Moodle in English: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Wednesday, 31 July 2013, 4:41 PM

Hi everyone,

During my personal project week at Moodle HQ, I decided to give it a go at removing both the navigation block and the administration block from the page. I was mainly motivated by several aspects of the navigation that I don't like:

The navigation can be very long, especially when there are many course sectionsThe content appears to change from page to page
- This because some nodes are sometimes expanded, sometimes collapsed (especially in the admin block)
- Sometimes the nodes appear to be renamed
Some pages with very low value are accessible on every pageThere are inconsistencies between what is supposed to be in the administration block, and what's not.

From a beginner point of view, it is very difficult to find your way around. And if you are a teacher it is probably even harder because you are presented many navigation options.

I am not a usability expert, and I don't pretend to be one. The research I did is based on my own assumptions and practices that I have observed in other environments. Also, please note that the following are focused on students and teachers user experience, especially in a course. As I am not a designer either, I quickly arranged those so that it looks OK, the purpose of my research here is to demonstrate what could be done, the technical and "beautifying" part isn't part of it.

1/ Direct access to user-related pages

The place where was displayed the information about the currently logged in user is now used to allow the user to quickly access his own stuff, like his profile, his grades, badges, and his preferences.

Another icon is used to access everything related to messaging. I am still unsure about that, ideally this would be changed into a notifications icon, which would eventually develop into messages, notifications, etc... This allows use to remove the need for My profile in the navigation block.

Key factors:

Each dropdown menu has to be as minimal as possible, very few links.
The dropdown items should not lead to something that you can be accessed via normal navigation. Example: My courses.
Items that are subsidiary should be accessible from your own profile. Example: Notes. "Forum posts" could be a good candidate.

2/ User preferences page

In order to get rid of the "My profile settings" in the settings block, I created a "Preferences" page which is accessible in the "Direct access dropdown" mentioned above. As most of the settings offered to the user in the Settings block are unlikely to be used often, they don't need to be accessible directly, on every page!

3/ No more navigation block

All the navigation happens via the breadcrumb. Each node of the breadcrumb allows you to jump into neighbour nodes that you have access to. Like all the activities in the current section, or all the courses in the category that you are browsing.

Key factors:

The modules should extend the navigation in the same pattern, ideally not more than one level
The administration block should never be used for students to navigate in an activity. This is wrong! Students should never have to hear about "Administration".

4/ Where am I?

The breadcrumb would certainly constitute a very good point of reference to figure out where you are. But on top of that I standardised the headings so that you always see the course name, and if you are in an activity, the activity name as well. This brings another level of consistency to help the user identifying where he is.

5/ Course related pages

The content of the course can easily be accessed via the course page, and the breadcrumb, however some others pages also need to be accessible. Now, as soon as you are in a course, the top bar gets a new icon. I am not entirely sure about the position of this icon, but as a course is a massive set of content that you have access to (and so important enough), I thought that it wasn't that bad to put it there.

Next to the icon you have the course shortname, this helps the user identifying that this menu is likely to change from one course to another, and that they should keep on having a look at it.

Currently this would give access to the participants page, and your own grades. When you are a teacher, you would get access to the gradebook, and a preferences page (understand settings/configuration/options) which is like the user's preferences page.

5/ Activity settings

As the activity name is now forced, I have added a dropdown next to the activity name to get access to its settings and settings page. This dropdown should never be visible by students. I haven't had time to work more on that, but ideally the content should be relatively small, possibly linking to a Preferences page. Again, keeping in mind that only the most important stuff among the settings of the module should be visible by default. The rest should only be accessible in the "Preferences" page.

So for example, this dropdown could contain:

Modules settings
-
Important settings entry 1 (defined by module)
Important settings entry 2 (defined by module)
-
Other (Leading to a classic "Preferences" page, which gives access to "Backup", "Roles", etc...).

6/ 2 columns design

As we now don't need to navigation block or the settings block any more, a 2 column design seems more appropriate. It gives focus on the content.

