Exercise C: Mobile Usability in Your Context

The mobile I chose is called Hello Chinese. I enjoy the simplicity of the app. I like that each screen there is not a lot of buttons and not a lot of text to read. The exercise or games of the app are multiple choices for the user to pick. It is great for users when they are using the app on the go. The images and colors and aesthetically pleasing and not too busy so the users do not get lost while reading the information provided.  My only issue is that one cannot skip lessons. One has to go through each lesson to unlock higher-level lessons. Maybe they can offer a “test” feature to unlock the desired levels and skip others.

I decided to look at the Down Dog yoga app here. Not traditional education, but definitely still a teaching and learning tool. I’ve been doing yoga for years, and this is one of the first apps I really appreciate to help guide self-practice at home.
The content organisation, navigation, and layout is clear and easy to use. It opens with the basic options for a practice including what type of class you want to do, what level you are at, whether you want to focus on anything specific, how long you want your class to be, and how long you want to savasana at the end. Following that there is an option to go to an advanced menu which has a consistent layout with the opening menu, or a big button that says “Start” which then loads your practice.

These options are both part of the learning experience and assure that you can customize a practice that you really want and need for your body and health. Further customization in the sub-menu includes music and voice selection, class pace, amount of instruction, and video quality.

When in a class, the visual representation is of the postures you are moving through with associated options to show how long a pose is still held for an the name of the pose if you would like that displayed. On the menus and loading screens, supporting images and information is shared which ties into an overarching experience of being in a yoga space.

There are also additional icons at the bottom of the screen that allow for optimisation of learning and selection based commands that go with your progress, favourite classes, and goals.

All in all, you can open this app and easily get a class started in under a minute. There are further options if you want to customize or optimise. The layout and navigation is consistent and easy to use, and supporting media creates both a mood and supports the lessons being taught. This means that there are a range of functionalities students can choose from depending on their preferences and reasons for using the app.

I looked at the LMS mobile app for my institution. One big advantage of the app that the traditional LMS platform doesn’t offer online is that you can submit voice-notes as part of a forum discussion or as an accompanying message to your lecturer. I think that’s a rather neat advantage over the online format.

The app that I picked that my students use is ChatterPix Kids. They love this app because they can bring to life anything they have created and then showcase it on FreshGrade. The buttons are easy to use and the kids love to get creative. The end result always leaves them laughing.

Love this app and so do the kids. It is straightforward and basically prompts you the whole way. The kids love making items, math, plants, etc.. talk! Great recommendation.

As an academic advisor, a big part of my job is referring students to useful information on websites. I am getting good at cutting through the marketing and hype. Usually my students are searching for resources on UBC’s website (on their phone) but increasingly they are asking for assistance in locating admissions or study abroad information from other universities. This week I was helping a student explore two graduate programs in the USA. I found Stanford University’s mobile website (stanford.edu) very user friendly. The website has a balanced approach with respect to information hierarchy and design. Visitors get well organized information and quick answers to their most immediate questions – programs and admissions. The navigation is clear and easy. The images displayed are relevant and inviting.
The second school was John Hopkins University (jhu.edu). The university’s website has bold news headlines and clever titles inviting engagement and exploration. Its creative layout and organization is modern and appealing but it does rely heavily on scrolling and drop down menus that may distract the user from their initial goals. Overall, I liked both these website and I think UBC could learn from these two user friendly examples.

The app that I recommend for my students is the Microsoft Teams mobile app to download. Students can just click on the website link from their email, but the browser does not always work appropriately on their phones which I then spend most of the conference call trying to trouble shoot the technology glitches. With the app, students can easily share their screens, files and use the chat function throughout the call. Each phone uses different web browser and we always run into compatibility issues with that platform.

Hey Kristin,
I was also thinking of the MS Teams App so I thought I would add onto yours. I enjoy using the Teams app and I find it overall easy to navigate, students do as well. What I like most about it is when students are having trouble finding a specific post I can easily copy a link to the post to share with them and bring them exactly where they need to be. Something I think the app can improve on is the location of the link to OneNote. Its in an odd place that students can only find if they know exactly where to look.

I checked out the LMS mobile app for my school: ManageBac. Although the app is only rated 2.1/5 based on 26 ratings, I found the app quite intuitive to use. Navigation is natural and self-evident, and I was able to find things that I use on a daily basis easily. The global search function is really effective, which allows me to search for year groups, classes, groups, units and users. I particularly liked the Scan Coursework function, which allows students to scan and upload their handwritten work easily.

Most of the complaints from the App Store reviews are about the app taking a long time to load, but it was not a problem for me while I tested it out this morning. It also allows me to customize the items I have on my bottom navigation by simply dragging & dropping things into/out of the bar. Overall, the app has passed many of the key mobile usability guidelines, such as categorizing materials into homogenous chunks, maintaining consistency and standards, and having the help and support function to provide relevant, context-driven information for personalized feedback… I’ll definitely be using it on my phone next year!

