Learning to Use, Useful for Learning: A Usability Study of Google Apps for Education

Abstract

Using results from an original survey instrument, this study examined student perceptions of how useful Google Apps for Education (GAFE) was in students’ learning of core concepts in a first-year college composition course, how difficult or easy it was for students to interact with GAFE, and how students ranked specific affordances of the technology in terms of its usability and usefulness. Students found GAFE relatively easy to use and appreciated its collaborative affordances. The researchers concluded that GAFE is a useful tool to meet learning objectives in the college composition classroom.

Keywords

Google Apps for Education, cloud-computing, networked learning communities, student motivation, instructional technology, usability testing, first-year composition

 

Figure 1. Previous use of Google Drive, n = 55.

Materials

The independent variable in this study was Google Apps for Education.³ In GAFE applications like Drive and Docs, files can be shared with the public, with members of the institution, or with specific individuals with an email address using the “Share” button (always located in the upper right of each application). Google Drive enables customized group and individual sharing and permissions at the folder and file levels, so entire folders of Google Drive (and other files within a folder) can either inherit parent folder permissions or have custom permissions set.

Sharing a Google Doc means that those given appropriate permissions may access and edit the file simultaneously, an affordance that is not shared by other word processors. Microsoft Word, for example, can share files and track changes, but only a single user may access the file at a given time. Google Docs tracks every change made by every user, and every change can be undone by rolling the file back to any previous version. The document is saved automatically after every change as long as stable Internet access is available, so there is little concern about losing data as a result of unsaved changes.

Sharing folders and files supports the creation of a composing community focused on a common subject or object of inquiry. The teacher can create the collaborative environment using shared folders and a scaffolded writing assignment that requires file sharing among groups and associated feedback on written work. Once shared with appropriate permissions (the authors generally required sharing with editing permissions to enable collaboration), students and instructors alike were able to easily insert comments and make suggestions.

The comments feature in Google Docs affords rich commentary from students and teachers alike throughout the composing process, from low-stakes feedback in invention, drafting, peer review, and revision, to formal assessment from the instructor. Comments enable multi-way conversations that empower students to respond to peer and teacher feedback. Google Docs supports unlimited commentary on highlighted text passages, and comments can be threaded to at least one level in subsequent responses. Comments can also be marked as resolved, an action that clears the on-screen comment thread but saves the entire comment text for access as needed. Users can respond to comments asynchronously or in real time during a composing session. In addition, synchronous in-document chat is available, meaning users can “text” one another as they work together on a document. The combination of collaborative tools makes Google Docs and Google Drive versatile applications for group composing activities in synchronous and asynchronous contexts.

Following Miller-Cochran and Rodrigo’s heuristic (2006, p. 102), we determined tasks based on the following categories:

• tasks users would need to be able to do to use GAFE in any context (i.e., login, determine an appropriate app based on need, access various apps, create and name files, organize files)
• tasks users must repeatedly do in this specific context (i.e., share a file and/or folder, upload files, add, read, reply to, and resolve comments, access revision history, work synchronously and asynchronously in shared documents, use word processing affordances of Google Docs to compose and format, use editing/suggesting to make revisions)
• tasks student-users have had trouble with in the past, based on instructor observation and experience (i.e., saving files in the correct places, locating files, exporting files to other formats)

The following attributes of GAFE, or tasks performed by users, were assessed on the survey:

• Account setup
• Login process
• Visual interface/visceral design/look and feel
• Text styling
• Icons
• Adding comments
• Reading comments
• Sharing files or folders
• Collaborating with others
• Revision history
• Cloud-based access and storage
• Synchronous chat
• Platform
• Browser
• Location of use
• Familiarity with the interface prior to exposure

