 start the recording now. So without further ado, it's over to you Dominic. Thank you very much. So if you just all bear with me while I share my screen, I've posted in the chat. If you could just let me know, what brings you here? What are you hoping to gather this session? I'll keep an eye on the chat while I'm doing the sharing thing. And also, just going to know what it is that you're expecting. So also, if you'd like to tweet at me, feel free to do it with ad tech check at any time. But of course, you can also comment in the chat. Unfortunately, because of the way my screen is set up, I won't be able to keep an eye on the chat while I'm presenting. But I'll certainly sort of come back for the Q&A session. If there's anything urgent, I think Martin's here as well. So do jump in and let me know that I need to pay attention to something along those lines. However, the moment I am looking at the chat, so do let me know in the chat, what is it that you're hoping to get out of the session? What brings you here? So I saw somebody was attracted by the useful approaches part. Well, I hope it will be useful approaches. I forgot I promised useful. Oh gosh, that's too much pressure. This was intended to be a workshop, an hour-long workshop. And as these things change, it just got made into just a presentation. So some of the very, very useful things, I probably won't have time to do stuff hands-on. But hopefully, there will be interesting stuff there as well. And I like the question about being able to design more purposefully, because that's actually something I want to think about. So that's where we are. So thank you for letting me know. So what is it that I'm hoping to get out of this? Why are we even thinking about what's called the user experience or UX? And I think there are really many lessons out there if you look at the literature. And I've been going down this rabbit hole recently about how is it that users interact with interfaces in different environments? And what this actually means for a lot more, a whole lot of interactions that you go beyond just a simple clicking on buttons and things like that, the whole learning environment. So that's where I'm coming from. So I'd like to ask you a quick question. Do you agree that computers should be easy to use, have intuitive interfaces, so that the user shouldn't need a manual or a training to understand those interfaces? So let me just quickly put up a poll and see if you agree with me on this. So click yes if you agree and no if you don't agree. So the poll is running now. So I'm getting, and if you disagree, let me know why in the chat because I'd definitely like to know about that. And so we're so far, we're saying overwhelming agreement with that and with that statement. I don't know how many people have six times it, but most people have voted and we have huge people in favor and only three people have disagreed so far. So let me start the poll. But I actually agree with the people who said no. And because what if you replace the word computers with cars, you know what you say? Cars should be easy to use and have intuitive interfaces that the user shouldn't need a manual or training to understand. I think computers are much more powerful and in many ways much more useful than cars and many people we sort of try to think that they should, we should need any sort of training or any way of thinking about them to make them work. So I am actually, I don't think the intuitive is the right way to think about this and hopefully I'll convince you of some of these of this a little bit by the end and I'll have some interesting examples of you as well that will make this more hopefully make more sense. So I think for me the key lessons are some things that I have as I've been reading the literature on design and looking at design issues myself, there is actually no such thing as a perfect or intuitive design. Using an interface is always a process of learning. It's never something that you just go to and use both any thinking. And the whole design is a process of discovery of the learning that is required. So those are the key lessons that I would suggest are relevant here. And I would like to talk about the six areas of six concepts that I have learned over the past year or two of being more closely involved with the user experiences on the Twitter. And they are affordances, the question of the knowledge gap, idioms, the difference between intermediate versus beginner users, usability heuristics. And finally something that I've sort of tried to use as a synthesis of some of these lessons called zone of proximal capabilities. So what are affordances? Affordances I think get thrown around a lot in the digital learning sphere, but I think people don't really often think about them very deeply enough or carefully enough. So the definition, this is my definition that I would define as it's a property of an object that allows the user to interact with it in order to achieve a particular goal without conscious deliberation. So that's, it's the sort of thing that allows you to grasp a handle, for example, a mug or pour, you know, to use the mug to get some water out of a bigger container. I wrote a lot more about affordances in the companion post to this talk on the outside. So do you have a look there, but a few examples here. The term affordances was introduced into the literature by Don Norman into the design of everyday things, which was originally called the psychology of everyday things. It comes from this area called ecological psychology that was very much interested in how people interact with objects. So something like a door handle is often given as an example of an affordance. You can grasp it, you can easily pull or push out it. You can go on to maybe make things with it. And