[DG: Teaching & Learning] User Goals

[Clay Fenlason]

I was looking at the "Learning Capabilities" spreadsheet [1] again
this morning, and was glad to see it being fleshed out. I did however
note a tendency for the "user goals" to creep into feature requests
and implementation assumptions as the list grows longer, which starts
to dilute its effectiveness. Since I warned on the T&L call a few
weeks ago that I would be pushing back on this kind of thing, I now
feel free ;) I know it's hard to avoid the sort of language that
assumes common web tools, since we all live and breathe in this space,
but let me urge the effort once again, and offer a few examples to
illustrate the point.

Near the top of the sheet the user goals take the form of "I need to
see who's in my class" and "I want to learn the names of all my
students/peers." Simple and universal needs with no technological or
functional assumptions.

Near the bottom there are now user goals like "Allow me to use common
keyboard shortcuts" and "Allow me to listen to class readings with a
screen reader." For such things it would be better to place them among
the "capabilities" columns and try to trace them back to the
essential, non-technical need. Maybe that's going to be the right
exercise for most of us who take these technical tools as second
nature: first lay out what seem to us the capabilities in the middle
of the sheet, and then try to work back to the left what the
underlying, non-technical user goal is. If that can't be done that may
be a sign of something.

~Clay

[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlfbHxo2qpHEdHRuSnowVGMwWE9HY1MtVjFpY1dtS0E&hl=en