The survey instrument was an original design constructed as a Google form within the GAFE interface. Google Forms was chosen as the survey container because it is free, easy to use and share, because all participants already had Google Apps accounts, and because it has the ability to export results into more robust data analysis software. The survey consisted of 28 questions, in four sections: Access and Use, Function and Utility, Effectiveness, and Attitudes. Survey questions were designed to obtain data related to the five factors of usability and used the standard Likert and Likert-type scales to measure attitudes and values along the negative-positive dimension. As advocated by DeVellis (2012), questions regarding preference should use an even number of options on the Likert and Likert-type scales. There is still considerable debate about whether an odd-number or even-number of responses is more effective, but in order to avoid confusion about the midpoint option’s meaning, the tendency to over-choose the midpoint rather than thinking critically, and data tending to merge toward the mean, we used a 4-point scale for the section on function and utility. However, when asking participants about how their expectations matched their experience of using Google Drive, a 5-point scale gave students a midpoint value—matched my expectations—that fell directly between the better than expected or worse than expected values.

Procedure

After the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board, the survey was administered to participants online and shared as a general (non-personalized) URL via email message to individual students’ institutional email accounts. Google forms offer no method for tracking whether a recipient has completed the survey. As a result, each researcher sent a follow-up email message to all potential participants one week after the initial message to the same students, asking them to consider completing the survey if they had not yet done so. Students were given a choice of when to take the survey; their participation was unmonitored and researchers did not interact with participants as they completed it. One week following the reminder email message to students, the authors closed the survey to additional results.

Participants provided consent by reviewing and approving the consent statement online, which enabled them to complete the survey. Because the authors also served in a position of authority as teachers, participants were invited to participate in the study after all assignments had been submitted. Students received no benefit for completing the survey.

The authors collected real-time and reflective use information throughout the semester, but made no attempt to connect data collected via these methods with survey data. This usability test sought to generate generalizable data on overall usability for the tasks of composing rather than real-time data on the ease of use of a particular interface or activity in GAFE. Although the authors collected qualitative data from participants using open-ended questions in the survey, the survey’s usability questions were quantitative and sought to address use of specific aspects of GAFE for composing practices. Aside from the consent statement, no survey question was required. As a result, n values sometimes fluctuated from question to question.

The survey did not require or allow personally identifying information to be included, other than demographic information as noted in the previous Participants section. Aside from the survey responses, the only additional data collected and recorded during the survey was a completion timestamp, recorded in the form m/d/yyyy hh:mm:ss. Although no personally identifying information was collected, the survey results are considered confidential, but not anonymous, because the field of possible participants was known to the researchers. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, the confidential results are not re-identifiable, and no attempts have been made to correlate responses to individual students. Reported data are aggregated so that no specific individual can be inferred in the results.

Individual records were downloaded from Google Forms and stored in Google Sheets (spreadsheet) in a limited-access Google Drive folder physically housed on a Google server and accessible only by the researchers. String fields were converted to numeric fields (Strongly Disagree = 1, Disagree = 2, Agree = 3, Strongly Agree = 4) before importing. For yes/no questions, an answer of yes was assigned a value of 1 and no was assigned a value of 0. All variables were assigned names related to the question and the aligned construct in order to facilitate analysis and aggregation. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including percentages, means, standard deviation, and frequencies. Data were visualized using charts and graphs functionality within Google Sheets.

Results

In an effort to address the usability of GAFE as a tool for collaborative composing, the following sections discuss the tools used to access GAFE, the location of GAFE use, the browsers used to access GAFE, the students’ perceptions of Google Drive’s interface, and the ranking of the most and least useful functions.

Tools Used to Access GAFE

Students identified platforms they used to access GAFE. Researcher objectives were to differentiate between networked computer access and networked smartphone or tablet access, to evaluate multiple platform usability as a cloud-based (rather than locally installed) application, and to specify the ownership of the devices in order to roughly determine their access to technology. Students could select any platform(s) that applied. As results in Table 3 and Figure 2 suggest, most students accessed GAFE using a personal computer and/or a school-owned computer. Laptop and desktop computers were combined as a single platform to represent the closing gap between desktop and laptop costs, numbers, and experiences, and to differentiate the “computer” experience of Google Drive from the mobile experience (represented here by smartphone and tablet device). Although 93% of students accessed Google Drive from a personal laptop or desktop, other platforms received high percentages (see Table 3 and Figure 2). Because respondents could select all options that applied, the data demonstrated that students accessed Google Drive from multiple platforms during the study, even though they may have preferred one platform over another.