I searched a Spelling app for my students called: Word Beach https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/word-beach-fun-spelling-games/id1286254804
It was very easy to navigate through & extremely appealing in image & design. It seemed like students from primary (grade 3) to intermediate (grade 4/5) would be able to use this app easily without any adult support in explanation. It was reviewed at 4.3/5 stars by users and nothing negative in comments about display or advertisements or pop ups. I may actually use this with my students! Thanks for the motivation

I searched a Spelling app for my students called: Word Beach https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/word-beach-fun-spelling-games/id1286254804
It was very easy to navigate through & extremely appealing in image & design. It seemed like students from primary (grade 3) to intermediate (grade 4/5) would be able to use this app easily without any adult support in explanation. It was reviewed at 4.3/5 stars by users and nothing negative in comments about display or advertisements or pop ups. I may actually use this with my students! Thank you!

I took a look at Google Translate, a tool my students use often (much more often while working at home!) but that I haven’t used very much. I found using it on the web was very easy but the app really shone! I was able to speak a sentence and have it translated into French, something that would be very useful for my elementary aged French Immersion students as they have often had a maximum of one year of English language instruction and struggle with their spelling in English. I can see how dictating a sentence in English and getting a (not bad) French translation is very useful. By playing around with it a bit I can also see how many of my students’ writing improved dramatically in April! I suspected that this was the case but by using Google Translate I can see how they got grammatically correct sentences in French quite easily.

Not sure if you already know this, but you can take photos of writing and it will translate it too! I used it all the time with a girl from Vietnam. She just kept an iPad at her desk all the time and used it autonomously to help her navigate learning English when I couldn’t get to her right away to help her.

Yes, this is a very useful tool as well! I often recommend it to parents who are struggling with helping their students with tasks at home when the parents do not speak French.

The website/app that my students use the most is Reddit. I was just on it to see what I can comment about in terms of usability…. and a loooong time later, here I am. I learned a lot of interesting things though. Reddit is mobile friendly in the sense that the information is simply organized and you can keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Comments and ratings are easy to see, searching and navigation are intuitive, and hours can be spent going lower and lower into the rabbit hole!

I have decided to look into fresh grade from a student perspective. I know a lot of primary teachers used this app during remote learning and had success with it. In general the page is bright and well displayed. The content is easy to find with a side bar tool and you can scroll easily through portfolios or posted assignments. The page itself is intuitive and students can easily find what they need.

At times it can be difficult to download PDFs, videos or word documents from a mobile device. They might not be compatible, take a long time to load or simply not work at all. I had many students have difficulty with this.

As soon as I was reading your post I was thinking of the uploading issues we would always run into. I thought it was our school’s wifi connection, but it sounds like more of the site’s issue?

Popplet! This is an app that is a simple yet engaging way to create mind maps. Last year we used it to pick out key points of articles. It would be great for students to use it with their own research projects too by collecting all the information they need in point form, this way they aren’t plagiarizing. They can add photos, change the colour of the boxes, save it to the camera roll and easily upload it to FreshGrade.

As I am switching grades and subjects, I took some time trying to find an app that could be used with my new classes, while something that I have used before, so I decided on FlipGrid, which was good, because I got to see it from a student’s perspective with this course. As someone who gets distracted easily, I liked it because there wasn’t a lot where I could get lost in at the beginning. The main student screen is very basic, although students may find this a bit boring. Going into the actual responding, there is a good balance, with the topic or question and then other student’s posts. I could see students immediately watching the other videos right away, maybe getting distracted from their own posting. When they start to post, they could also get off task with choosing stickers or getting the “perfect” selfie.

A mobile tool that I played around with as if I was a student was Google Slides. I am coming from the perspective as a student in an elementary classroom. Using Google Slides is easy to access and put information in, however, it is not fully functional to use on a mobile device as it is more difficult to access the animations and transitions. As a student you could easily get the majority of the work imputed using Google Slides on a mobile device and then will need to switch over to using a laptop to complete the fine tuning of the slide presentations.

Adobe Scan
With library and school closures, students don’t always have access to scanners. One tool that students can use to scan homework or documents is Adobe Scan. It is free and allows you to take a picture of your document and turns it into a pdf. I think it is really user friendly. The app directly takes you to a camera when it opens. You just need to aim at your document. the app detects the borders of your page and snaps a photo to scan. This process minimizes confusion for the user by taking them directly to the start of the process. Although there are other more advanced features in the app, the functions are not all over the screen and are not required for basic functionality. The app also makes great use of color to highlight buttons. One small thing that could improve the usability of this app is the speed of detecting and capturing documents. Users need to keep the phone still for a few seconds while the image is processed, which can be difficult to do.