Rules I applied (or to apply)

The top bar is a fixed navigation, its content should not change depending on where you are. I made an exception for the course dropdown, but I am not 100% convinced that this was the right thing to do.
The content of a dropdown should never change. Except it is made clear that the page has changed. Example:
- The activity settings dropdown is allowed to change because it is visually tied to the activity itself.
- The user dropdown never changes, as its content is totally independent of the page we are currently on.
- The course dropdown content changes according to the course, but it never changes within the course. It remains the same.
Each dropdown should be concise.
To be part of a dropdown, a link should be really important. If it is not important enough, then it can be placed into another page.
No submenu in the dropdowns! Otherwise we fall back into a nested navigation.
It is better to have a link in the right place in context, rather than in a long navigation. Example: To subscribe to a forum, you should have a little link on the main page of the forum. This is should never be part of the navigation.
The course dropdown is not placed next to the course title because it would distract a student. It breaks the flow of the page.
Modules should extend the navigation either using tabs, as some already do, or via in-context links.

Further improvements

Have a dropdown for quick access to different gradebook views (teachers)
Same for reports. (teachers)
Somehow get the Site administration content accessible (managers)
Solution for subsidiary content that is not more accessible (all)
Solution to access site pages. (all)
Solution to access category settings from category pages. (managers)

What is needed to get that into core

Most of the logic is based on the current navigation lib.

Extending the current navigation lib to support more "Node types"
Creating renderers for the dropdowns and the breadcrumb
Updating modules and pages to follow the new style

Try it out!

You can give it a go by checking out my branch, but don't look at the code which is really horrible! As I mentioned, I wanted to try out the user interface (not designing it in Photoshop), not spending time on making nice code. The code hacks the core and theme/clean.

https://github.com/FMCorz/moodle/commits/MDL-ultranav-master

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Joseph Rézeau - Wednesday, 31 July 2013, 5:03 PM

Hi Frédéric and first of all congratulations for tackling that difficult but much-needed task of re-vamping the navigation system in Moodle.

Here are just a few hasty comments.

"The navigation can be very long, especially when there are many course sections" Yes, that can be terribly non user-friendly.

"The administration block should never be used for students to navigate in an activity. This is wrong! Students should never have to hear about "Administration"." Yes, and I think we've already had discussions about removing the "Administration" term from the student interface.

Talking about what navigation "elements" and blocks etc. which should be strictly related to context, I have already expressed the opinion that, as a teacher, when editing an activity/resource, the so-called "Administration block" related to that activity ought to be automatically displayed in the first position at the top of the blocks, instead of its present default position under the Navigation block. This is a real annoyance in my daily use of Moodle.

I would like to try out your MDL-ultranav-master branch. Could you please confirm that it is to be used on a moodle master (2.6dev) installation?

Joseph

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Wednesday, 31 July 2013, 5:27 PM

Yes, it is based on 2.6-dev. I recommend checking out my branch if a merge fails.

Also, I failed to mention that:

$CFG->undeletableblocktypes = ''; should be set in config.php
Navigation and Admin block should be deleted for best experience

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Séverin Terrier - Wednesday, 31 July 2013, 6:33 PM

This seems really interesting, and looks like what can be found on other well known sites !

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Jason Hardin - Thursday, 1 August 2013, 12:43 AM

I really love the design. We took on something similar recently with our Express project (an overlay on top of Moodle Themes). We called it minimal because the purpose was to present a minimal User interface that didn't detract from the content on the page. We used jQuery to move the navigation and settings blocks into a bar at the top with regions below for all links.

The treeviews then become menu items

As do the blocks. Blocks are added via custom block region and the rest is CSS. This allows clients to add more blocks to a page as they want and still access all of the block content.

It is not as inspired as your design though because we really didn't tackle redoing the navigation. It is also based on Moodle 2.4. If you want to take a look at it you can go to http://demo2k12.moodlerooms.com/. The code should all be accessible via the source or in the Express block in the layout directories of the manage designs tab.

I should also mention we worked with New School Learning on this and John Stabinger provided the initial jQuery design and CSS to make the buttons and regions work.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Thursday, 1 August 2013, 9:03 AM

Hi Jason,

Indeed, the Minimal theme that I had the opportunity to see in demo at the Moodlemoot is part of those projects who gave me some ideas.

Learning about the internals of Minimal that you just mentioned, I have to say that the purpose of my experiment was also to find out what should be modified in core in order to entirely change the way you navigate through Moodle, and surprisingly, not much.