actually from Norman's work, there's this new meme has sprung up on the internet called Norman doors, which is doors, pictures of doors that do sort of suggest different things through their affordances. They pretend that you can push or pull, but actually you can't do it as they would suggest because Norman said famously that you should never have to put a sign or it's push or pull. And this is an example that's not from a Norman door, but it's recently come up on the subreddit of crappy design. And this is from an American distillery, their new sanitizers that are helpfully put into bottles that just invite you to drink. So everything about it is to be grasped with your hand, the cap unscrewed, and then just put it just to your mouth. So it's very much something that is very natural. The most natural thing about it is to drink from it. Whereas of course what they try to do is they say, do you know the drink on there? But I doubt that that is a very handy, that is enough. And I suspect that there may be some people who will occasionally take a sip. And but Norman also talks about some really good examples of design. So for example, this is our doors. And if you think about it, when was the last time he came up to a new car, a friend's car, and he didn't know how to open the door from the outside. So obviously there's something done well. There's perfect affordance of the handle gun works very quite nicely with that. But Norman also points out that nobody's quite figured out how to do the internal doors just yet. Because I've had many experiences of being in somebody else's car and not knowing how to get out, because all of these little latches and locks and everything, it all works differently. Sometimes you have to pull, sometimes you have to pull. And it doesn't have any sort of intuitive way of interacting with it in order to open the door. So I would say that actually the Norman door issue is not quite resolved because sometimes it's just too complicated. So I don't know why nobody's figured it out to do it and make the affordance door opening door and cars. But nobody's done it. But it's an example of a Norman door that suggests both that you pull it and push it. So that's kind of an example of the affordances kind of going against giving you mixed signals here. But of course, what we often forget when we think about affordances, sometimes the affordances are there for hidden needs. So sometimes you may use this handle to close the door and this one to open the door. So I would say I always like to say that you can always push at a full door. But to bring it back to extra home, so these are some affordances. This is from an alt conference I was at some years ago. So obviously, we have this nice printed schedule. So this nice great affordances of me being able to see everything side by side, a circle of things that I want to attend. But of course, there's an affordance of the digital center has its own affordance. So I can, for example, scroll, I can search, but I cannot see things side by side. So that doesn't as a disadvantage. So that's, and as we can see with the search, it also has to be sort of mediated by my knowledge about being able to do that. Another interesting example is very relevant for education is ebooks. So I've noticed that as I'm reading things on the Kindle and I'm sort of reading just sort of a genre fiction that I'm not that interested in just something that passes time, that I often don't know what is the title of the book or what the name of the author is. Because when I pick up a book, I see the title, the affordance of the book is to present the title and the author. Every time I pick it up, or something at the Kindle, I don't see any of that. I just see the text when I pick up the Kindle. So I don't have that sort of reinforcement. But there are many, many other differences on many other differences when it comes to this. And I'll mention some more about how you leaf through your books, how you find information, how you met. So the paper has certain affordances that are kind of natural that the Kindle has to imitate that it doesn't have. And when you forget about them, then we often make mistakes such as suggesting that people can learn from digital textbooks in the same way they learn from paper textbooks. And that's not always true. Another example of affordances of the digital space that people are in is that I've had one person said that why don't people laugh at my jokes in a webinar? And that's just because they're not sitting next to each other. So they cannot feed off each other's perception because they're not getting everybody else's chance on. But also, as I also mentioned, it's important to bring in the question of mental models into our affordances. That brings me back to the question of the Kindle. So for example, it took a good 10 years for Amazon to introduce in the Kindle a way that you can jump between chapters without losing your place. And which is something you can very easily do in a book. You can open a book, quickly flip to the right page. That's actually quite hard on a Kindle. And with a textbook, you do it all the time. You want to jump back to the indices, you jump back to a chart that you're referring to all the time. And on a Kindle, that's quite hard to do, which is why digital textbooks are not quite always as useful as novels, as fiction. And so it took quite a long time before Amazon sort of made it easier. But even so, you have to have some sort of a mental model of what it is happening when you flip between those pages and it's not at all obvious. So the printed book is replicating a digital space but requires some sort of a mental model for people to work through. So that I think is the lesson of affordance. It's a way of thinking about ways that feel natural