This is a very interesting exercise indeed because apart from Kahoot! https://kahoot.com/ I did not do much with my students on mobile. That will change after this course. I used Wevideo with my students https://www.wevideo.com/ (mind you I paid for it myself, it is behind a paywall). So I was curious and I took just a very quick look on my phone. Oh yeah, my students would be using the computer to make videos. I would never try it on a phone. Thanks for a great exercise.

I picked Cambridge dictionary and I used the mobile website version. I thought there was too much information and too many options on the landing page. If you don’t know your way around this website, you could easily waste time looking for the information that you need. I have never noticed the number of advertisements on this website. It was a bit of an eye opener for me.

Using Teams in my classroom I have noticed that iPads and phones are not usually able to share screen, or if they are they can’t share system audio. These types of different features for different users makes it difficult to teach and allow everyone to contribute equally.

I tried the Canvas app – it is easy to use and navigate with a static menu bar at the bottom of the screen and an account menu bar dropdown on the top left. I can edit which courses I want on my dashboard, see information for all my courses in the calendar, to do, and notifications, and can navigate smoothly and quickly to where I want to go – except there’s no search bar – search is also not a functionality on the site for web, either. I can also easily submit an assignment in multiple ways if I wanted to – this is good to know, as I’ve never submitted an assignment on Canvas mobile before, but now I know the ways my students can submit assignments using mobile.

We use Loom for students and teachers to do screen recordings and tutorials. I was pleased to discover there is a mobile app. What I really liked about it is that when it’s teaching you how to use the app you scroll through one instruction at a time. There is one action and one concept associated with each “swipe” making it very easy to follow along. There are only three buttons, screen, camera and videos allowing you to record the screen, record the camera, or view and manage videos. Depending on your focus you get only the detail you need for each of those purposes and it walks you through the exact steps. For a detailed tutorial they use an effective two minute video (not too long, not too short) rather than text and good use of visual cues instead of text to guide you through using the app itself.

I’ve been using Prodigy in the classroom for a few years now. I’ve tried it on a computer but I thought I would take the opportunity to test it out on my phone, so I downloaded the app. I was surprised as to how well it transferred. It maintained all the features and was easy to navigate.

My school uses MyBlueprint as a form of ePortfolios for students and although there were some differences between the mobile website version compared to the desktop website version, they were both easy to navigate and use. All the features were present in both forms. It is actually easier to login using the mobile version since students have individual QR codes they can use to login. The one knock I would give on the mobile version is that the portfolio is viewed as a list instead of a grid. In one way, it is more organized as the list is in chronological order, but in another, it looks less visually appealing/substantial compared to a grid. Besides that, I did not run into any usability issues.

Kahoot is one I think we’ve all used. It works great in class and like anything, the app version is better than the website. I’ve used it from both sides and I’ve used it as a teacher, creating a quiz on my phone and it’s been super simple.

In my class, the kids really enjoy reading books on EPIC. I haven’t actually spent much time on it. Usually I just introduce the basics and they take it from there. Today I decided to explore some of the features a little bit further. I noticed that it is very user-friendly. The books are very well-organized. They are categorized into sections. I looked into the “educational video” and the “read to me” sections. Videos loaded very quickly. This application is very easy to navigate in terms of scrolling and clicking. I usually don’t have students approach me with issues. I have had the occasional student complain that their video is lagging. Other than that I think this is a great app for kids to engage in reading. The kids love earning badges and leveling up. This application also tracks number of books read, pages flipped, hours spent, and videos watched. It’s a great way for teachers to monitor their students.

Check it out here: https://www.getepic.com/

I want to reflect on an app called SchoolMessenger as a parent. It is used by Thams Vally district school board to manage the conversations between parents and teachers. The function is as simple as sending and receiving messages. However, I am not sure whether it is not allowed by the software, policy, or teachers who simply don’t want it to happen. Parents in my class cannot send a private message to the teachers. There are two ways a parent can contact teachers: one, reply to a private message sending by the teacher, which is rare; second, reply to a general message that everyone involved in this message can see it. I understand that teachers will be distracted and interrupted by some parents sending private messages, but those parents who want to contact teachers for reasons feel quite inconvenient. By the way, this app’s usability design is more like software in the 20th Century.

I chose to examine PhotoMath, which students can use to solve algebraic math problems. Honestly, the functionality is amazing (which is almost frustrating to say, as students often use it to cheat on homework assignments). It is incredibly intuitive, wastes no time with navigating to the primary desired use (it starts up much like a QR code scanner, reading to photograph your math equation), and differentiates it’s different pieces of information in clear ways.

Context

Your Task

Make a Post

32 replies on “Exercise C: Mobile Usability in Your Context”