General developer forum

Have you used any other Virtual Learning Environment software that the Moodle developers might learn from? Do you have any specific areas of Moodle that might be improved?

 

Vladimir "I wanted to create a simple course, 16 lessons, that repeats over year, for different groups, with PDF materials and weighted assignments per lesson, attendance tracking and exam on the end. It seems as the most usual task that can possibly be."

To paraphrase your post, that view of what a "simple course" can be is "so 1970's". You do raise some pertinent points about Moodle's interface, and most Moodlers would agree that there is a real need for UI designers on the team. However, the "simple course" you describe in your post seems to consist of very traditional components that pre-existed Moodle and online teaching. You forget to mention those activities which are the strength of Moodle, such as the forums, the glossary, the database, the survey-like activities (feedback, survey, questionnaire), the Wiki, the workshop, etc.

Joseph

Dear Vladimir,

I second the replies asking for examples.  I know that Wordpress has a good back end and is worth emulating but this takes time and effort.  You say you have "As a web developer and designer for last 20 years", so I say "welcome to the team and I look forward to your contribution" because a proportion of development is undertaken for free by the community because we believe in it.

I came to Moodle from experience of another VLE where it took 45 minutes to accomplish what then took 5 in Moodle 1.9 and that is ancient history.  Having used another VLE beginning with 'B' that interface seemed clunky.  Moodle 2.5 has lots more features including drag and drop upload and responsive Bootstrap themes.

You state "There are some best practices as a legacy of two decades of web,  and Moodle seems to ignore most of them. ", so if you know them, then please share so we can evaluate their validity and if substantiated do something about it.

You say "I just wanted to give a constructive critic" but you have only criticised, where is the "construction"?  Where is the evidence?  Where do you provide a solution to a problem?  All critical papers at University level have their arguments backed up by relevant references.

The Moodle community is about providing a 'free' learning platform for all to use and benefit from.  So join in and contribute .

Gareth

Hi Vlad

Thank you for your constructive criticism focusing on Moodle's User Interface and usability issues. Which version Moodle did you install?
What would be some of the best practices which Moodle seems to have ignored that if implemented can make Moodle even better?

Frankie 

Vladimir,

I agree with you, for the most part, the UI in Moodle is hard to use. But I do agree with with the rest of the thread posts that you are not actually providing any constructive criticism.

I believe that the root of the problem is that UX is hard and not many people will do it for free or volunteer. UX for almost any open source project I have used is usually terrible. On these Moodle forums, I believe that the only UX expert I have seen post regularly is Stuart Lamour from the University of Sussex. Try looking at his post history for some of his ideas he is trying to get the Moodle community to adopt.

But the core developers for Moodle are making amazing strides in the recent few updates, that I am amazed that this is the same Moodle from a couple of years ago and they have more ideas and plans on the roadmap for the next versions.

I would like to start the thread of providing some constructive criticism. 

I believe what you mean by design patterns from the 90s, you are referring to the "click on a button and the whole page reloads" idea? Yeah, it is sometimes annoying, especially when it causes "back button problems" when the web browser complains about POST data being resend when you reload or hit the back button on a page. Other frameworks have solved this problem, for example, "the flash" from Ruby on Rails.

Some other usability ideas that Moodle violates are the ideas in Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think". Although Moodle 2.5 now uses short forms, there are still many areas of Moodle in which it is very easy to screw up or forces the user to make decisions that can often end up being very bad for them. An easy example is the gradebook. The idea of overriding grades is not well communicated at all in the Grader Report and often causes our support headaches. When you override grades, the box is simply highlighted a different color, but there is no legend to indicate why it is that color or what it means. Just simple things like that.

As for looking at the competitors, there have been great strides in UX. For example, Blackboard's newest version of their Learn product has great UX now, just looking at their recent videos: http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Products/Blackboard-Learn/Features.aspx

The ability to easily embed video, easy grading, and built in learning analytics are ahead of the game when compared to Moodle, even if you count the various plugins and such available.

Also, another major up and coming competitor is Canvas. I really like their simple integration with LTI resources and easy of use in creating a page with video content, pictures, links, and such:  . So much better than the file picker that Moodle currently uses, because everything is on the page and lets you focus on creating content.

But, I believe, the reason that these other LMS systems can make their UI/UX experiences better is because they are, for the most part, hosted services. For example, it is very hard to make media handling easy if you cannot rely on a media server. Also, if is hard to easily make PDFs viewable in the browser, if you cannot have a guaranteed connection to a service like Scribd. 

