Bien+Dit+Website

=Bien Dit Website=

**Explanation of Design:** This is an online text book for French students and teachers. The book is meant to be interactive and although some of the functions work well, the page view is not exactly what a teacher wants when using the book to introduce new vocabulary.

**Design Issue:** The screen only shows a portion of the information and makes it difficult for students to get a global view of the unit. The address bar shows and any other tool bar for that matter. The heading takes up about 1/3 of the page and one has to scroll to the next portion of the page. In reading a hardback covered book, a reader gets to predict what comes next and with this poor design, the reader only gets to see what is there. It appears that the designers missed a step in the evaluation process. Page layout and usability are necessary for ease of interaction within the website. Within this textbook, the reader is constrained and can never see the pages as they appear in a real text-book. The way a reader predicts new information is cognitively changing because of the design. They will get information in bits and pieces instead of all together as a whole. For a reader, it is important to be able to put the pieces together and the design fails to do so which makes this textbook more difficult for struggling learners. **Recommendation for design improvement:**The layout design of each interactive textbook page should be a popout page so that the entire page can be viewed at one time instead of portions only. A test of the usability should be done or have been done before having published this textbook. According to Shneiderman (p 146), "Early usability studies can be conducted using paper mockups of screen displays to assess user reactions to wording, layout, and sequencing. A test administrator plays the role of the computer by flip-ping the pages while asking a participant user to carry out typical tasks. This informal testing is inexpensive, rapid, and usually productive."