aesthetics

Aesthetics, AV and User Experiences

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been reading a fair bit about UX (User Experience) and it’s role in website design, and by proxy, online learning spaces. I’ve been thinking about how aesthetics have been important in this relationship and recently I’ve come to re-think my definition of aesthetics. Previously, aesthetics online only meant the visual: the look and feel of the website in question. Now, I’m thinking that motion and sound will become increasingly more important as we move from a static web to the motion web. YouTube is great for allowing people to share videos, but really, the skin that they wrap their videos in is horrible. Ugly. Vimeo, on the other hand has a much better looking (and in my opinion designed) interface.

Does that mean that design is an indicator of popularity? No, but eventually either YouTube will allow you to change the default skin (and they already allow some minimal customization) as a feature for it’s users or a competitor who allows more customization will begin to eat away at the dominance. If only YouTube allowed an easy migration path to switch between hosts? The real killer for YouTube is when it can no longer support the bandwidth required and people have videos interrupted or become basically unplayable. At that point, if it comes, people will switch to the better looking alternative.

To the same end, audio will need to be presented in a good looking player. Not only that, but it needs to be clear and audible. A lot of the problems I’ve encountered with poor audio have been with two aspects, the first is in the production of the audio (generally characterized by a flat AM radio sound) and the second being choppy intermittent transmission. Both do things that disrupt the user, by either being a distraction or an interruption to the processing of the core information. Ugly interfaces are often accepted as long as it works. When it doesn’t work… well things get bypassed entirely.

3 Comments

What I Learned This Week (Part 5)

Posted on by Jon K.

Finally, one of my major pet peeves with Google has been answered. Matt Cutts announced late in October that Google Docs now lets you do a bulk export. I’ve played with Docs a lot, but never considered it a real threat to Word in my workflow as I couldn’t get all of my crap off of the one system in one shot. Now I can. Thank you Google for doing the right thing.

Was listening to Martin Weller’s presentation for CCK09 about the Pedagogy of Abundance, and while Martin’s presentation content was great, the sound was difficult. It wasn’t the quality of sound per se, although it was a bit rough around the edges. I don’t know if it’s just me, or a combination of my background as a sound engineer and sensitive listener, or if it was just my mood, but the sound was off.

It got me thinking about the aesthetics of sound, and how sounds might be pleasurable or distracting, and how that works in a networked learning environment. Clearly, the aesthetics of the new media environments extend further than the visual realm and will have to be considered when developing e-learning courses and environments. With the ubiquity of good sound devices, we still will have to have quiet spaces from which to broadcast, or record.

I also found out about Sherlock, the Codec Detective. I’m not sure how Apple feels about the possible name confusion (although I’m not sure that Apple’s search is called Sherlock anymore either), but this is a great little utility that helps one figure out if they have a video codec installed or not. As everything moves towards Flash video, this sort of tool may not be needed in the future, but in the meantime it’s incredibly useful for me, as I switch between several different machines throughout the day and may need to edit video on any of them.

Visualization of data is a huge trend, and in my opinion only going to get bigger as text literacy declines in favour of visual literacy. I’m not saying text literacy will disappear; just that visual literacy becomes more important in the future. Flowing Data posted an interesting contest, to see if a correlation can be drawn between SAT scores and class size. The contest isn’t about the correlation per se, but it’s about the visualization and what comes of it.

No comments yet

What I Learned This Week (Part 4)

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been working on adapting a AODA module for Desire2Learn, changing some minor things, tweaking the navigation and other minor bits. It’s intended to illuminate some of the issues people with disabilities face in daily life at an educational institution. It’s well designed (educationally speaking) but some of the sites I’ve been to in looking at accessibility have been, well, aesthetically challenged. As we all know, content is king, but I have to say, the way things are presented on some of these sites could use some sprucing up to bring it in line with modern web design that is accessible. Certainly CSS could be leveraged to provide different looks depending on what browser/screen reader was being used?

