photoshop with friends: a synchronous learning community...
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Figure 1: Photoshop withFriends is a Facebook applicationfor Photoshop users wherelearners can exchangejust-in-time help.
Photoshop with Friends:A Synchronous LearningCommunity for Graphic Design
Juho KimMIT CSAILCambridge, MA [email protected]
Diana JosephLearning ResourcesAdobe SystemsSan Jose, CA [email protected]
Benjamin MalleyUniv. of MichiganAnn Arbor, MI [email protected]
Krzysztof Z. GajosSEAS Harvard Univ.Cambridge, MA [email protected]
Joel BrandtAdvanced Technologies LabsAdobe SystemsSan Francisco, CA [email protected]
Robert C. MillerMIT CSAILCambridge, MA [email protected]
Mira DontchevaAdvanced Technologies LabsAdobe SystemsSan Francisco, CA [email protected]
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA.
ACM 978-1-4503-0556-3/12/02.
AbstractPhotoshop with Friends is an online community oflearners exchanging just-in-time help on graphic designtasks. The system attempts to provide an interactive,visual, context-aware, and personalized mode of learning.Developed as a Facebook application, Photoshop withFriends allows users to help each other in live sessions,with built-in screen sharing, recording, and voice chatsupport. Major design decisions are guided by twolaboratory studies that identified challenges in learninggraphic design skills on the web.
Keywordsgraphic design; online learning; synchronous help
ACM Classification KeywordsH.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation:User interfaces]: graphic design.
General TermsDesign
IntroductionAn increasing number of professional and amateurdesigners are learning graphical design software to createwebsites, retouch photos, and merge images. Whiletrial-and-error is a popular learning strategy for many [1],
users often combine exploration with external help [2],learning on one’s own using prepared resources andlearning with others. The web has expanded the amountand diversity of help options available, affecting the wayusers find, access, and learn from external help resources.Today’s learners use the web to find information and postquestions on social Q&A sites and user forums.
Figure 2: To better support thevisual nature of graphical tasks,questions are labeled with imagethumbnails rather than justwords.
Figure 3: Session recordingsallow not only asker and answererbut also others to review andlearn from previous sessions.
To better understand learning challenges in locating,understanding, and employing external help in the contextof graphic design tasks, we conducted two laboratorystudies. The first study investigated learning on one’s ownby searching the web for information. We found thatparticipants struggled to formulate accurate queries, failedto recognize appropriate webpages, and had difficulty intransferring knowledge from the web content to the taskat hand. The second study focused on learning withothers by connecting with remote teachers forsynchronous help. While the visual and synchronousnature of the interactions made it easier for learners tocommunicate their problems, we observed that theseteacher-learner pairs faced difficulties in building andmaintaining shared context, and in managing the cost ofsynchronous social interaction.
Based on the results of the studies, we extracted thefollowing design goals for better learning environments:- Support the visual language of design- Encourage learning-by-doing- Support various learning interactions- Lower the overhead of synchronous sessions.
With these goals in mind, we built Photoshop withFriends, a learning platform that provides flexible andaccessible synchronous learning to anyone (Figure 1). Itaims to support a community of learners exchangingjust-in-time help for graphic design tasks.
System DesignTo support the visual language, Photoshop with Friendsuses images as primary unit of communication. Thesystem encourages browsing through user-posted imagesin a grid layout (Figure 2), with text descriptionssupplementing each image. Pairs start a synchronoussession upon joining a virtual room and agreeing to worktogether. To lower the barrier to joining in synchronoussessions, we implement two features. First, a lobbychatroom allows pairs to clarify their objective beforestarting a session. This prevents inaccurate descriptionsfrom misguiding the teacher and helps learners revise theirdescription. Second, each session is limited to 5 minutesto minimize the teacher’s time commitment and makeexiting sessions socially appropriate.
The system supports various learning methods: 1) learnerscan choose to record a session so that they or others canreview the recording later and discuss (Figure 3), 2) thesystem can recommend relevant web tutorials and forumentries for each session to further the learning, 3) teacherscan add video replies to learner questions asynchronouslyby self-recording their solution, and 4) spectators can joinlive sessions and watch other pairs work on tasks. Inaddition to enhancing the synchronous learningexperience, our design also addresses community-building,teacher motivation, and matchmaking.
The next step is to evaluate the system with actual usersto see if it achieves the stated design goals.
References[1] D. G. Novick, E. Elizalde, and N. Bean. Toward a more
accurate view of when and how people seek help withcomputer applications. In SIGDOC 2007, pages 95–102.
[2] J. Rieman. A field study of exploratory learning strategies.ACM ToCHI, 3:189–218, September 1996.