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Aesthetics vs Pragmatics
I’ll be honest… It took me as much time to select the image accompanying this post as it did to write it. Afterall, a picture tells a thousand words and is more likely to engage you than an alliterative title or a well-placed citation.
You don’t need to be a graphic designer, visual artist, or marketing executive to understand the importance of design. As educators, part of the instructional design of our online platform is its aesthetic design. Can the student see all key elements at a glance? Does it engage the student? Is it clear? Does it look good? Are the images denotative, connotative, or symbolic? Yet there seems to be a divide–visually interesting and visually clear have been placed on a continuum instead of acting in collaboration.
I prefer visually interesting, seeing it as an inducement to engage students, which is why I clicked on the link to Shane Alexander Kelley’s Doctoral dissertation, Beauty in Online Learning Environments: A Quantitative Study on Student Engagement in Blended Courses, assuming it would prove my choices correct. I was wrong! Alexander Kelley demonstrates: “the usability of an online learning environment is more important than the “look” of that environment.”
Alexander Kelley’s research raises many questions.
- Does the look of an environment impact on its usability?
- Do aesthetics impact engagement?
- How do we ensure our learning environments are usable?
- How do students know a technology is usable if they are not encouraged to use it?
- Is there a point where visual design equals pedagogical design?
- How can Kelley’s work inform our practice?
Katrina Cutcliffe
To quote at length from his findings:
“The finding that expressive aesthetics do not significantly increase student engagement also holds potential benefits for improving student-technology interaction. Academic leaders suggest that discipline and self-regulation are key qualities for students in online education. Rather than desiring to encounter the most innovative online learning tools, students are more interested in clearly understanding the expectations for the technology used within a course. This desire for “just the basics” corresponds well with HCI research into online environments. Through studying Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory (EDT) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), it is apparent that if the online environment facilitates self-regulation and is perceived as useful, users will be satisfied and continue to use that system. Usability, not aesthetics, seems to be the appropriate focal point of online environment design.
Relatedly, the findings of this study have implications for our understanding of the interplay of usability and aesthetics. HCI research has held a long-standing debate on this interplay, with one side proposing that the aesthetic impression of a system influences evaluation of the usability of that system and the other side suggesting that usability influences perceived aesthetics. In the present study, student engagement was not significantly different while expressive aesthetics changed and usability stayed the same (as demonstrated through the field test). The findings of this study lend evidence to the importance of usability over aesthetics and help promote this vein of research beyond the realm of HCI research and into the field of higher education.” (69-70)
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