Along a similar line, this article sheds some light on the issue of teacher’s blowing out their voices – one of their main tools in the classroom. Certainly we have seen repetitive stress injuries for athletes and office workers – are we just maybe working too hard? E-learning can assist with this, of course, by recording things that might be said four or five times a week – streamlining teachers to actually get in the trenches and actually work with students to assist in their learning. The end of the article had an interesting thought, “you can’t teach French without speaking.” I think you certainly can – using a blend of native speakers on YouTube or a more community based site like Language Exchange.

Finally, from Reuters, technology doesn’t isolate people. The study doesn’t really reveal much, other than people who are active socially offline are also active in publishing and creating content online. I’ve always believed that technology doesn’t change who we are, but it does change who we communicate with. In many ways, this study and article backs that idea up.

No comments yet

Aesthetics and Community

Posted on by Jon K.

So to continue this train of thought, I was watching this digital rough cut of an interview with Howard Rheingold. In it Howard makes a few statements about digital communities, groups and nation-states that appeal to me. Particularly this statement:

In fact when I first started travelling about this was erm during a brief period when I worked for Wired Magazine, I had a little wired hat on.  It didn’t matter whether they spoke English or not, there were people who identified more with me than with they’re neighbours, with they’re parents, with they’re peers, erm even though we may not have even spoken the same language, they knew UNIX, they knew Photo Shop, they knew communicating on line.

That resonated with me for a bit. Earlier Howard mentioned his sense of dress as well, and how it can be offputting for some people. Now I don’t want this to come off as a love letter for Howard, I would think that his dress is what made me interested in him. He was confident in himself enough to put himself out there, and that confidence and uniqueness speaks to me as a person. In the same way that Howard’s way of dressing (through his Wired hat or colorful jackets) made an impression on people and acted as an attractor or repellent, the aesthetics of online spaces will do the same thing. So is it important that online spaces be as aesthetically neutral as possible?

No. There is no neutral. Think about color for a moment. White background color has a different context depending on culture – your actions will be unable to alter those cultural reaction. So you have to rely on your own aesthetic choices and make sure they reflect you as much as possible. I think the individual need to express this is what will begin to differentiate institutions from one another. We’re already seeing this in higher education where certain lecturers are the “top free agents”. I’m sure sometime in the future, as online learning becomes more prevalent, we will begin to see the better learning designers, and by that I mean aesthetically and pedagogically, become more important.

Howard makes some mention of what makes a community later on, and in my interpretation it comes down to a like-minded group – some sort of connection occurs between all the parties. It could be worldview, it could be musical tastes. In web design, we recognized that a certain consumer expects a certain level of design. For instance, an opera house website would be rejected if it wasn’t sufficiently “high class”. You wouldn’t see a graffiti font on the opera house website. These groups have an aesthetic identifier as well, it’s an external clue, part of that first impression decision making process.

So thank you Howard for helping me make the connections from this video!

1 Comment

Cooped In With Audio Tracks

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been playing with the Aviary Online Garage Band style web application called Audio Editor and have been cranking out some neat quick atmospheric items. While it takes a bit of fiddling to get good results, if you’re looking to craft a fifteen second introduction theme, like the one on Howard Rheingold’s videos, then this is a free way to do it. If you spend $25 to $50 on a sample kit you could put together a pretty decent intros and outros for videos or interludes.

It’s fairly intuitive, drag a track to the timeline then add another couple. Add effects, twiddle virtual knobs, and away you go.

Another similar project, although definitely slanted towards electronic music, is hobnox. In some ways hobnox seems more organic, plug the tone bank or 808 clone into a few pedals and dump it into the mixer, then the amp.

So you can add a little pizazz to your videos, which if the content is good, you’ll be able to make them closer to a professional production.

No comments yet

Aesthetics and Self Defined Identity

Posted on by Jon K.

