ApliaText Online Textbook Reader
Project Overview: ApliaText is an innovative online textbook reader leveraging all the web has to offer to improve reading and learning experience.
Goal: To provide textbook content online and seamlessly integrate with student learning behavior.
My Role: User experience designer
Company: Aplia
Year: October 2008 – May 2009 (+ongoing iteration)
Discovery – Understanding Users Needs
We conducted extensive research on how and why students read textbooks. We found out that traditional e-book are usually based on physical textbook metaphor and it wasn’t the best approach. For example, referring to actual book pages make sense for physical books because of page space limitation. But for online reading, it is more natural to put a section worth of content into one online page for continuous reading. Our team redesign reading experience so that we leverage advantages we have online.
We found that most of the time, students use textbook when they are doing their homework. They usually switch back and forth between the two. They also do highlighting and note taking as part of the learning process. The highlight helps them learn while they read and also keep track of things they want to recall when they prepare for the exam.
Design
The main functionality of ApliaText is page navigation. For the actual textbook, it is very easy for students to flip between pages. They usually refer to pages from their memory. Instead of referring by page number, it’s natural for students to notice what’s on the page. For example, images, bold texts, and paragraph layout. We designed an iTunes-coverflow style page navigation as the book header bar that allow students to go to different pages and chapters.
This flipbook is also accessible from student’s homework page itself. When they are stuck with their homework, they have access to the textbook right away.
Key terms are clickable and the description will be shown as a tooltip next to it.
Highlighting can be done by simply highlight the text using cursor. The highlight icon will appear, students can click the icon to highlight. All highlights are aggregated in the Chapter Recap page. It helps students collect their highlights when they want to revisit them, usually for their test.
What I’ve Learned
Following real world physical object metaphor is not always a good idea. It sure give the clue for users on how they can interact right away but interacting using mouse is different from hands. My favorite “bad” example on this subject is the design of digital calculator. I don’t understand why they make it look like an actual calculator? It’s too cumbersome to try to click the right digits and operators. Excel-style (entering string of text) calculator is a much better way to approach the design problem in a digital world.
Disclaimer: This is only a brief look of my work. This project is owned by Aplia and I only want to show a few sample materials. For more details on particular projects, feel free to contact me at chatreez [at] gmail [dot] com.