Skip to main content

An Introduction to Brightspace: Content Nesting and Navigation


What is content nesting?
Brightspace has many issues; alas, the most user-driven may be its nesting. Nesting is a term that describes the way content flows and is able to be accessed from a main screen. In a study done by Flood and O’Reilly (2006), "credibility, usability, and accessibility were the three issues in formulating the minimal set of guidelines for website design... insuring that the table content makes sense, providing clear and consistent navigation mechanisms." In a sense, the more accessible you make the content and the easier it is to navigate, the better your website is—so much so that these features are two of the three pillars of website design. Brightspace can therefore be judged against this measure to see how user friendly it is by means of navigation and content nesting.

Okay, what does that have to do with Brightspace?
Brightspace, like many other online academic websites, has a plethora of tools and medias with which students are supposed to navigate their classes and academic scholarship. The main issue that prevents the student (the user) from accessing and using these tools (the product) successfully is the website itself. The design of the website, which will be discussed later, is non-conducive to learning or navigation.

For example, look at any discussion thread. How did you get there? Did you go Class → Content → Announcement → Discussion Link → Thread? Or did you try Class → Tools → Discussions → Thread? Or better yet, a personal favorite of mine, Class → Content → Table of Contents → Due Soon → Discussion Post → Thread? There are many long and tedious ways to find a commonly used area of the website, and each contains at least three steps. Drawing off of the work of Rex P. Bringula, in usability, one of the main ideas is that a product, whatever it may be, should be as accessible as possible. You could have a great product that is very useful, but if you cannot make it available to your audience, it decreases in value. Enter Brightspace.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The UX behind Among Us

The online multiplayer game, Among Us, took the quarantined world by storm. A year ago the game boasted under a hundred players. Today, the social deduction game has nearly 400,000 players in a given month. Players join the online game to play against their friends or randomly assigned players from the internet in a murder mystery free for all. At the start of a game, users are assigned the role of crewmate or imposter. Crewmates must complete mini tasks and identify the imposter who is running around murdering crewmates and avoiding detection. The game has proven to be incredibly successful, but how well does it stand up to user experience standards? Accessibility This game appears rather simplistic; however, there are a few major accessibility design flaws. The first of which is something that I personally would have never considered until I discussed the game with a friend. The primary objective of Among Us is to identify the imposter who is sneaking around and killing crewmates...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thanksgiving in the Midst of a Pandemic

This year was surely the most saddening Thanksgiving I've ever experienced. Don't get me wrong, I am so grateful for my family, friends, significant other, and most importantly our health. But this year's Thanksgiving dinner was incredibly depressing. A month before Thanksgiving, my mom decided that she would host this year at our house. This meant that my grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, cousin, great-aunt, and 2 second-cousins would come to our house for our annual dinner with my mom, my dad, and me. Everything changed suddenly when my grandfather, who has major health conditions, started feeling ill. Now, he generally feels ill all the time since he has problems with his heart and spends 100% of the year under a heated blanket. But he started to panic at the thought that it might be COVID. My mom consulted my dad and me to hear our thoughts on canceling Thanksgiving and insisting that everyone stay in their respective houses for the holiday. My dad stated that he was conce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Think “Experience Architecture”

At the beginning of this class, we were assigned readings and videos about airports in order to conceptualize the main theme of the course, experience architecture. Experience architecture is the design of spaces (architecture) for users (experience), such as an airport. In de Botton's work, "A Week at the Airport," de Botton addresses a doubt about experience architecture that sheds light on the scope in which the concept applies. "Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration...[and] yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of a chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic." (de Botton, 2009, p. 3-4). Simply put, experience architecture is design that is meant for the experience of the user. De Botton communicates this through an exp...
Post a Comment
Read more