I wonder if there’s a benefit to allowing the end user, the learner  in educators cases, control of how online spaces function and look. How we design places, how we as educators/teachers/instructors design places is a egotistical idea, imposing a will of how things will be viewed and the order of viewing, that’s unlike anywhere else on the web. I can choose to go to Google in the middle of writing this article, no one says I have to finish writing this blog post before I can move on to looking at LOLcats. In the same sense why are we ordering students to complete tasks in an order that may not work for them? Maybe someone wants to engage in discussion before attempting the readings…

Similarly, who’s to say that my idea of what pleasant aesthetics are? Certainly they might appeal to a European or North American aesthetic set, but maybe my use of white, black and greys are not appealing to an African or Asian aesthetic? Wouldn’t it be nice to have educators select a default stylesheet, for those students who don’t have a preference, and allow the end user to choose how their localized content looks. I mean that was the hope with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XML, where CSS would describe to the browser how it would look and XML would describe the data being transmitted. Instead of creating courses with content, generate a mass of XML that would be styled by the learner. Then you of course avoid all those nasty problems with mobile platforms, e-readers, etc.

Learner. A word that exemplifies the role, but seems so clumsy… I’ll have to look for a better one – don’t know if one exists though. Neither here nor there…

In this situation where the end user/learner styles the content, what happens to the identity of the instructor? Part of the deal with aesthetic judgments one makes about e-learning spaces is that it informs the student about the instructor. What happens to this implicit “understanding” (or misunderstanding)? The way we organize a page informs the reader of the page about the designer. Traditionalist? Times New Roman font, twelve point, one inch margins… Amateur? Comic Sans, larger, clip art that isn’t really relevant… Modern? Helvetica, ten point, maybe two columns, with images? Is it important to have this information as a learner at a distance? Is anyone thinking about this stuff?

No comments yet

Aesthetic Attention

Posted on by Jon K.

Ran across an article about aesthetics from Carleton University called Aesthetics, visual appeal, usability, and user satisfaction: What do the user’s eyes tell the user’s brain? which had confirmed my previous assertions that you have 3 seconds to make an impression with a website – in fact, according to the article, you have 50 milliseconds. It also confirmed my idea that if your first impression is bad, then you’re fighting an uphill struggle to merely regain your credibility. This is a doubly bad situation for an e-learning space, where you have to not only fight to maintain attention, but also external preconceived notions of e-learning from other professors or teachers work online can have an effect on your credibility as an instructor. That credibility can be a class killer, especially at the College level in Canada. Colleges were built on trades, and being an instructor at College requires some real-world experience in the field that you’re instructing in. Any knock on your credibility can be overcome with good teaching technique, or personality but you have to fight for attention. When you are interacting with a screen though, as your sole “interaction” with a teacher, that initial impact is crucial to retaining attention. Positive first impressions will also allow users to forgive minor usability errors, although I didn’t see a definition of what minor was.

The article also goes on to say that users prefer things that they’ve seen before – which seems like an obvious statement – and also contributes to explaining why we see so many two and three column layouts on the web – familiarity. Three columns mimic the newspaper, which is familiar to most members of the 20th century (although, may not be to the members of the 21st century). Never mind that columns organize information into groups which allows users to better scan and assimilate information, but order on a page is aesthetically pleasing. Disorder is disorienting. So a logical ordering of information will help with your credibility long after the initial impression has occurred. Does it follow that a positive first impression and an orderly page improve your credibility? Or is there a finite amount?

No comments yet

Attention and Aesthetics

Posted on by Jon K.

Aesthetics are one of the tools that advertisers can use to distract, deflect criticism or deceive. In websites, each viewer has a minimum standard for aesthetics that must be met or else they will go elsewhere. The content is irrelevant  in this initial snap judgement of the worth of the site despite how well thought out, how good or how useful it is. Aesthetics are assessed almost instantaneously in an intellectual and instinctual way. By getting people to start paying attention to aesthetics, we can increase the intellectual assessment of aesthetics.

EDIT: In a fit of irony, I’m being distracted too much to do this subject justice.

EDIT: OK, now at a different venue, I can continue.

Paying attention to aesthetics is important for instructors because while good, tasteful learning spaces can assist learners in making good choices in what to pay attention to, ugly spaces make it difficult for learners to learn. Students already have a myriad of barriers in front of them, why add more?

