Do we know how to think like an 18 Year Old?
Mar. 14, 2007 by ravishan
Why this question? I will explain that shortly… But, I wanted to share this with you this story first. FWIW which has nothing to with the topic at hand… A couple of days ago I had gone to Glastonbury to visit a friend of mine. On the way back I stopped at Panera Bread on Main St, Glastonbury. I went ordered the Tuscan Chicken sandwich with no tomatoes for Varun, our 14 year old. While at it, I wanted to pick up 6 bagels, so I chose them with a lot of pain (they have so many tempting varieties and I wanted to keep it to 6). When I was ready to pay, the woman at the counter said “The bagels are on me”. Thanking my stars, I was happy to take it. I waited at the other end for the sandwich when another woman came by and asked me if I would mind taking some cookies with me. I have a feeling that she thought I paid for the bagels and was also picking up the sandwich. I said sure and she brought me some really nice cookies (8 large ones)…
So I left the place carrying close to $18 worth of goods having paid only $6.75. Good day overall. Suddenly it occured to me that there may be TV cameras following me (like the candid camera deal). When nothing happened, I called my buddy to make sure that I didn’t look poor or desperate. He assured me I looked just fine. Oops, forgot to tell you it was 8:30 PM. And I can assure you that the bagels are just fine and so are the oatmeal & raisin cookies in case you want to point out that they must have been stale!!!
Now to the question… We are in the business of delivering services for faculty, staff and students. And the services we deliver in a lot of cases are based on our own interpretation of what the needs out there are and how best to package it so that it will be adapted. I think we do a great job doing this on the faculty and staff side and also in many services delivered to students. The question I have is can we do better when it comes to students? This would mean that we understand how best to package our own services, the basic network, other software and learning modules, in a way that it gets used by this new group.
And I believe that in order to do this, we need to understand how the students think when it comes to using technologies. Several of us have children in that age group and we all think we know them well, but the reality is that it is hard to keep up with them. But we have to in order to remain successful. So the question is how should we position ourselves to do this. With the age gap between ITS staff and students widening year by year, it is probably a good time to take this on.
FYI: Average length of time a staff member has worked for ITS is is 9.8 years with a standard deviation of 6.5 years. 10% of our staff have been here for more than 20 years and 50% have been here longer than 9 years….
It is quite obvious that in order to develop something that gets used by a constituent group, we have only two choices: involve them in a substantive way before designing systems or design systems based on our own assumptions about usability. If we do it the first way, more users are going to willingly use the system; if it is the latter, they will use it because they have to (like looking up grades or classlists). In reality we try to mix them both. We try to involve the faculty members when we are designing/choosing systems for them and we had student focus groups when we did the original EP design.
But the problem is getting them involved in a substantive way. The system/software we develop for them is not the primary thing in their minds… So, whereas the current method of involving them helps, the interest is not consistent and it is understandable. The recent exercise in content management is a good example of this.
What I am asking is if there is a way to use our own student employees (we have 144 employees on our payroll amounting to about 6 FTE) in some meaningful role. I know the issues of developing systems based on input from just the technically advanced students. I would be more interested in knowing if we can involve them in developing user interface prototypes that appeals to the students.
I know the pitfalls of student developed systems – they have not been sustainable because of the way they are developed. But, what if we use our students in developing these prototypes with staff supervision? Of course it will require investment in staff resources, but may be the return on investment may be worth it.
The other advantage that I see with this approach is that they will push the envelopes in terms os using newer technologies for development. We do not adapt newer technologies that easily and for the right reasons. But, this will provide us an opportunity to look at a few and see it in action (which is vastly different from reading about it).
So I am basically suggesting that we have a formal student group that is charged with experimenting and prototyping systems and interfaces for use in developing software for the use of students, but overseen by ITS staff and asking for feedback…
Working closely with the students I have also noticed the widening gap in how I perceive and interact with our environment and the way they do (I stop somewhat short of admiting I’m actually getting older…).
I really like the idea of having students participate in the development of user interface prototypes (without being involved in the actual programming of the system itself). Just asking them for suggestions or feedback results in wide-ranging and sometimes poorly thought-out or impractical input. Having them actually design a prototype means they would have to refine their concept of what the user interface should be and, in the process, give a good deal more thought to how students would use that interface to interact with the system. I think this could be a vaulable exercise for them and provide useful input to ITS.
I have two reactions.
One, we are trying to figure out how to understand the practices of our users in various ways. One way is through our ethnography project wherein we dispatch hired students to make maps, draw pictures, take photographs and then to tell us about these materials as a way of trying to better understand how they interact with both the virtual and the built environment. Building these sorts of activities into our daily routines seems a productive step forward.
Two, ITS is largely about infrastructure, not content, and so we need to find “content providers” that want to partner with us in developing next generation interfaces. Good news is that the library, a major content provider, is about to embark on a major new re-design of how students and others interact with their ‘content’. Thus it makes sense to figure out how to build into these processes student involvement.
– mike