I didn't want to create a new theme, load up jQuery, and do things that might not work in a different Moodle than the one it is customized for. I told myself not to use CSS/Javascript hacks to move blocks around, in my mind, those blocks (settings/navigation) are wrong in the first place, something fresh instead was needed.

Great work though, I really like how simplified/straightforward this is.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Damyon Wiese - Thursday, 1 August 2013, 9:22 AM

Thanks for working on this Fred, and thanks for the great post about it with all the screenshots. I really like the messaging and user menus. I also like the crumb trail and the thing I like most is getting rid of the settings/navigation blocks.

I also really like having a separate page for settings (instead of shoving them in the navigation).

Without thinking too hard about the code - perhaps one way to tackle this in core would be to have some kind of block region that gets different renderers so it produces menus instead of blocks and then just move the settings and navigation blocks into it.

I don't necessarily agree that everything should move to a 2 column layout, or that the course menu should go next to the course title (IMO it should be next to the user and messaging menus).

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Tim Hunt - Thursday, 1 August 2013, 2:43 PM

I think we should get the user and messaging menus into core relatively. Soon. We talked about that at the hackfest last October with general agreement, and it is consistent with how a lot of other sites on the web now, so it is what users expect.

I am more sceptical about removing the navigation or settings block. If you already know exactly how to use Moodle, then you know what settings links exist, and you can go hunting for them (but adding extra clicks on the way to finding them is bad for teachers who just want to get things done).

However, if you are just learning Moodle, you don't know what is available, so having all the options listed in one place, the settings block, is a big win.

So, for me, settings block is good for experienced users: more efficient; and good for new users: more discoverable. So, absolutely worth the screen space it uses.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Tony Box - Friday, 2 August 2013, 1:14 AM

When I'm teaching new faculty how to use moodle and get to the settings block, they almost always get a panicked look on their face when they first see it. I quickly say, "Here are three things you will need to use under the settings block and... all this other stuff, yeah... basically ignore all of that." That's not good. As Frédéric has already described in an excellent way, the fact of the matter is, there are really only a few links in the settings and navigation blocks that are used all the time (we actually don't even use the navigation block at my university... except for those darned statistics and reports links!). Why should we confound new users and give them a bad impression of the software?

To your point, Tim, I agree with you. As an advanced user, I appreciate being able to see all of my options in one place. However if I put myself in the shoes of a technology illiterate professor and see all of this... stuff... whoa! I'll never be able to learn this! I'm not sure I even want to learn Moodle anymore! (This happens).

As a regular day-to-day moodle user, 90% of the settings block is never used 90% of the time (okay I made that up, but I'm willing to bet it's pretty close to truth). Our techno-illiterate faculty do not want to be forced into looking at things they will never use--in fact, that's exactly what scares them away. On the other hand, advanced users are inherently more willing to explore around and figure things out on their own; the people who use those less-used features are the ones that will easily find them.

So I believe Frédéric's solution is an excellent compromise: see only what you need--for beginners and 90% of anyone's daily actions in Moodle--and tuck the less-used options away, out of sight until they're (maybe) needed, where advanced users would find them anyway.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Friday, 2 August 2013, 5:54 PM

I follow your opinion Tony. I don't really fancy the Settings block because it is daunting! Sure you can find whatever you need in there, but until you're getting really familiar with it you won't. Also, I feel that the page "Preferences/Settings/Options" could be layed out in a way that would also help advanced users finding what they need very quickly.

As you mentioned too, some settings are used once in a semester, or even never! Why should they be present on every single page? What is important is being able to find that setting, not much how fast you access it.

Also, let's not forget that the Settings block content changes almost on every page, especially when you navigate between modules. And it is not made clear to the user that it changed, nor why. I think rather than its content, that's what is the more confusing for the users. At first you have the Course settings, and on another page it's not there any more (it is, but collapsed). That is closely related to Joseph's comment above.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Guido Hornig - Thursday, 28 November 2013, 6:05 PM

Tim, no need to be sceptical. look at awesome bar. no extra clicks. less clicks from day one on.

I hope there will be a responsive theme with a navigation like decaf. My observation shows that with Decaf its is much easier and faster to learn the administration and course management, than with the old fashion moodle 1.7 - 1.9 style nav + setting blocks. Its faster to find the right sub-menu. Less waiting. Much more efficient than setting block.

