User-based Design in iPhone App Development
iAdvocate - Prototype Web App
Project Description: This Design-based Research project involved identifying an area for instructional research, and developing an intervention (a product or method) to use in collaboration with participant/practitioners for whom the intervention is designed. The project involved conducting a cycle of theory development, research questions, product development, implementation, user testing, data collection, analysis, feedback, and research discussion, with the understanding that future cycles would be conducted based on findings.
The research team was comprised of four doctoral students and myself. We selected as our topic the development of an iPhone app to assist parents of children with a disability to improve their advocacy skills, primarily in interactions with school administrators and teachers in Individualized Education Plans (IEP) for their child.
The original development of the iPhone app – named iAdvocate – was begun in 2009 by Dr. Alan Foley, Thomas Bull (director of the Syracuse University Parent Advocacy Center – SUPAC), and Kevin Forgard, a PhD student. Thomas and Kevin collaborated to develop a plan to conduct informal learning on an iPhone via the iAdvocate app, under the rationale that an “anytime/anyplace” method for information access would be beneficial to users. Kevin produced an instructional design plan and the development wireframes for the prototype. Kevin’s final paper and wireframes were used as the starting point for our Design-based Research in September 2010.
An Action x Cognition matrix
The focus of my paper is in the analysis of the first cycle of research, specifically in the area of content analysis and the organization of it within the app. In reviewing the user’s responses to the prototype, a number of issues emerged. On the basis of user responses, and from an analysis of the original content organization, it is proposed that the next iteration of research and development of iAdvocate utilize a User-based Design framework.
It is propose that UbD principles, applied to iAdvocate development, would refine the identification of relevant content through eliciting user-defined criteria, and organizing their responses into steps (an Action x Cognition matrix). This would promote ease of navigation within the information system, offer flexibility for the system to re-organize and assimilate new data, and support users to accept roles in the system’s evolution.
Further, the use of UBD principles would provide the ancillary benefit of furnishing the DBR process with a channel of communication between the researchers and the participants that efficiently facilitates co-orientation in the feedback and formative development process.
A Mockup of a Horizontally Oriented Information System Based on Action x Cognition
Reflection: User-based Design is a radically different approach to ascertain user needs and uses of information. Instructional designers do not intuitively embrace the idea of relinquishing control over content organization from a subject matter expert to, instead, a “subject matter network” where expertise is considered narrow and constraining to growth. There are Constructivist foundations in Dervin’s Sense-making Methodology, upon which much of UbD is based, and this philosophy is not necessarily embraced as canon for ID.
Far from promoting a Constructivist worldview, my goals instead were to seek where the energy was within the user community and identify their mutual goals. As a program of informal learning, I felt that the instructional design of iAdvocate ought to foster communication within the community of parents – whose bonding and support of each other was apparent in user testing – and to place it within a structured, ordinal information environment rather than a simple index of content.
The principles of UbD intend to create a prescribed “problem space” within which users experiences are used to develop ordinal steps in the process of achieving goals. Below each step are accumulations of questions and perspectives associated with each step, the answers to which help the user to understand their “stopping point” better and to help them to move forward. UbD proposes that users should be given the tools to build and refine the content as they see fit, rather than according to a developer or programmer.
In the process of developing iAdvocate for this research, I was able to quickly develop a functioning Web app prototype using WordPress and the WPTouch Pro plugin, which adapts a conventional website into a smartphone compatible layout. This helped to put together a low-cost prototype for user testing without involving an Objective-C programmer, while allowing for nearly instantaneous revisions during class discussions. The Web app had its limitations, however, such as the absence of a persistent Home button and no horizontal navigation. But for the needs of the assignment and the relative simplicity of the prototype’s functional requirements, it served its purpose well for the class and for user testing.
This project revealed to me that there is a notable absence of existing Web development that presents ordinal information in horizontal space – which is the conventional way we visualize events over time. Websites do not navigate horizontally, thus imposing (perhaps) a sense of hierarchy in information perception.
Mobile apps and virtual reality systems, however, are able to operate in ways websites cannot. This opens up areas for future research to see how global self-help communities might be able to migrate away from Web-based systems to mobile, tablet, or VR systems. These platforms may afford the ability for information systems designers, interactivity designers, and instructional designers to be free of the functional constraints of the Web.
