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UI Design Update
Newsletter – July, 1998
Insights from
Human Factors International
In This Issue
Bob Bailey reviews:
| Displaying
Information |
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| The
Effect of Multimedia Components on Learning, Lee, A.Y. and Bowers,
A.N., Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 41st
Annual Meeting, 340-344 (1997). |
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Do people learn
more when they read material, only observe graphics, hear the material,
or when they read, see graphics and read the material? An earlier
writer had proposed that people remember about:
- 10% of what
they read,
- 20% of what
they hear,
- 30% of what
they see,
- 50% of what
they hear and see.
Lee and Bowers
(1997) studied a group of 112 university students to determine in
which of the following conditions they learned best:
- reading
printed text alone,
- listening
to spoken text alone,
- looking
at graphics alone,
- listening
to spoken text plus reading printed text,
- listening
to spoken text plus looking at graphics,
- reading
printed text plus looking at graphics,
- listening
to spoken text, reading printed text and looking at graphics.
The participants
were given a pre-test, they then learned the material, and then
were given a post-test. Their learning was compared with the learning
of a control group that took the same pre- and post-tests, but studied
a different topic in-between.
When compared
with the learning performance of the control group, the people in
the different groups always demonstrated greater learning. The percent
of increase for each learning approach is shown below:
- hearing
spoken text and looking at graphics - 91% more learning,
- looking
at graphics alone - 63% more,
- reading
printed text plus looking at graphics - 56% more,
- listening
to spoken text, reading text, and looking at graphics - 46% more,
- hearing
spoken text plus reading printed text - 32% more,
- reading
printed text alone - 12% more,
- hearing
spoken text alone - 7% more.
These insights
are valuable to consider when designing multimedia interfaces.
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| The
Best
Way to Learn |
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| Hands-on
Practice in Learning to Use Software: A Comparison of Exercise, Exploration,
and Combined Formats, Wiedenbeck, S. and Zila, P.L., ACM Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction, 4(2), 169-196 (1997). |
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When providing
a new software system to users, is it better to include structured
learning exercises, or to simply let users practice on their own?
Wiedenbeck
and Zila (1997) conducted a study to determine whether exploration-based
("on your own") practice was as effective as having people
complete specific exercises. They had participants learn a task
using one of the following types of practice:
- specific
exercises,
- general
exploration,
- combined
exercises and exploration.
They found
that computer literate participants who used the exercises:
- completed
the training about 34% faster, and
- completed
more tasks correctly.
Users who had
little computer experience did not differ based on the type of practice
they used. Using "on your own" exploration to facilitate
learning was not too successful for experienced users. Although
some participants were more motivated to practice their own tasks,
their practice sessions were usually not well conceived.
Their final
conclusion was that providing structured exercises seems to be the
best way to have users practice with new software. They proposed
that a set of exercises that are well conceived and well integrated
can:
- greatly
assist people in learning,
- illustrate
typical uses of the software,
- focus users
on important rather than peripheral functionality,
- highlight
points that are difficult to understand, and prone to errors.
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3-day
Annual User Interface Update Seminar
presented by Dr. Robert Bailey
Suggestions, comments,
questions?
HFI editors at
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