Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

11.4. Interface Design

The critical factor in making technology transparent is the design of the interface between the user and the machine. Thus an educational program or indeed any Web site should be well structured, intuitive for the user to use, and easy to navigate.

Interface design is a highly skilled profession, and is based on a combination of scientific research into how humans learn, an understanding of how operating software works, and good training in graphic design. This is one reason why it is often wise to use software or tools that have been well established in education, because these have been tested and been found to work well.

The traditional generic interface of computers – a keyboard, mouse, and graphic user interface of windows and pull-down menus and pop-up instructions – is still extremely crude, and not isomorphic with most people’s preferences for processing information. It places a very heavy emphasis on literacy skills and a preference for visual learning. This can cause major difficulties for students with certain disabilities, such as dyslexia or poor eyesight. However, in recent years, interfaces have started to become more user friendly, with touch screen and voice-activated interfaces.

Nevertheless, a great deal of effort often has to go into the adaptation of existing computer or mobile interfaces to make them easy to use in an educational context. The Web is just as much a prisoner of the general computer interface as any other software environment, and the educational potential of any Web site is also restricted by its algorithmic or tree-like structure. For instance, it does not always suit the inherent structure of some subject areas or the preferred way of learning of some students.

There are several consequences of these interface limitations for teachers and instructors:

• It is really important to choose teaching software or other technologies that are intuitively easy to use, both by the students in particular, but also for the teacher/instructor in creating materials and interacting with students.
• When creating materials for teaching, the teacher needs to be aware of the issues concerning navigation of the materials and screen layout and graphics. While it is possible to add stimulating features such as audio and animated graphics, this comes at the cost of bandwidth. Such features should be added only where they serve a useful educational function, as slow delivery of materials is extremely frustrating for learners, who will normally have slower internet access that the teacher creating the materials. Furthermore, web-based layout on desktop or laptop computers do not automatically transfer to the same dimensions or configurations on mobile devices and mobile devices have a wide range of standards, depending on the device. Given that the design of web-based materials requires a high level of specialized interface design skill, it is preferable to seek specialist help, especially if you want to use software or media that are not standard institutionally supported tools. This is particularly important when thinking of using new mobile apps, for instance.
• Third, we can expect in the next few years some significant changes in the general computer interface with the development of speech recognition technology, adaptive responses based on artificial intelligence, and the use of haptics (e.g. Hand-movement) to control devices. Changes in basic computer interface design could have as profound an impact on the use of technology in teaching as the internet has.