Aug 28 - Su, Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Learning Portals

Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Learning Portals.
Daniel Su Kuen Seong. The University of Nottingham, Malaysia. Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia. +603-89248138 daniel.su@nottingham.edu.my

Mobility 06, Oct. 25–27, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand.
The 3rd International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Systems — Mobility 2006.

Abstract
Mobile learning presumes the use of mobile Internet technology to facilitate the learning process. The growth and rapid evolution of the wireless technology have created new opportunities for anytime and anywhere learning paradigm. As a result, numerous mobile learning portals have been developed to gain the advantages of it. Nonetheless, there is little research and exploration has been initiated in proposing usability guidelines in designing mobile learning portals to achieve efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of learning. Thus, this paper seeks to present usability guidelines by grounding the user interface on usability theoretical framework, possible constraints, and unique properties of mobile computing. Three categories of usability have been formulated: user analysis, interaction and interface design. Ten golden usability guidelines have been suggested which aims for designing highly efficacious, user friendly and usable mobile interface to support dynamicity of mobile and handheld devices. Moreover, Mobile Learning Course Manager (MLCM) portal has been developed to demonstrate and exemplify the usability guidelines proposed.

This integration of technologies has altered considerably the instructional strategies in our educational institutions and changed the way teachers teach and students learn [2]. ... Some noticeable examples with the use of technologies in educational context are multimedia learning, World Wide Web or web/Internet-based learning, e-Learning, and in recent years, the mobile learning.

Mobile learning has been perceived by many educationalists to offer flexibility in learning and
present a multitude yet unique educational advantages [5]. The rapid evolving of the wireless communication and demanding for the low-cost of mobile devices potentially direct many researchers and educationalists to move from web-based and e-Learning to mobile learning which promising easy and convenient ways of learning.
One distinct feature of mobile learning over e-Learning is mobility [6]. Hence, researchers and scholars are becoming enthusiastically in coining the term ‘mobile learning or m-learning’, such as ‘mobile learning as the point at which mobile computing and e-Learning intersect to produce an anytime, anywhere learning experience [7].
According to Nyiri [8], m-learning is fundamentally e-Learning delivered through mobile computational devices such as Palms, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), Pocket PCs, smart phone, digital cell phones, and any other handheld devices. The use of mobile devices with the wireless network technology flourishes mobile learners to get convenience, expediency and immediacy of mobile learning in appropriate time and accessing the appropriate learning contents [7].
Additionally, mobile learning is the next generation of e-Learning and important instrument for lifelong learning [49].


The term usability is defined as by The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) ISO 9241-11 [16] as ‘the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.’
According to Nielsen [17], usability means the measure of the quality the users’ experience when interacting interface.
...usability is not a surface gloss which applied at the last minutes or before the releases of the system or product; but it is deeply affected by every stage of the analysis, design, and development [18].
Usable systems are easy to learn (learnability), efficient to use (efficiency), easy to remember (memorability), not error-prone (errors), and satisfactory in use (subjective satisfaction) [17].
The ultimate goal of usability is meeting the needs of to users’ satisfaction [17].
..advantages of usability encompass increased productivity, enhanced quality of work, improved user satisfaction, and reductions in support and training costs [19]. The reduction in costs has attracted many project managers and interface designers to employ the theory of usability when designing the interfaces as reported in [20, 21].


Mobile learning appears in any facets of possible variations in context such as locations, environment, conditions, noisy or quiet, weather and so on. Hence, the dynamicity has triggered
additional efforts and investigation in order to design highly usable mobile learning portals to cater for different types of users in the global economy.
Furthermore, the limitation of screen size, the presentation of mobile contents, and adaptation of the information to the sensitivity of context and devices influence the efficiency and effectiveness when learning via the mobile devices.
Hayhoe [23] emphasises that the design criterion of this ubiquitous perspective need to be examined thoroughly and focused as to eliminate boredom and disorientation which involves wide range of users in having variety types of handheld devices.


It is perceptible that little research and exploration has been initiated to propose usability
guidelines in designing mobile learning portals. Moreover, several extensive experiments conducted from 2002 to 2005 discover substantial amount of severe usability problems
pertinent to user behaviour in mobile navigation on mobile Internet portals’ design [24]. Therefore, this has set the directions for this paper to explore the usable guidelines when
designing mobile learning portals by grounding the user interface on usability theoretical framework, possible constraints, and unique properties of mobile computing.

Category Usability Guideline
User Analysis U1
Interaction U2, U3, U4, U5 and U6
Interface design U7, U8, U9 and U10
The usability guidelines are divided into three categories: user analysis, interaction, and interface design.

Guidelines mean ‘rules or principles for action, encapsulating some combination of practitioner determined best practices in a domain and research-based insights into factors relevant in that
domain [25].’
The usability guidelines framework is grounded on the usability theoretical framework discussed in [17], constraints proposed by [22], and understanding of a number of unique properties that are intrinsic to mobile computing as highlighted in [52, 53, 54].