to us, even though they may be learned, but they feel they're immediately obvious that what we can do with it. Most of our digital interfaces don't have a natural affordance. We always have to do something to create some mental model to bring people to where we want them to be. And this brings me to the next lesson, which is the knowledge gap lesson. And this is actually, this comes from the work of a user experience designer, Jared Spool. And he talks about the intuitive design not actually being the right goal. And so Jared Spool talks about the fact that intuitive is not really a good thing to think about because what we're really talking about is what he calls the knowledge gap. So we need to look at the design's knowledge space. The knowledge gap is the space between what the users already know and what they need to know to be able to perform the action. And you never are, an intuitive would be where there is no gap, but actually that almost never happens. That is a rare occurrence. We always need to have some sort of a way of bridging the knowledge gap. And so that's something, and that is what Spool calls the biggest design, the biggest challenge is to actually know where the user's knowledge is and what the target knowledge points are. And then we can either simplify the design to make less target knowledge required or we can put in, we have to put in training or instructions and so on. So you can see some examples of that, of how the mental model's current knowledge of the user's interaction when you compare different versions of timetables. So this is, for example, the Oxford to Heathrow timetable that tells you how often the buses, because there's a whole picture of where buses go. And that sort of takes into account the fact that the users may want to know and have a bigger picture of how often the buses go to Heathrow. But if you want to just travel between Oxford and the village where I live, you actually don't have anything like that. You just have to search your timetable and then you know exactly when the next bus is, which is a very useful thing to do, but it never tells you, but you have to do a lot of searches before you figure out how often the buses go there. So in some ways, the designers of the system were not really thinking about all the things that I need to know. Very often I need to have some example, have to, the knowledge that I have is in the form of some sort of image scheme or script. So this happened just the other week when Microsoft introduced this together mode in Teams. And what happens is that when people turn on the together mode, it gets a little checkbox next to it. And I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of other learning technologists and one of them said, how do I turn off the together mode? And what they were doing was trying to tick the together mode again and untick this little tick box that Microsoft puts there quite unhelpfully. But actually the mental model you need to have is that you're switching between mode. Gallery mode is also a mode. Art Gallery mode is a mode. So you're switching between them. So it's not a tick box, it's a toggle. But Microsoft has this very unhelpful tick box here. So, and that's happened to two people that I know about who had that struggle. And their response to that was, it's not very intuitive. But if you have the right model, it's perfectly intuitive. We have the right target knowledge. But here Microsoft doesn't help people acquire that target knowledge because the designers already have had that. The very same thing is happening here. This very platform we're using right now. So click on somebody's picture. It will come up and become full screen. And then my slides will become this little small thing. But how do I then get the slides back? And my initial intuition was to click for the close button. How do I close this picture? Because I had to realize at this switch where I'm able to say, I actually need to toggle back. And I need to click on the slides to bring them back to the front. So that's again, sort of, I could figure it out quite easily, but it required there was some sort of source knowledge and target knowledge. It's this very same platform. How do I, it's not quite easy to figure out how to share my screen? Because I am used to having that as part of my training my camera on, running my microphone and share my screen. Whereas here, the share screen is hidden away. So again, it's not very difficult to do, but it required the current knowledge that I have, which is that usually the screen is here. I had to work against that because actually, the target knowledge was it's over here. And the system didn't do anything to help me with that because it just assumed it's obvious. But it isn't. There was a gap and all. So that's the sort of thing we need to pay attention to. To also other solutions that exist out there. So we can learn from them. And also what's called the, what I'm calling the logistical space and how many clicks it takes to get something simple done. And that's often quite difficult. So another one more lesson that I want to, that I want to share from the learning so far is that we often, we should privilege idioms over metaphor. So there's this sort of a lesson that idiomatic design is better than metaphor based design. Because there are not enough metaphors. Let me give you some examples. It comes from a book by Alan Cooper and his colleagues from the Cooper Design Agency. It's called About Phase, but has some great ideas. And they say, well, we're often designed to be sort of metaphorical, which means it should reflect some things we already know. So this is from a very early Apple advertising when they were introducing the early Mac, Mac InterSystem, and they had these, as part of their promotion, they