What Moodle is, is that it is trying to be a jack of all trades type of web application. I love that it is open source and able to be heavily customizable. But the price you pay is that the out of the box it will look like it has been each piece of it has been designed and developed by a hundred different people, and it has! Each tool can be almost be guaranteed to not work or flow like another tool.

I believe that Moodle has a bright future and will only get better, but it really does need more UX contributors or useful and constructive feedback (and some contributed code) to make that happen.

Please join in on the effort! 

hi Vladimir, welcome to moodle

 

moodle seems to believe it can go on 'evolving' without fixing the massive underlying issue of its basic ux, but this incredibly obvious and very specific need isn't something the moodle community themselves  know how to do deal with exactly because there is are no ui or ux designers in moodle hq.

 

It's like saying "that's bad code" to a bunch of people who don't know what code is.

 

Lots of the commenters are asking for where moodle can be improved, and so i thought maybe we could start a list maybe?

 

1. Improve the process

Make sure future developements in moodle are user friendly by testing with real users : https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-32544

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=200924

 

2. Give users navigation

Elongated tree views, mixing clickable and none-clickable elements, confusing labels and the ability to jump to resources without context all mixed with no transparent information architecture are a constant feature of any enterprise level cms that grows organically.

 

If moodle is seriously meant for learning, it needs to place the end users needs first and have an information architecture:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=176557

 

Some mebers of hq are already thinking about this https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=233520 - be good to move it forward.

 

3. Simplify workflows for content creation

Without tutors having the right tools, its difficult to create a good  learning experience.

 

As you say “overcomplicated,  counter intuitive, outdated in concept and design, hard to navigate with dozens of clicks for even simplest operations... “

 

“ every second click was wrong in average. If it was so frustrating for me, an experienced web guy, I can't imagine teachers on my university to do it by themselves even after an extensive training.”

 

That pretty much sums up the experience of every tutor i met before we started to customise moodle for the end users needs.

 

If anyone cannot read the above as very precise constructive criticism i’m happy to have a chat - https://plus.google.com/117151225863784084515‎

 

4. Stop looking for examples of best web practice in other vle and look for them on the web instead

At the end of the day for a student or a tutor moodle is a website.

 

They don’t have experience of other vle’s - they just know how to use the web. The less moodle is like the rest of this web, the harder it is for the end users to use. Restricting moodle to a ‘like other vles’ silo is damaging for the end user.

 

Creating forms can be as easy as http://www.wufoo.com/ - Online discussion can be as easy as facebook/twitter - Video can be as easy as youtube - Quizes can be as easy as the most fun quiz on the web - making these things complex or difficult is the enemy of good user experience, and therefore the enemy of good leanring.

 

I’m sorry this is all ux stuff. Moodle seems to believe it can go on 'evolving' without fixing the massive underlying issue of its basic ux, but this incredibly obvious and very specific need isn't something the moodle community currently knows how to do deal with exactly because there is is no ux in moodle.

 

I’m not sure the above list is in anyway the priority issues to address, but they are the things we did at sussex and it seemed to get us into a position where teachers create fantastic learning experiences without having to do an online course in how to teach, and online learning is a modern web experience for students and not a trip to web of the 90s (before they were born!).

 

yeh, long post - add stuff, happy for anyone to message me for more specific constructive stuff - https://plus.google.com/117151225863784084515‎

welcome to moodle Vladimir 

As a Moodle administrator for 4 years, developer for 3, now core contributor, and newly minted user I have to say that I agree with the above.

I believe that awareness can be constructive in itself, so thank you.

To add my two cents, as was said, a lot of teachers know the web and so they can compare moodle to standard websites, but as a school we've never used totara or blackboard, etc... so nobody is saying "well I like this better than that LMS..."

I just hear "it's so confusing", "it's clunky", "I can't find...", "where is...", "how do I..." or "I like surveymonkey because it's surveys are way easier than moodle", "Why can moodle quizzes be more like memrise", "why can't I do BLANK as easily as BLAH"

As Stuart has roughly said the reply for me to a teacher, or Moodle to a user can't be "well change it then" or "do you know how many use cases there are for quizzes?" or even "what do you want?".  Good UX doesn't rely on the users to say what they want directly.  Good UX is an iterative process of soft science testing and feed back, A/B testing, focus groups, etc...  And that's not happening.  UX don't expect when somebody says "I don't like this" for them to be able to answer "then what do you want?", it guides them through the process.