Table 3. Platforms used to access Google Drive

Platform	Number	Percentage
My personal desktop/laptop	52	93%
My work desktop/laptop	10	18%
College computer during class	40	71%
College computer in a lab (outside of class)	23	41%
My smartphone	19	34%
My tablet device	8	14%

 

Figure 2. Platforms used to access Google Drive.

Location of GAFE Use

To assess access as well as usage preferences, students were asked to choose all locations where they used GAFE. As the data in Table 4 and Figure 3 demonstrated, students regularly accessed Google Drive at home—a likely sign of reliable Internet access.

Table 4. Locations Where Google Drive Was Accessed

Location	Number	Percentage
Home	55	98%
Work	10	18%
Campus classroom	48	86%
Campus elsewhere	16	29%
Other	2	4%

 

Figure 3. Locations where Google Drive was accessed.

Browsers Used to Access GAFE

Students identified the browser they used to access GAFE, a choice that may impact the product’s usability. Google’s own browser, Chrome, is “designed from the ground up to optimize the Google Apps for Education suite of products” and Google recommends using Internet Explorer for running “legacy apps” (Google, n.d.a). Data in Table 5 and Figure 4 showed fairly even distribution among student browser preferences to access GAFE, with Chrome garnering the most uses, possibly as a result of one of the authors modeling its use.

Table 5. Browsers Used to Access Google Drive by Number and Percentage

Browser	Number	Percentage
Internet Explorer	14	25%
Mozilla Firefox	12	21%
Google Chrome	19	34%
Safari	10	18%
Opera	1	2%

 

Figure 4. Browsers used to access Google Drive.

Student Perceptions of Google Drive’s Interface

According to Don Norman (2005, 2013), good design requires that attributes and features are visible, that the relationship between function and control is perceived and exploited, and that constraints are used intelligently so that they do not detract from the experience. High usability correlates to a feeling of effortless ability to discern and enact the right action at the right time.

Students were asked to evaluate the ease of use of specific GAFE features and functions (see Table 6 and Figure 5). The question employed a 4-point Likert scale using values of Very easy (4), Somewhat easy (3), Somewhat difficult (2), and Very difficult (1). The relatively low 95% confidence interval (no greater than ±0.19) of the means suggested students found easy to use specific GAFE features, while the calculated 95% confidence interval suggested that at least 75% of the population represented by the sample would find the GAFE tasks easy to learn, remember, and understand (see Table 6).

Table 6. Ease of Use of Specific Google Drive Features and Functions

	Account Setup	Login Process	Look & Feel	Text Styling	Icons	Adding Comments	Reading Comments	Sharing
Very easy (4)	33	34	31	32	32	35	37	34
Somewhat easy (3)	18	19	16	14	21	17	15	14
Somewhat difficult (2)	3	1	7	7	1	2	2	4
Very difficult (1)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
Responses	54	54	54	53	54	54	54	53
Mean	3.56	3.61	3.44	3.47	3.57	3.61	3.65	3.53
Standard deviation	0.60	0.52	0.71	0.72	0.53	0.60	0.55	0.72
95% conf. interval (mean)	±0.16	±0.14	±0.19	±0.19	±0.14	±0.16	±0.15	±0.19
Positive responses (%)	94.4	98.2	87.0	86.8	98.2	96.3	96.3	90.6
95% conf. interval for positive responses (%)	84.3 – 98.7	89.3 ->99.9	75.3 -93.8	74.9 -93.8	89.3 ->99.9	86.7 -99.7	86.7 -99.7	79.3 -96.3

 

Figure 5. Ease of use of specific Google Drive features and functions.

