General help

Good morning Tim,

I read the same article. You might find Appendix 9 - 12 (Usability Testing, particular Task 3 "Go to a Forum of your choice") of my dissertation of interest. Although, I used students who should be familiar with the system, they were not used to forums as the tools Moodle offers were not embedded into the studies from the lecturers point of view for many different reasons (see interview transcripts). Another thing I noticed that my participants rather "guessed" were they can find the forums and this is mainly due to unclear layout - some knew that they can access it via the activity block, other scrolled down a lot.

As I believe the performance transcripts are really useful for developers, I tried to do them as detailed as I could to avoid using videos, but still capture the knowledge (of course, I need to protect the participants).

Hope that helps.

All the best.

Syndia.

P.S.: In the module (moodle course) there were only very few posts and these ones were made by administrative staff rather than students.

On searching a forum for a user name (to see what they've posted), nothing relevant comes up.

On going to a forum, a good chunk of the screen real estate is taken up by banner, nav bar, the forum subscription links, and the forum description. In many cases, one has to use vertical scrolling just to get to the most recent post

And then, forum threads can't be sorted, so one is stuck with looking at them in reverse chrono order by last post, but in thread mode.

Furthermore, once one has read posts, on MyMoodle it doesn't indicate that they're no longer unread until one has logged out and back in again

And the biggee, for me - one is forced to use web-interface to post to a forum - as opposed to sending via email, like a mailing list e.g., Google Groups

Some notes that spring to mind:

In 2.0, the "Mail now" should have explanation 'by default this forum sends out an e-mail 30 minutes after you have posted it, to allow you time to make changes, to everyone who has subscribed this forum. If you are sure you are not going to want to change it, check “Mail now”'. Without that context the option does not make any sense. (I hope I guessed the meaning right.)

When replying to a post there are links to other posts in the thread above the subject field and the compose message box. Clicking any of these may lead the user to lose all the data they have written in the compose message box, depending on their browser, since clicking the back button may not restore the text (in Firefox restoring it requires the Lazarus extension). These links should instead have a plus/minus sign or an arrow in front of them and they should expand in the same window (via javascript) and have target="_blank" on the link without javascript (opening a new window is a smaller disaster than losing the data).

Also see the side track here for an experience losing data in Moodle.

When I click on a user, then forum posts, it only seems to show the most recent 5 posts, then I need to click next to see 5 more etc. How could I view all of a user's posts or say 100 posts at a time? e.g., I would need to click 1188 times to see all of Tim Hunt's forum posts here - yikes!

If you are adding to a discussion that has already been started then I think it is confusing. Next to every person's comment is a link to reply. The thing that always comes to mind for me when I see this is that I am replying directly to the person who made the comment. (rather than adding to the discussion)

It would be nice if there was a link below the initial post (and possibly at the bottom of the list of replies as well) which said Add to discussion (or similar).

eg:

Initial post:
-----------------------
blah blah
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Replies:
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and so on....