were showing these pictures. So a calculator looks like a calculator, a folder looks like a folder, a trash can looks like a trash can. And they just had these analogs in the real world. So that was a very much a metaphor based design, but they just are not enough metaphors and you can overdo it. So for many, many years, iPads and iPhones had what's called a skeuomorphic design, but that's not always very useful. So you can see the bookshelves here and there's been a lot of pushback against that because it makes the interface and consistency across apps. It takes up a little space with distracting elements. There's not enough real-world analogs. But so that's a, so that bet I think another problem here is that metaphors pre-supposed shared knowledge and shared mapping and that often also doesn't happen to people. So have some other, imagine different things under different metaphors like we saw earlier. But it is done are a different piece. They don't just make sense until you know what they mean, but they are quick to learn and they don't quite sticky. So for example, where's that kick the bucket, put me up for the night, this and that, these are all idioms forms of idioms. And if you just look at the individual words, they may not actually make sense if you just translate them into dictionary. But if you want to learn what they mean together, they become quite intuitive and quite easy to use. And then so that's why we prefer idiomatic design. So what you're seeing here is Steve Jobs demoing pinch to zoom. So this is perfect example idiomatic design. It's not at all intuitive. There's nothing intuitive about pinching on a photo to make it bigger. But Steve Jobs only had to show once during the presentation and everybody wanted it and everybody immediately knew how to use it. So when people got iPhones, they didn't need any training on this because they just, they already knew. It was so powerful and so easy to, easy to learn. Here's another example of an idiom that's developed which is this is a check bus time table. And so you already, you can look at it and you know, the first one is where you say, where are you coming from, where you're going to, and then here you're going to see some dates once you click on it, you're going to see dates. So it's a very easy example. So another example where you have the new idioms developed in checking where you do, where you're booking things. So you used to do, you have to check them separately, but now all you have to do now is you have to just click there once and you click on the date first where you're starting and then you click on the second date on where you're ending. And it's not at all intuitive. There's nothing intuitive about this, but you're getting what's a good feedback. And once you do it once, you just know how it works and it's so very, so very useful. Another example of idiomatic design which is not so great is in Canvas. So those of you who use Canvas know this and they decided to know, to name the structure of the course modules, which is very unfortunate because modules mean something different at different institutions. It could be modules of the course, sometimes the course is a module sometimes. So it's very, very confusing. However, it's not all that, in reality, it actually isn't that confusing. It feels like it should be, but in reality, you just have to tell the scenes once, you know, we have these modules and there's this link that's modules in here. That's what it does. That's what it does. And it just kind of, it just kind of works. It's not something that remains confusing. So it's sort of an idiom that, you know, it's not perhaps better if we wouldn't have to do this, but it actually kind of works. Sometimes the idioms can get confusing. So here's my old washing machine, which has the on button is out. Whereas when you turn it off, you push the button in, which again, there's nothing into it. It turns out that actually there's nothing natural about the on being pushed in, but it's just a convention. That's what the idiom is. They decided to go against that idiom. So you can see that that's an issue. And again, if we're having an example of idiomatic design with the switches here where you have the red is showing up, but I never know actually which one it is. Is which one is on and which one is off? Is the red, do I need to push the red? A good example of the Logitech clicker, which has, you switch it to off and then this red thing comes on. But then when you switch it to on, you slide back to red, which is kind of very strange. So sometimes these idioms may be quite difficult. So that brings me to the next one, which is the- I have a minute, just to say we've got a couple of minutes left. Oh, my apologies. Okay, so let me just go finish. Is that what I'm going to say is that the last bit, the last two weeks I would say that we should sort of aim design intermediate users. And so one example of that is that people who use the course all the time. So here's an example of a very common thing that happens on course designs, which is the very long introduction when you have a digital course. But actually the users only ever need to be welcomed the once. But so having just a welcome link would be much more helpful because then every time they come to a course, they still have to go through the welcome scroll away. So that's kind of the example of how to avoid sort of designing for beginner users. So it's not too many steps, long welcome messages, only one way to do things. Again, those are all for beginners, but the other thing that I often see, design for the manager, something that somebody can, somebody who only looks at something for a minute and they never actually achieved any tasks. So you try to make it look for them, but not actually useful