Given the large number of first-time Google Drive users (see Table 1), students identified fewer issues with usability than might be expected; Norman (2005) correlated a positive feeling or affect toward a design with one’s ability to use it. Students’ perception of the usability of the interface was likely influenced by the similar design to other software. This familiarity likely led to students’ improved perceptions of the tool’s ease of learning, task efficiency, ease of remembering, understandability, and ultimately, their subjective satisfaction—the five factors of usability.

Student Perceptions of Usefulness of Specific Features

We asked students to evaluate the usefulness of specific features of Google Drive, using a Likert scale from Very Useful (4) to Not At All Useful (1). The mean of each set of responses on the 4‑point Likert scale reflects an overall sense of usefulness for specific affordances of Google Drive, with all means scoring above 3 (Somewhat Useful or Very Useful) on the scale. Even the tool perceived to be least useful, Chat (mean = 3.16, n = 53), received overall support, with its lower ranking likely correlating to the fact that the chat affordance is only available synchronously, versus other features that are available at any time. Collaboration, Document Sharing, and Commenting received the highest scores for usefulness. Collaboration developed as a response to increasing comfort with document sharing and comment throughout the semester, which may explain why these three features received the highest satisfaction scores (Table 7 and Figure 6).

Table 7. Usefulness of Specific Google Drive Features

	Sharing	Commenting	Collaboration	Chat	Cloud-based	Versioning
Very useful (4)	38	39	32	23	31	24
Somewhat useful (3)	15	12	18	20	20	24
Not very useful (2)	1	2	2	6	2	6
Not at all useful (1)	0	0	1	4	0	0
Responses	54	53	53	53	53	54
Mean	3.68	3.69	3.52	3.16	3.54	3.33
Standard deviation	0.50	0.53	0.66	0.91	0.57	0.67
95% conf. interval (mean)	±0.13	±0.14	±0.18	±0.24	±0.15	±0.18
Positive responses (%)	98.2	96.2	94.3	81.1	96.2	88.9
95% conf. interval for positive responses (%)	89.3 – >99.9	86.5 – 99.7	84.0 – 98.7	68.4 – 89.6	86.5 – 99.7	77.5 – 95.2

 

Figure 6. Usefulness of specific Google Drive features.

Ranking Most and Least Useful Functions

We asked students to compare functions and rank them relative to one another using the values Most Useful or Least Useful. Asking the question this way teased out clearer attitudes toward more and less useful functions of Google Drive. The researchers focused on the three most useful and three least useful features as ranked by the participants. The full results (Figure 7) showed that, compared to other features, Sharing Documents, Collaboration, and Commenting were the three most useful features, while Synchronous Chat, Cloud-based, and Document Versions were considered the least useful functions of Google Drive. Table 8 isolates and highlights the percentage of most useful (Sharing, Commenting, and Collaborating) and least useful (Chat, Cloud-based, and Versioning) features as ranked by the participants. These results likely reflect the way we used Google Drive in our classes—we stressed and reinforced the value of collaborating in Google Docs (in particular among Google Drive apps) and de-emphasized the use of synchronous chat.

Table 8. Most and Least Useful Functions of Google Drive

	Sharing	Commenting	Collaboration	Chat	Cloud-based	Versioning
Most useful	18 (32%)	14 (25%)	15 (27%)	1 (2%)	7 (13%)	0
Least useful	4 (7%)	9 (17%)	5 (9%)	16 (30%)	6 (11%)	13 (25%)

Note. Most useful: n = 55, Least useful: n = 53

Figure 7. Most useful (left) and least useful (right) functions of Google Drive.