And I am sure there are better solutions than awesome-bar, if more people work on it.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Michael Aherne - Friday, 29 November 2013, 12:40 AM

It's probably worth making a distinction between the settings and navigation blocks. Having spent quite a lot of time watching people using Moodle, I've noticed that almost nobody is interested in the navigation block, and they tend to go back to the homepage if they want to navigate to another course. I have never seen anyone use the functionality that allows you to jump straight to a particular topic in another course. Many people dock the navigation block so they don't have to see it, and manage to use the system fine without it (except for things like reports where they're forced to).

On the other hand, particularly for staff, the settings block is the most important block on the page, and contains most of the functionality they use outside of the main course format. Because it's very context-aware it tends to contain the specific things they're looking for.

It would make a lot of sense to me if the settings block were left more or less as-is, but the navigation block was completely replaced with more contextual navigation as in Frederic's excellent demo.

(Just to be clear, as a developer I think the navigation block is a nice piece of work - I just don't think it works particularly well for the average user, in our institution, at least.)

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Mary Cooch - Friday, 29 November 2013, 1:48 AM

And of course, Michael -the reports which were in the Navigation block are now (since 2.5) in the renamed Administration block, so they wouldn't even need to go to the Navigation block for them.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Michael Aherne - Friday, 29 November 2013, 6:49 AM

Good point, Mary, I'd forgotten about that! (We're still on 2.4 at the moment)

The only other thing I can think of like that is the participants page, which is also in the navigation. Most of our staff users just use the "Enrolled users" link in the settings to see who is enrolled on their course, but for those who find it disconcerting that they can see suspended users in there we tend to get them to use the participants page. I think that may not be such an issue in 2.6, though, now that "Enrolled users" has functionality to filter out inactive users.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Derek Chirnside - Friday, 29 November 2013, 10:18 AM

Just checking, Tim.

Have you ever looked at any theme with the Awesome bar in it, and actually used it for a few of the key functions, either as a teacher admin or student role??

-Derek

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Paul Nicholls - Friday, 2 August 2013, 7:22 AM

Hi Frédéric,

I've just set up a complete fresh Moodle using your ultranav branch. It looks pretty good, and I certainly like the idea - but it doesn't seem very reliable. So far I've only had a quick play with it in Firefox, but it sometimes takes several clicks to get a dropdown to appear - nothing happens for the first several clicks. It's not throwing any JS errors, so I'm not sure exactly what's happening - I'll have to dive a bit deeper to see if I can figure out what's going on.

-Paul

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Friday, 2 August 2013, 5:46 PM

Yes, I am aware of that. I made the choice of ignoring that fact for now, but it sure is something that should be looked at for a better usability. I assume that the YUI modules that we are using to trigger the dropdowns are not (yet?) as good as the jQuery ones which usually come with Bootstrap.

From the look of it, it seems that if the target of the click is not clearly the toggle, it would fail. For instance, if you click within an image within the toggle, it would not trigger the event. Or something like that...

I think Chrome behaviour was even worse than in Firefox.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Lamour - Sunday, 11 August 2013, 6:30 AM

hi Frédéric,

http://jsbin.com/unogan/68/edit is a pretty simple way to do dropdowns onclick without any lib - not the best code, but you get the idea.

I'm not a fan of :hover menus, but added that as well.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by David Scotson - Friday, 2 August 2013, 10:48 PM

This all seems really excellent. How much of this can be done in a theme, without waiting on changes in core?

I agree totally and fully agree with every point, with the minor exception of number 3.

I've noticed that, at least in our setup, administrators of Moodle spend a lot more time navigating through the hierarchy of courses than staff or students. We automatically enroll students into all their courses and so they primarily want to jump between courses in that (relatively) short list, and shouldn't have to worry about whether another course is up two steps in the hierarchy and then down again two steps into a different category. This design is all about the admin users use case I think, I think it would look very different if designed from the point of view of many students or staff using Moodle.

Some other random comments:

For part 1, having the users icon here in place of the user icon (when available) is a really nice personal touch, which I think some themes already do (Aardvark I think). User preferences and

For part 6, having a two-column layout makes life very much easier if you want to use Moodle on phones and tablets. On small devices the block column can just slip below the main content, and since you've moved the important stuff to the top menus, that's not a problem. Currently a lot of time and effort is spent supporting the 3 column look and making it work with RTL, accessibility and responsiveness. Enforcing two-columns cuts through that Gordian knot. The only problem is that people are really used to the 3 column look.