for the users. So designing for the managers. Very often the corporate software is designed as the, is bothered by people who will not use it. So I will skip this. So I wanted to sort of just draw attention to the UX heuristics that I definitely highly recommend looking at that because just going through these 10 usability heuristics and your designs can help you, can help you discover things. And then also laws of UX website, which has the Jacob's Law, which is Jacob Nielsen's law, is that most of the time you just spend their time on other websites. So we should keep that in mind, look at the other websites. And we should also sort of pay attention to what people do to keep an eye on the way people do things. So I have lots of examples here, but I'm just going to skip them. And my final words here are about the, what I would say, consider the zone, what I'm calling the zone of proximate capabilities based on the zone of proximate development from Vygotsky, is that we need to think about not only what users are accomplishing on their own, but also what they're accomplishing with the help. And you see all the time that people are using, people are using things with the help of others. And so here's my one example of that when I was teaching about Zoom, I never had to show anybody how to set the virtual background in Zoom because they always already knew, because they already asked somebody, some of the basic stuff like screen sharing was much more difficult than setting the virtual background. So again, I have lots more examples, but I'm going to skip them. And just going to find my final words, what I would suggest that we need to not just think about the design itself, but also about how people are learning from the context they're in, the interaction with others, and then making sure that the environment they're in is full of guides, not just help in the system, but also the things we're already doing, like local guide champions, but also in our messaging about teaching and learning, we should always include maybe tips about how to use Canvas, how to use order VLE, and things like that. And finally, my final word is that support rich environments are good for people with additional needs, because everybody has a learning need when they're busy, tired, or new in the language culture environment or subject. And so we just never need, we can never really act at the design process. So my apologies for running a bit late, but... Not a problem, not a problem. Thank you so much, Dawn. Questions? Yeah, we have got, we have had a couple of questions. So I'll just read out the first one. So it was, does idiomatic design bend itself to collaborative learning? And I think that came in from Miles. Well, I mean, the idiomatic design really is a, I think the idea there is it's something that goes against the idea of the intuitive design. So that's, I would say, that's really the idea. So I'm not sure, so the collaborative learning is perhaps part of it, but it's really the idea is behind, is not the focus on making things intuitive. I think that's perhaps the biggest lesson there, is just try, think about how can people do this easily and achieve tasks easily and quickly? And how you can create, and how you can create ways, again, going back to the knowledge gap, how we can create ways for people to actually acquire the idioms, how they can quickly learn the design. So I'm not sure if it quite overlaps with collaborative learning, but it certainly is, the collaborative learning, I think, is a big part of that. We need to have students learning from each other as well, how they use things. Excellent, thank you so much. And then just very quickly, and we've had a question from Saskia Mjid. Do you have any examples of how different groups or countries or cultures have different ideas of what is intuitive? And I think I was thinking of keeping it left or keeping it right whilst driving or different alignments for different languages? Yeah, so just before I've pasted it in the chat, I've pasted a link to my presentation, which is all my examples that I had to skip. So you can include, there's a few videos there as well. So feel free to have a look at those. Well, again, it goes back to the current knowledge and target knowledge. So I don't think it's sort of inherently cultural, but it very much is very much sort of, what is idiomatic is learning. So it's the things that feel intuitive to one cultural, unintuitive to another, just because of the way things are done. So obviously door handles are a perfect example, because in the UK you have those so strange door handles that you have to twist, whereas in Europe you have ones that you have nice handle, you push down and you open, and it's completely different sort of affordances, different ways of doing things. And they both make sense and they both have sort of different advantages and disadvantages. So that's sort of perhaps a digital example. But I mean, I have loads of examples. For example, the arrows at the beginning in front of a roundabout in the UK, they're incredibly confusing coming from the Czech Republic. I almost got into an accident because they point, they say turn left or turn right, but actually they mean turn right after the roundabout. So we have the first turn left on the roundabout and then turn right again. So the arrow would certainly be confusing unless you know the whole sort of context of everything. So that's got some examples up above my head. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for those questions as well at the end, Miles and Taskin. So if we could all use the clap function in our emojis and say thank you very much to Dom, that would be absolutely fantastic presentation. Dom, if you could stop sharing your screen, that would be absolutely fantastic.