Recommendations

As a commercial product, Google continually (and often without fanfare or advance notice) updates its products based on available data and feedback. This reality yields several recommendations:

• Results indicate that students generally found GAFE usable, useful, and easy-to-learn. While care should be taken to model and introduce new technology in the classroom, faculty can have a reasonable expectation that the vast majority of users will find little difficulty accessing and mastering GAFE.
• Composition teachers in higher education settings should consider using GAFE in their composition classrooms to implement pedagogies that help students become better writers, more aware of rhetorical situations and their social characteristics.
• Given the increasing institutional demands for IT infrastructure, the security, reliability, and utility of GAFE should be considered favorable by higher education administrators seeking to provide tools for faculty and students.
• Researchers should collaborate to develop additional GAFE usability testing protocols for instructional use, including composition contexts, and seek to publish results of usability test results in journals and avenues easily accessible to educational scholars and practitioners.
• Educators and researchers should seek avenues to have their voices heard by Google, to influence future development of Google Apps for Education to take into consideration students and instructors as primary users among professional and personal users.
• Google should seek to be more transparent with users—administrators, faculty, and students—in its plans for current and future development of GAFE applications and interfaces.

Conclusion

In this study, the primary investigators were two faculty members seeking to test the usability of Google Apps for Education for teaching composition to heterogeneous populations of students at their local institutions. The objective of the study was not simply to evaluate whether GAFE met the functionality and ease of use claims described in Google’s marketing copy, but to determine the usability of the tool as an effective cloud-based suite of applications within multiple composition classrooms, and potentially within the broader context of composition pedagogy. The objective of usability testing is to evaluate the object as it is actually used by the intended audience, which in the case of GAFE is students. Although Google likely conducted professional usability testing of GAFE, the results of this study go further in demonstrating how students evaluated the usefulness and usability of the interface as used over time in an educational setting and integrated into course instructional design. The study followed suggestions made by Eyman (2009) and Miller-Cochran and Rodrigo (2006, 2010) that faculty must anticipate user needs and expectations as an integral part of design, which the authors demonstrate to include the instructional design of the technology-in-use.

After using a combination of CP and CTA usability methods to inform the RP survey design, a mixed-method instrument given at the close of the semester assessed usability by asking participants to evaluate their use of GAFE for classroom composing assignments. Quantitative questions focused on ease of use and perceived usefulness of specific functions and features of the interface for composing practices. The data collected on ease of use, usefulness, and most and least useful functions and features demonstrate that the vast majority of participants found GAFE features at least somewhat easy and somewhat useful for assigned composing practices. Few participants found one or more GAFE features least useful relative to other functions for composing assignments. The data collected on browsers, platforms, and locations of use and access to GAFE features suggest that GAFE is largely accessible and at last somewhat usable on multiple browsers and platforms, regardless of location, assuming stable Internet access is available.

Overall, the results of the study demonstrate the Google Apps for Education is relatively easy to use for most users, even those unfamiliar with Google Docs or other Google Apps. Usability of the tool for composing may result in what Norman (2005) described as “positive affect [that] arouses curiosity, engages creativity, and makes the brain into an effective learning organism” (p. 26). The sharing and collaboration capabilities and affordances of GAFE enable participants to improve their composing skills. As a result of these findings, we consider GAFE a useful and user-friendly tool available for teachers with experience using Google Drive applications, such as the authors of this study. Though the user interface and ease of use of specific features is considered useful and usable, this study did not assess how faculty members found GAFE in terms of its usability and usefulness. Scholars caution that instructors require training in implementing a technology in the composition classroom in order to ensure it does not drive the pedagogy and is aligned with learning outcomes and best practices (DePew, Spangler, & Spiegel, 2014) This conclusion in particular demonstrates the need for local training opportunities for teachers to introduce relatively new technologies like GAFE as useful tools for improving existing or emerging pedagogies. Students attempting to use GAFE in the classroom who are taught by instructors unfamiliar or uncomfortable with GAFE affordances and constraints would probably have their perceptions of the technology’s usefulness and usability affected.

Ubiquitous broadband connectivity has not yet adequately extended beyond urban and suburban centers to encourage implementation of GAFE in all locales. Accessibility, while impressively widespread, remains problematic for those using screen reading devices and other tools for accessibility, an aspect of the tool we did not directly test, but the limitations of which we’ve experienced firsthand.