Great work!

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Lamour - Sunday, 11 August 2013, 5:08 AM

hi Frédéric,

First off - great job.

We do a lot of testing with users - students and tutors - and the standard moodle navigation was the first thing we removed from our site back in 2010.

We have some fun videos of tutors trying to use that standard navigation and blocks which would make whoever initially developed them cry, but you might be interested in seeing.

Information architecture and navigation for complex sites is difficult to get right but by doing card sorting, tree testing etc and getting real feedback from the real end users of the system you'll get a pretty good steer.

Do you have any current plans for user testing your navigation designs?

Cheers

Stuart Lamour -user experience developer - University of Sussex (http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/elearningteam/)

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Tim Hunt - Sunday, 11 August 2013, 4:57 PM

"standard moodle navigation was the first thing we removed from our site back in 2010"

In 2010, you were still using Moodle 1.9, right?

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Lamour - Sunday, 11 August 2013, 7:36 PM

hi tim,

exactly - so you understand how much worse navigation got for them in moodle2.

When you have to make a video/provide instructions to show your students how to navigate on a web page, you know something is seriously wrong.

A tutor described trying to perform a simple common task as like looking for a needle in a haystack and i totally agree. In extended use the learning curve did not improve either.

Even our most technically competent tutors were baffled by the heady mixture of of basic usability flaws including clickable parents and semantic parents mixed together - in both nav blocks and breadcrumb combined with none-transparent hierarchies, confusing naming conventions, differing navigation patterns used on different pages (and within the same page) and general screen noise all the meaningless icons, random blocks, trees and links etc create.

I know that these days a lot of our usability work is gradually creeping into moodle2, and i'm thankful for that.

For us navigation is so fundamentally vital to the user (and thus learning) experience - far more so than repository integration, badges or any of the other recent m2 features. These features are nice, and may be used a small amount of users, but basic navigation - that 100% of users need - is unfortunately something that got much worse in moodle2.

Like you, i'm really glad to see Frédéric's work moving forward in addressing some of these issues.

Frédéric - if you like a tour of our moodle as a tutor/staff member i'd be happy to show you the navigation patterns, and if you want to try it as a student there are some courses which allow guest access on our moodle https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Tuesday, 13 August 2013, 10:26 AM

I would be happy to have a look at your Moodle, Stuart.

Unfortunately I don't have any plans on testing this on real users, and that is simply explained: This is a one-person project and demonstration of something that could be achieved, my work on it stopped at the end of my "personal project week".

Of course, if this example of navigation refactoring motivates Moodle HQ enough (and I would hope so) to get people working on it, then we should definitely test on real users, and consult experts before making it available. This should be a long term work that we owe to ourselves and the community to get it right. I am skeptical that this could be achieved in the timeframe of 1 major release.

In regard with the technical bit, I think it is possible to hack a theme to do the exact same thing. But as it will be hacky I don't think the result would be 100% satisfactory. And also, we have to keep in mind that in the case the core would benefit from this sort of improvements, we will be asked to provide fallbacks on the previous system, which makes it harder to develop.

Anyway, all your feedbacks here are definitely a good way to express your desires of seeing Moodle improving its navigation.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Damyon Wiese - Tuesday, 13 August 2013, 12:56 PM

Yes thanks Stuart - I had a look at your Moodle as a guest - but I could not find a course that had more than just resources listed in the course page to see how the navigation changes e.g. in an activity.

Is there a good example of that you could point us too?

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Derek Chirnside - Tuesday, 3 December 2013, 9:23 PM

Frederic, is there a demo of this somewhere we can look at?

-Derek

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by David Scotson - Thursday, 15 August 2013, 9:48 PM

"Even our most technically competent tutors were baffled by the heady mixture of of basic usability flaws including clickable parents and semantic parents mixed together",

Relevant bug: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-34838

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Bonnie Mioduchoski - Friday, 16 August 2013, 5:43 PM

Dear Stuart,

You offered Frédéric a chance to see your navigation patterns - any chance I could test it out? We teach students mindfulness online and I'd love some examples of good user interfaces from both a teacher perspective or at least a guest student perspective. If you're willing, can you set me up as a non-editing person? Best, Bonnie

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Gareth J Barnard - Friday, 16 August 2013, 5:52 PM

Dear Frédéric,

First of all, thank you, I love it - I also concur with David in asking if all the changes can be theme based? Also, please could you check out this discussion https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=234336 as I would value your input on it.

