What is UXDL?
User Experience Design for Learning (UXDL) is, as its name suggests, a focused application of the larger discipline of user experience design to the specific affordances and limitations of courses that take place on the internet. What is user experience design? It is the professional art of "provid[ing] meaningful and relevant experiences to users. UX design involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function." And it is an art built around users, the humans who will use the thing, including holistic attention to their context, identity, and needs.
UXDL, then, posits that the same kinds of decisions that improve things like road safety, efficient appliance design, internet sites, and all manner of human interfaces can also improve learning. And it further posits that the key to improving learning design is to center the entire process on understanding and addressing student needs as the intended end-users.
Specifically, the UXDL Framework is a set of principles developed at the University of Waterloo by a team of instructional designers intended to make the complex practice of user experience design available in a manageable form for educators. It adapts the UX Honeycomb model originally developed by Peter Morville in 2004 for a distance learning environment.
Briefly, the UXDL framework aims to identify the most crucial aspects of design and to provide a manageable set of key principles to optimize learning for each aspect. Its primary benefits compared to other frameworks are that it usefully reduces the complexity of design decisions without oversimplifying – a difficult balance to strike – and that it uses the structural metaphor of the honeycomb to arrange what might otherwise be an overwhelming number of imperatives into a decision framework that are approachable and easy to implement. In addition, it is a non-hierarchical framework: that is, it does not posit that one or another feature is always more important than another. Rather, as the circular arrangement of the diagram implies, the importance of each design principle depends on the situation, and the ultimate quality of the design is a syncretic result of the sum total of design choices. It is not a checklist or a manifesto, but rather a set of tools for focusing attention and orienting decisions.
Above all, we believe the UXDL framework is useful because it is a framework: that is, it is an explicit articulation of principles to guide decisions that we might otherwise make without awareness and without paying due attention to the needs and preferences of those who will have to live the results of those decisions.
Elements of UXDL
USEFUL
By “useful”, in this context, we specifically mean minimizing cognitive overload and maximizing generative processing. We can create useful online learning experiences by reducing distractions and extraneous information. One of the primary goals of this component of the UXDL framework is to help learners process information more efficiently by modeling how to select, organize, and integrate information in meaningful ways.
DESIRABLE
We know that students have intrinsic, self-regulated motivation to thrive. The second component of UXDL framework, “Desirable”, focuses on the elements that make a learning experience enjoyable. This includes the aesthetic and functional aspects of the course design (how it looks and how it functions), as well as the ways in which the design encourages reflection and connection between students and the instructor as well as among student peers.
ACCESSIBLE
If students are going to have successful learning experiences, the course material must be fully accessible. Accessibility, as it relates to this design framework, refers particularly to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, specifically designing learning to provide multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression, as well as meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which outline best practices for making digital content accessible to all learners.
CREDIBLE
A credible learning experience means that the quality of the scholarship and course materials is high and that the visual and functional design of the course is well suited for the learning objectives of the course. Our Learning Management System (LMS), CarmenCanvas, has several built-in features to verify links, identify errors in the text, and search for common accessibility problems. Additionally, instructional design support can provide an invaluable second set of eyes to act as quality control to maximize credibility.
INTUITIVE (Findable and Usable)
This segment of the framework is most relevant for course navigation and the ability to easily navigate through the course and find materials. This includes having clear and concise instructions for navigating the course, consistent visual and design elements, and fully functional elements, such as links and documents opening and/or downloading as they should.
Personas: One Size Does Not Fit All
The beating heart of UXDL is the users' experience. The goal of UXDL is not to achieve a platonic ideal design; rather, UXDL aims to make design choices that benefit individual students, each of whom will experience the course differently.
To assist in the practice of designing for real people, our team uses a set of personas we have developed that remind us of the diversity of needs and interests that we encounter among the student population at Ohio State. None of these students are actual individuals, but all of them are based on real students we have encountered and specific characteristics that are demographically prominent at the university. By sharing these personas, we hope to encourage you to consider the multiplicity of student needs and not to be forced to rely solely on personal experience.
How should you make use of this list? We realize that it is not really feasible to imagine the consequences of each design decision on each of these students.
What we recommend is that you review this roster of students at two main moments in your design process and have it in mind throughout your work:
- Before you sit down to work, explore these personas in order to remind yourself that you should consider the needs of a range of people, rather than a universal subject, and to refresh your memory of the kinds of needs that current students bring to their learning.
- After you have finished a draft, especially when you think you might be done, take a moment to consider what you've built from each student's perspective. Will it work for all of them? Are there opportunities you may have overlooked which viewing your work through a given student's perspective suddenly makes visible?
- In between, while making the dozens of micro-decisions that design consists of, pause occasionally to think about the situation from a given student's perspective. Eventually, you will develop the habit of designing for personas.
A Note About Accessibility
It is important to bear in mind that if the course design and content are not accessible, none of the other components of the UXDL framework even matter, as learners would never even be able to arrive at a point at which they could evaluate a course design’s usefulness, desirability, credibility, or intuitiveness. The root of accessibility is access, and access as a principle, stems from a desire and a practice to lessen constraints and barriers. This principle seeks to anticipate potential needs before they arise, thus broadening the scope of inclusion. Access, therefore, exercises inclusion over exclusion, and requires reflection that leads us to ask what is missing around us, and what we can do to eliminate any barriers that create exclusion. It is the foundation that undergirds the design and content choices that you make as you develop your course.
It is important that access does not become an afterthought or the element you only think about applying once the rest of your design is complete. Instead, it is vital to practice accessibility from the start. Again, this can begin by focusing on a few key elements. Reviewing the above personas will help illuminate several elements that you can use as guides to begin practicing design thinking that takes accessibility seriously.
How Can UXDL Address These Things?
Ok, that is a lot of information. Let's cut to the chase: how do we use the UXDL framework to address the needs of our students?
Below we will provide three examples our team in ASC ODE has developed wherein we use the UXDL framework to address the most important early needs for students. As a general rule, we propose a 5-step model for this kind of design work:
- Abstract the situation to identify what students need most.
- Identify the dimension(s) of UXDL that are most salient for the task.
- Review the general principles for that dimension of UXDL and connect them to specific experiences that students will have.
- Identify the corresponding features of Carmen and figure out how to optimize them for the students' actual experience with them.
- Rinse, repeat until it feels ready to present to students.
For a more detailed explanation of how this works in practice, please follow the link below to learn how the UXDL principles can be applied to improve the initial learning experience for students.