Limitations

The following is a list of limitations that occurred in this study:

• Although the participant population consists of multiple sections of composition courses on several campuses, the overall sample size is small, limiting the generalizability of the data.
• Although open access institutions have heterogeneous populations that created different user groups, greater attention to controlled user groups based on categories would improve comparative analysis, which was not conducted with this study.
• Users were not differentiated by school, so a comparison of contexts could not be conducted.
• This study does not take into account differences in pedagogical style or instructional delivery, which may have affected students’ perceptions of GAFE.

Opportunities for Future Research

A usability study comparing use of GAFE from various browsers and devices would be very useful. In particular, certain affordances are unavailable on the mobile interface (smartphones and tablets). Factors such as operating system, browser, screen size, and typing with texting vs. QWERTY methods would be useful differentiating factors to compare in terms of usability. Additional studies should seek to test the usability of GAFE among differently abled users, including deaf and hard-of-hearing users and blind or visually impaired users.

The decision to use Google Docs in the classroom should support the learning outcomes of the course. For writing teachers, those outcomes include creating communities of inquiry that integrate cognitive, social, and teaching presence (Garrison & Vaughan, 2007); providing low-stakes student-centered composing opportunities and engaging student and instructor feedback (Warnock, 2009); reinforcing “critical and liberatory pedagogies” (Reilly & Williams, 2006, p. 59); and teaching and exemplifying meta cognitive reflection on the technologies themselves as applied rhetoric (DePew, 2015). Google Docs and Google Drive, as applications in Google Apps for Education, support these outcomes. More research specifically about how cloud-computing and GAFE affect composition and rhetoric theory and pedagogy is needed.

Tips for Usability Practitioners

Usability practitioners can use the following tips while conducting a similar study:

• Recognize that students will access the technology anytime, anyplace. This has implications for instructor availability and inconsistent design or functionality across platforms.
• Understand that Google may elect to make changes to the features and visual design of GAFE at any time. Google may also change its Terms of Service at any time. These have implications on use and usability, as well as the results of cross-sectional and longitudinal research studies.
• Be prepared for differences in GAFE usability based on the tools participants use to access it. This includes changes based on web browser, browser version, device, operating system, Internet speed, and GAFE version. While this can be mitigated in a controlled testing environment, it does not then replicate the actual usability of the tool as accessed by users.
• Limit the number of affordances evaluated in a single question. As Table 6 demonstrates, results from testing a large number of affordances in a single question can be unwieldy for reporting purposes.

¹ Although Google introduced Google Classroom in 2014, that product is designed as a productivity tool for teachers “to help them save time, keep classes organized and improve communication with students” (Google, n.d.b). Google Classroom functions as an interface overlaid on top of GAFE; the primary functionality and interaction for students is with GAFE itself.

² Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99.

³ The authors acknowledge that the independent variable could not be fully controlled. As an SOA, GAFE’s interface differs slightly depending on platform, browser, and user customization, including acceptance of new updates. While a single platform, browser, and configuration was modeled during face-to-face instruction, the authors could not control how users interacted with GAFE outside of class. Indeed, this flexibility is one of GAFE’s affordances. The authors asked survey questions to determine which browser and platform students used in an attempt to provide some controls.

 Acknowledgements

Thanks to our students, who joined us in experimenting with GAFE in the composition classroom and chose to take our survey and provide data for our study. Thanks to our respective institutional review boards for providing valuable assistance and to our institutions that supported our research. Thanks for Dr. Daniel Richards for sponsoring our submission. And thanks to Dr. Joyce Neff, Dr. Shelley Rodrigo, Dr. Julia Romberger, Dr. Richards (again), and Dr. Kevin DePew, whose classes at Old Dominion University, along with critical commentary and direction, encouraged our own collaboration using Google Drive. This research was funded, in part, by a Paul Lee Professional Development Grant from the Virginia Community College System.

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Published in: in Volume 10, Issue 4,