Is Usability always Productive in Learning Environments?

Abstract

Learning games in virtual environments are invariably designed with a lot of attention paid to maximising their ease of use. It is widely believed that the more usable a learning tool the more effectively transposed the content learnt. Although this idea is far from unfounded, it is too easily accepted as a general rule, and we believe that too much credit is given to usability, to the detriment of the pedagogical objectives. As a matter of fact, struggling with the task does not necessarily impede the learning, and can even help the learner memorising content.

In this research, we have studied how deliberately ill-designed interactions could yield better recollection of educational content. In a simple assembly task in Virtual Reality, we have calibrated the identification and positioning operations of various items at different levels of obviousness and practicality, only to observe how learners would perform differentiatedly. The results fail to capture any direct effect, but results indicate that it should not yet be ruled out that poor usability can indeed be leveraged to optimise the learning expectations of learners in a practical training activity.