Ta,

Gareth

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Chris Kenniburg - Monday, 12 August 2013, 10:03 PM

If this could be implemented into the core I would jump up and down and do cartwheels!

The only thing I am torn about would be the Administration/Settings block. I like it being there but I can see how it might be overkill for most non-tech teachers.

This is a much needed and desired improvement if it can be implemented

And made to work with the Essential theme ;)

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Andreas Stoeffer - Friday, 16 August 2013, 2:28 AM

Hi Frédéric,

really great. That's what needed.

Since Moodle 2.x is released I use "decaf" to have a horizontal nav.

But your concept and considerations are going further. Thank's for sharing

Andreas

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Graham Bowman - Thursday, 28 November 2013, 4:50 AM

This looks awesome, it would make so much more sense to student who spend a lot of their time using sites with similar styled navigation.

Do we know if it is getting any more attention?

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Robert Brenstein - Friday, 29 November 2013, 9:09 PM

I missed the original discussion in summer being offline for a month and just discovered it now. Big thumbs up for this work Frédéric! I think you hit the nail straight on. I hope this makes its way, at least partly, into Moodle 2.7...

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Anita Seth - Saturday, 30 November 2013, 12:17 PM

Where can I see the sample website with this theme or settings? Do we have it....forgive me, I am new to web designing/development and Moodle too smile thanks...

I went through many of the posts/replies in this discussion but not clear where to go to 'see' this theme/navigation. Pls help

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Anita Seth - Friday, 29 November 2013, 3:38 AM

Where can I see the sample website with this theme or settings? Do we have it....forgive me, I am new to web designing/development and Moodle too

thanks

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Lila Kelly - Sunday, 22 December 2013, 8:14 AM

I am relatively new to moodle. I was looking for anything that talked about using the browser navigation back arrow at the top left of the screen to navigate back to the course main page. I use the topics format in 2.5, and it seems to always work. Right now I am trying to put clear instructions at the end of each activity/page, which is a lot of work and hard to find the right wording. I have even copied the links from the navigation bar to put at the end of each page/activity, which worked great and got the user to easily go directly to the next activity....but then when I had a system change made, it reset all of them. WAY TOO MUCH WORK to re-copy them all. So, I am wondering...Is it a good practice to instruct students/clients to just use the browser navigation back arrow to return to the main course page after each activity/page. I hope this makes sense.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Mealor - Sunday, 22 December 2013, 3:34 PM

Personally I would never use the Back button in a browser for navigation when using Moodle.

The reason is you might simply be displaying the "old page" the cached content that the browser history has, and NOT a new view of that page.

Note that this totally depends on how your browser and computer are setup to handle the display of pages when using Back.

Just as an example, if I was in the Gradebook and it showed my one activity is 0/100, and I then do the Quiz, I don't want to see the OLD Grades page (with 0/100), I need to see a new Grades page - with 100/100). With a dynamic system, like Moodle, you never really want to see old pages, you always want to navigate to a URL so you have the up-to-date display.

Stu.

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Lila Kelly - Monday, 23 December 2013, 12:46 AM

Thanks Stu. That makes sense.

What do you think about coping the links from the navigation bar and pasting them at the end of each page/activity, so the user can just click that link to go to the next activity?

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Mealor - Tuesday, 24 December 2013, 4:47 AM

Hi Lila

Yes, that should work OK - we've created Moodle Themes and buttons for some clients who wanted a visual button to act as the jump point for the next activity - should work fine

Stu

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Stuart Lamour - Wednesday, 12 February 2014, 2:26 AM

nice to see the profile dropdown menu on the new moodle.org theme

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Re: Simplified 'block-less' navigation experiment

by Frédéric Massart ⭐ - Tuesday, 3 June 2014, 10:23 AM

Hi everyone,

just in case you did not notice, we posted a navigation specification on the 'Future major features' forum. The more feedback, the better.

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=261224

Cheers,
Fred

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