1. Panel on the Development, Maintenance, and Use of Course Web Sites
Melody Y. Ivory
Asst. Prof., Information School
Adj. Asst. Prof., CS&E
April 6, 2019

2. The Design of Course Web Sites
Designing good course web sites is difficult
Requires understanding of effective design practices (usability, accessibility, …)
Requires understanding of technology (HTML, XML, …)
Requires time
Potential solutions
Templates, generated sites (Heines), course management systems
Still need to adhere to effective design practices
What if changes are made?
Design processes
Take time to follow
Design patterns
Need to be developed
Evaluation tools
Not a substitute for user evaluation
Ideal solution
Integrate all of the above

3. UW Course Web Site Template

4. UW Course Web Site Template

5. Macromedia Course Web Site Templates

6. Macromedia Course Web Site Templates

7. Generated Site (Heines)

8. Generated Site (Heines)

9. Most course web sites reflect this process
Design Processes
Scenario
An instructor is teaching a core course for new undergraduate students and needs to create a course web site
Most course web sites reflect this process

10. User-, Information-, or Learner-Centered?

11. User-, Information-, or Learner-Centered?

12. User-, Information-, or Learner-Centered?

13. User-, Information-, or Learner-Centered?

14. User-, Information-, or Learner-Centered?

15. Design Patterns Area that needs work
Templates, generated sites, etc. need to reflect effective design patterns
Some patterns developed for educational sites
WebTango Project (webtango.ischool.washington.edu)
Prototype analysis tool for comparing design to other high quality education sites

16. Automated Evaluation Tools
Over 30 automated evaluation tools to compare pages to guidelines
e.g., Bobby, LIFT, WebSAT, WAVE, Validator, etc.
Survey: The State of the Art in Automated Usability Evaluation of User Interfaces, Ivory and Hearst, ACM Computing Surveys, 33(4), December 2001, pp
Good at identifying potential problems and teaching about effective design practices
Effectiveness in improving sites is unclear
Study: Using Automated Tools to Improve Web Site Usage by Users with Diverse Abilities, Ivory, Mankoff, and Le, IT&SOCIETY, 1(3), Winter, 2003.

17. What is Needed
Integrated environment to support Web site design and development (grant proposals)
Incorporates design process (user-,information-, and learner-centered?)
Incorporates design patterns and templates
Incorporates site generation (early design representations)
Incorporates evaluation support
Question: Should the education domain be used as a testbed to guide the development of this environment?