Sure, I suppose I’m advocating that teachers invest time in “selling” their content – but that’s what we’re doing (poorly) already. And the model we’ve all been working under is not working for the intended audience. They aren’t buying what we’re selling – or if they are, they are doing so because they feel they have no other choice. With more choice introduced to the educational model, for-profit education that guarantees jobs, does it at an accelerated pace, and provides external accreditation with industry standards (such as many for-profit College’s computer programming programs in Ontario).  We can’t wait for change to effect us, we need to flip the model and effect change.

Subpar and mediocre learning spaces need to be dealt with. Even if you have no technical skills, you should be able to style a page by choosing fonts, colors and sizes from a menu. All LMS’s have HTML editors built-in. Use them at a minimum.

If you have no “eye” for design, start to develop one. Pay attention to sites that appeal to you – and start thinking about them critically. Find out what works for you and repeat it in your own work. We ask students to do this – why not apply these rules to yourself as well?

No comments yet

Aesthetics as Part of Usability

Posted on by Jon K.

So the recent past has me thinking about the aesthetics of e-learning spaces, and while that may seem like a non-issue for many people, I believe it will be incredibly important as educators move forward. We rely on aesthetics to assist us in a quick reliability check. We all do this in real life when we meet a person, as they say first impressions are important. Well, this is no different in e-learning or in a face to face class.

Certainly Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle and other modern LMS’s allow a creator to exert some control over how content looks. You are somewhat functionally trapped into a frame where content is held with some of these systems, but in many cases those are constraints that you can work with (against?). As an educator you might also have other issues restricting the look of your content; headers are a certain color, color schemes might be imposed by your institution, usability experts tell you what icon to use for a link or even font size might be restricted.

As an educator you have a dual purpose as well, you need to make your content accessible as well. So that means you should consider things like contrast of color, whether your font size is large enough for the visually impaired and whether your images have alt tags to ensure a screen reader can convey the description properly to a user. In fact, your institution might be under law to make your content accessible.

Frames in and of themselves pose problems for stringent accessibility rules, so your LMS might already be screwing you. It’s quite possible it’s screwing you anyways… never mind that ugly thought…

It’s not particularly difficult to make a website accessible. It can be tricky to make it aesthetically pleasing and usable. Seeing as I’ve brought up visually impaired users, I would be very very remiss to not mention this other blog article about 10 Tools for Evaluating Web Site Accessibility especially for color blind users. While these are for websites, you can use most of these tools within LMS’s as well. The Firefox extention (#1 in the linked article) is excellent, and has identified a couple areas that I need to be aware of in my own work. Of course, this doesn’t really speak about aesthetics. Well not explicitly anyways.

Aesthetics are pleasing the eye – which can be difficult to hit the centre of the target everytime as we all view things differently. I often get asked, how can I make something look good? Practice is my default answer, but when pressed I will concede that you can’t go wrong with the classic black, white and grey. Add an accent color of (one of) red, blue or green and your e-learning space will look professional. If you have a predetermined header, or logo, grab one of the colors as an accent from that. Simplicity is key. It’s when people start to get fancy that sometimes people run into trouble.

3 Comments

Aesthetics Continued

Posted on by Jon K.

To continue the previous entry – another pushback might be that instructors would feel that improving the look of a space might be considered manipulation of the student, as if marketing the educational piece is the same as selling someone a Flowbee. Making things look good is not the same as manipulating the end user. A simple three column screen layout or a well designed Power Point (oxymoron alert?) does not mean that you are trying to  manipulate learners. One could cynically argue that’s what teachers do now, by selecting what students read, how they will be graded and what activities they will engage in.

Aesthetics doesn’t always extend to just the look of a document or page. It’s also about how the design interacts with the content. If the content is playful, it should be reflected in the aesthetics related to the content. The design and the content will inform the student about the instructor – providing a clue as to who an instructor is. If these ideas about aesthetics are not addressed in the materials, that too informs the student.

Also, to tie into the last post, the great Presentation Zen has 10 tips on how to think like a designer. It’s a very broad overview to help non-designers begin to think about design. Of course, this is from Garr’s perspective, and has a very zen approach to design (specifically points 2,3 and 5). I certainly appreciate Garr’s approach to most things so it resonates with me, your mileage may vary.

No comments yet