Assignment

Following Petr's suggestions, Joan has made some changes in the assignment module in our test site. You people can have a look and tell us what you think:

http://parles.upf.es/TEST/

Login: teacher , psswd: teacher

You will see that now the notices about word limits are much more discrete, less intrusive. For those who didn't follow the discussion in the other thread, bear in mind that these notices do not appear at all if the teacher has not activated the 'recommended length' option.

A new button has been incorporated to the right of the icon. When clicked, you get a little JavaScript pop up window saying saying something like "word limit: N, you have N1 words". Note that the live count in the status bar is still there. We thought having the two things there will allow people to experiment with the two modalities and give us feedback about usability: what do they prefer, what they find more comfortable, useful, intuitive, etc.

In fact, and this is my personal opinion, now that I've played around a bit, I think I would like to keep the two things. Having the little live counter in the status bar can be comfortable for some people who don't want to be bothered with mousing around and clicking buttons. Keeping the button (which now can easily be disabled in configuration > administration > editor settings), however, might provide some added value. The message that appears in it -- and the code that triggers it -- can be easily modified to incorporate more informative messages like: "The recommended length was N, your essay/answer has X words more than the recommended length. Try to be a little less wordy" or "You only have typed X words, you still have at least N more to go " (this in case that a minimum recommended length was also introduced), etc. etc.

We discussed the other idea proposed by Petr (having a JavaScript popup automatically triggered when the text went over the recommended number of words) and decided not to implement it yet because we found there could be some potential problems. We'd like to discuss them here to see whether people do consider these potential problems or not.

Here's the main issue. Depending on the different strategies used by writers to stay within the recommended limit, the popup window could get to be quite an annoyance. Thinking about it in the abstract,  I thought it would be a very good idea to have a reminder poping up automatically. Many people can be really oblivious to the live count in the status bar or to the word count button, so it is nice to remind them automatically when they exceed the limit. However, since there is no way to stop the popup window from appearing every time the text goes beyond a given number of words, there could be a period of time when the popup kept on appearing constantly: that crucial point in the editing process where the user will be making a lot of changes to make the text reasonably approach the word limit. During this fase it would be very annoying to have the popup window come up every few seconds and having to close it every time. Also, if the user is constructing her text by doing a lot of cutting and pasting and then editing the pasted text, there would also be a risk that the popup would appear when it is not desirable.

I think I have not left anything out. Anyway, we invite you to login in our test site and play around a bit so that you can give us feedback about your user experience. Also, you will have a chance to see other features that Joan Codina and his students have implemented:



Josep M.