An exercise on usability puts theory into practice
At the end of a semester-long course in digital journalism , I asked my students at the University of Navarra in Spain to say what they thought was the most interesting or useful part of the course. The survey was anonymous, so I give it some credibility. The question was open-ended. The second-most-mentioned item was a class exercise I gave them in which they had to judge the navigability, usability, transparency , and other factors of any website they liked. This group exercise put theory into practice and developed their analytical skills . (No. 1 was the video interviews with digital media entrepreneurs from Latin America. They are in Spanish and can be seen on my YouTube channel . Accompanying text in English is available elsewhere on this blog.) The exercise took 45 minutes and followed a 45-minute lecture on the theory of Internet design, especially as it applied to taking advantage of mobile and social platforms. First, I told the students that they were going to do an ungrade...