I’ve been thinking a lot about usability these days. It’s not like I never considered the user; we document and provide print and video tutorials for a host of processes and procedures here at DePaul. But I recently had a long discussion with an instructor who took me to task for assuming that students would know how to play a file in iTunes U. He didn’t know to locate and click the play icon, or to double-click the file. He was frustrated and questioned the logic of having to explain to his students the process to access a video tutorial meant to explain yet another process. My impulse was to dismiss him as a clueless Luddite, but thankfully I heard him out.

This morning I was copied on an email from an irate student who couldn’t get her course-required third-party web app to install or work properly. It didn’t occur or matter to her that DePaul didn’t design or administer the application. Since the app was a required part of her course, for her it is DePaul, and her experience struggling with the software colors her perception of her course, her instructor, and the school.

What these two incidents have in common of course is usability, or lack thereof. Both illustrate that seemingly easy tasks are often anything but easy for many users, and that these struggles have a negative impact on user satisfaction and the perceived value of a tool, course, or institution. Why do we make these usability errors?

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that at least regarding computer literacy I assume others know what I know simply because I know it. That it’s obvious to double-click a file to open it, or execute it, or get it to reveal its function in some way. I assume others recognize that icons exist in an application to indicate functionality or some other important attribute that the user needs to know. I assume others know to check system requirements before downloading software, or at least know what system they use. After all, I argue, it’s 2008! These things are conventions, for crying out loud! And who doesn’t know how to install an application? Do we have to explain everything?

Well, no. But we do need to explain a lot more than we might think, and we need to make things a lot more obvious. How can we do that? We might start by incorporating some quick and easy usability testing before we roll out that nifty new Web 2.0 app or learning tool in our courses. Steve Krug suggests in Don’t Make Me Think that a morning testing session with a handful of users, followed by an afternoon debriefing, is an inexpensive and effective way to find out at the beginning of a project if you’re on the right track.

What happens too often is that decisions about tools and media are made in the optimistic afterglow of a distance education conference or by instructional designers like me reacting to industry hype or instructor pressures, and then passed down as blessings from the heights of Mt. Pedagogy. Then we are surprised and irritated when users reject our offerings for being too hard to use or protest our suggestions (diplomatically worded of course) that the problem is their own technological incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in rich media, in interactive tools and all sorts of whiz-bang features for online courses. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of scrolling through endless expanses of text. But I do think it’s time to work more closely with our users, to ask them what their needs are and how we might meet those, rather than deciding for them a priori and dictating what the solutions are going to be.