3.1.1 User Analysis
U1: The user/learner

3.1.2 Interaction
U2: Human-mobile interaction
U3: Map between mobile learning portals and the real world
U4: Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors
U5: Visibility of the status
U6: Minimise human cognitive load

3.1.3 Mobile Learning Interface Design
U7: The small screen display
U8: Do not overuse
U9: Navigation
U10: Consistency.

My Comments: Majority of Seong's USABILITY GUIDELINES were taken from Nielsen's TEN HEURISTIC or TEN HEURISTIC PRINCIPLES. Nielsen's 10 were among my "36 USABILITY INSPECTION CRITERIA" for e-Learning Portals. Seong had also the smart thing; take the Usabilty Criteria from a very well-known source. Most researchers would use some, most or all of Nielsen's 10 usability criteria.


Principally MLCM portal’s user interfaces can be perceived usable as the mobile learners or users are considered the most important entity in our design. Much effort has been devoted in analysing and evaluating the mobile learners’ need and caters for beginner, fast acting for a more expert learner, provides efficacious support to the learners’ working needs and is pleasant to use.

CONCLUSIONS
Technological changes and evolution significantly amplifies the demands on the quality and usable user interface and offer the potential to further enhance the task, structure and functionality of mobile devices. The rapidly increased number of mobile learning portals has urged the usability issues to be more transparent when designing the learning portals. This paper contributes ten usability guidelines which envelop user analysis, interaction and user interfaces categories. These usability guidelines empower the effort in creating highly usable and impressive user interface which promote the users’ satisfaction and interactivity while learning via the mobile and handheld devices. In addition, the proposed usability guidelines intend to set as benchmark for interface designers to further evaluate the mobile user interfaces to conform to the attributes of usability when designing usable mobile learning portals. Additionally, MLCM has demonstrated and exemplified the use of usability guidelines proposed which aims to increase the users’ satisfaction especially dealing with the diversify and universal mobile learners who comes from different background, culture, race, educational level, learning cognitive and styles. The simplicity design and ease of use, consistency in navigation, structural metaphoric, and standardised iconic design have promote mobile users’ cognitive and learning styles in accessing and comprehending MLCM to maximise their learning experiences and increase their learning curve indirectly.


Future Directions
we suggest the following for future extensions:
• Examines the usability guidelines by conducting usabilitytesting/evaluation to measure and quantify the theory of usability such as learnability, memorability, efficiency, effectiveness, and subjective satisfaction. The expected results and outcomes are used to prioritise the importance and plot the ranking of it.
• Further evaluation and experiment will be conducted to assess and determine whether the usability guidelines proposed are appropriate and met the basis of formal instructional design strategies, and the mobile curriculum development.
• Enhances the learning portals by extracting the lecture notes and other relevant digital documents, and transmit them to the respective mobile learners.

My Comments: In my Masters research, I measured the relative importance of all the 36 USABILITY INSPECTION CRITERIA (Seong called them Usability Guideline) and ranked them according to the rating of importance. I hope to repeat this for a larger set (36 plus More) of usability criteria for mobile learning.

References that I may want to read further in future:
[16] ISO/IEC, 9241-11 Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Visual Display Terminals (VDT)s – Part 11 Guidance on Usability. 1998: ISO/IEC 9241-11: 1998 (E).
[18] Lee, K. B., and Grice, R. A. Developing a New Usability Testing Method for Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC’04). 14-17 April 2004, Phoenix, Arizona, 115-127.
[19] ISO/IEC, 13407. Human-Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems. 1999: ISO/IEC 13407: 1999(E).
[22] Mayhew, D. J. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner’s Handbooks for User Interface Design. Morgan Kaufman Publisher, 1999.
[23] Hayhoe, G. F. From desktop to palmtop: Creating usable online documents for wireless and handheld devices. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 24-27 October 2001.
[24] Kaikkonen, A. Usability problems in today’s mobile Internet portals. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEE International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Systems. 15-17 November 2005, Guangzhou, Chine, 459-464.
[25] Vavoula, G. N., Lefrere, P., O’Malley, C., Sharples, M., and Taylor, J. Producing Guidelines for learning, teaching and tutoring in a mobile environment. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE’ 04). 23-25 March 2004, Jhongli, Taiwan, ROC, 173-176.
[30] Su, D. K. S. A comparative evaluation and correlation between learning styles and academic achievement on e-Learning. In Kwan, R., and Fong, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of Web-based Learning: Technology and Pedagogy at The 4th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL’05). 31 July-3 August 2005, Hong Kong, China, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 193-202
[39] Kaikkonen, A., and Laarni, J. Designing for small display screens. In Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Aarhus, Denmark, New York: ACM Press, 19-23 October, 2002, 227- 230.
[42] Su, D. K. S., and Chan, F. C. Navigational patterns on usable mobile news portals. Journal of Internet Technology, 7(3), April 2006, forthcoming.