being added to the same folder. Learners would have to search through all graphics to find the schedules to print. I understood at that point that it was important to do usability testing multiple times during design to ensure all areas of the course were streamlined and appropriate for learners.

Before

After

After

Usability testing was shown to be a worthwhile procedure for building a quality course for educators in the organization. It allowed me to see areas that were not in line with the type of learning course I want to implement. Having another set (or multiple sets) of eyes go through the design as learners gave insight into areas that may be misunderstood or not flow as well as they could. In the future, I would like to have at least a few participants for each test and test multiple times during design. I found it a key component to effective course design and look forward to using this new-found knowledge throughout all innovation plans and course designs I attempt in the future.

References

Purvis, K. (2022). 5318 Syllabus. Google Docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUyizZUVlixu00ycW5lRF_SuCHZDZt7HWoDzjf31Csw/edit