Usability: Tabbed sections

Usability: Tabbed sections

by Tormod Aagaard -
Number of replies: 10

Hi,

I work as a langauge teacher for immigrants, many of them with very little previous computer experience. For us, the length and complexity of the main/middle part in the course really is a problem.

The students have to scroll a lot, and quite a few of them don't even understand that they have to scroll, and so they end up seeing only half the material in the course.

What I suggest, is a possibility to organize the sections as tabs, and in this way keep the course within one screen. If, for example, you chose a "weekly" outline, each week could have its own tab.

I have no programming experience, so I don't know if this is feasible, but I do believe it would make things easier for us.

All the best

Tormod

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In reply to Tormod Aagaard

Re: Usability: Tabbed sections

by Olli Savolainen -
Thank you for your thoughts. Tabbing is indeed one option, or an accordion control. This has been brought up before, and it is one of the issues that should hopefully be dealt during the Navigation 2.0 project.
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In reply to Olli Savolainen

Re: Usability: Tabbed sections

by Joseph Rézeau -
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Make it an accordion control, please, not TABS!

Joseph (who has been waiting for this "accordion" feature in Moodle for quite a few years now.wink)

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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: Usability: Tabbed sections

by Mauno Korpelainen -

Both could be nice new features.

It might be rather easy to create for example a new css course format (no tables) with YUI TabView library http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/tabview/frommarkup.html , you should just count the sections twice, first for the tabs ( <ul class="yui-nav"> ) and then for the tabbed content ( <div class="yui-content">  )

... or another example about YUI tabs: http://css-tricks.com/examples/SimpleTabbedBox/ 

but accordion control might be cool too...

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by Tormod Aagaard -
I don't think it matters to us whether we get tabs or accordion control, the most important thing is that we don't have to scroll so much, but it could be interesting to hear the pros and cons of both.

And by the way: Is there a way to vote for one or the other, for instance in the tracker?

Best regards
Tormod
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In reply to Tormod Aagaard

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by James Neill -
For my mind, never a truer word has been spoken about Moodle usability than here by Tormod Aaagaard:

"the most important thing is that we don't have to scroll so much"
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In reply to James Neill

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by Frank Ralf -
Just two more ideas in this vain:

1) Using collapsible fieldsets
see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=122545

2) Placing more form elements side by side instead of stacking them
This is mainly due to the fact that HMTL form elements are block elements so stacking is there default behavior. But this can be overcome by using CSS's "float" or "display: inline;" features.

Frank
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In reply to James Neill

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by Tim Hunt -
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I would much rather be able to scroll than have to click to reveal stuff.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by Thomas Hanley -

Hi Tim,

There is a semantic benefit though in clicking (I am trying to appeal to your inner geek here ; ).

Unless the typography and design (use of colour, negative space) are of a high quality what you end up with is one long amorphous chunk of content. Consequently there is a cognitive overhead in scrolling: you have to scan/read through all of this information looking for the specific unit of information that is important to you. On many instances people will not need to read every single unit. They will be looking for a specific chunk.

Using an accordion or tab mechanism adds structure and semantics to the information by chunking it. People can then rapidly scan the chunk titles/headers and then choose the chunk that is relevant to expand and focus on.

~thomas

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by James Neill -
Tim, My observation is that in the typical/default Moodle way, a course tends to get longer and longer (as teachers add stuff) and therefore more and more vertical scrolling is needed to get to down to the more relevant current material which is further down than ever as time goes by.... it takes a strong usability mindset to work against this underlying design.
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In reply to James Neill

Re: Svar: Re: Tabbed sections

by Tim Hunt -
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Well, or a better course format. The OU's study planner course format (in contrib) shows last week, this week and next week; and then has a show all weeks link. As a student, I found that ideal.
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