So to that end - this IS constructive criticism from Vladimir, the ball is getting dropped on our (the developers') end.

And no, I'm not saying it's an easy fix!

Hello again and thank you for your comments. I've waited a bit to see all different kind of reactions... and I actually expected some hate To answer briefly on some of the comments: 1. Isn't this discussion that I provoked very constructive by itself? Even if you think I am wrong? Maybe I didn't shared my opinions about how it should be and why, but my intention was to direct your attention to one obviously neglected, but very important aspect of one otherwise great software. And it worked ;) 2. I do have experience with other LMS. We are using Chamilo. It is buggy, dev team is more fighting between themselves than developing, UI is far away from great example, but its workflows and UI are still a way better than Moodle. At least my colleagues teachers thinks so. But does it really matter? It is a software like any other. Complicated software. As a trivial example, if I need to click 5 times to get to particular course which is buried deep into categories, instead of typing first letter in some AJAX search box and getting it immediately, than it an interface that could be improved. 3. Comments in fashion "here you can donate if you you really want to help" and "it's free, be grateful, take it or leave it" are what is actually not constructive about this thread, and I will discard them as malicious and narrow way of thinking 4. I will try to help this project indeed. As a head of department for web development and design on my university, I am thinking to motivate some of my advanced students to consider this topic for their thesis and maybe we can join more developers and designers into the team. But before that, it is very valuable to have some sort of community feedback. Once again, thank you for participating in this discussion. I believe that open discussion and admitting that things must be improved are the only way to advance. Cheers! Vladimir

I agree with Vladimir. I've enjoyed reading everyone's perspective and think everyone agrees that something needs to be done. The UI/UX issue actually caused me to delay embracing Moodle. Three years ago, I just wanted to make course content available and the learning curve at the time was just too time consuming for my needs. I have to wonder how many similar stories are out there.

With many CMS's, where technical staff manage the system, you can get by with a weaker UI/UX design for content creators. However Moodle's backend is just as important as its front end because there is way more activity going on from content creators than with a typical CMS (course creation, management, etc).

If you haven't watched it yet, you might be interested in how the University of Sussex addressed this Moodle issue two years ago:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/31367166

Additional information related to this video is available on their blog.

I watched this short video and my first reaction was - wow, Moodle can be made easy to use. Based on my observation of this video, these folks did 3 things to make Moodle easier to use.

Trim the Menu

They've obviously trimmed the list of available feature considerably to those options that people in a specific role use the most. This would have been easy to implement in the past using the has_capability function with legacy guest, student, teacher, etc. role parameters (how check roles in Moodle 2.5+). Today, there are over 500 capability (and increasing) to deal with in Moodle and no clear documentation as to which capabilities are required by each menu item. I understand that this probably happened as Moodle evolved evolution but, if we were to start from scratch today, would most people really need that depth of control? I believe that it is things like this that end up making Moodle's UX challenging.

Although not mentioned in the video, one possible way to meet the needs of both basic and more advanced users is to have an Basic and Advanced menu mode where Basic would only provide the options typically required for day to day activity and Advanced would give them everything including the kitchen sink.

Group the Menu

Group menu items and combine configuration screens in ways that make sense to teachers, not necessarily to developers. You'll never be able to make everyone happy and if you try, nobody will like the result. Digging out useful and often used buried menu items would help eliminate a lot of hunting for options. This could be done by adding administrative landing pages. The challenge here isn't going to be in the grouping but making the breadcrumb trail work with the menus so that people can figure out their way around.

Interface Design

The current approach to Moodle's menu appears to be to make as much as possible accessible through the menu. This is not necessary and has resulted in making it difficult to find commonly used items. Again, having a Basic and Advanced mode could help here. Let me make this one easy for you. If you have a menu item in the tree that just opens a new menu level but has no page associated with it, turn it into that link to a landing page with meaningful linked images and helpful text. Not only would this end up appearing more user friendly, it would go a long way towards ensuring the dashboard's breadcrumb trail and user interface can meet WCAG 2.0 Accessibility standards which is essential to a growing number of organizations around the world.

If Moodle's administrative dashboard was a customizable role-aware add-on, I believe that you might concrete innovative ideas coming from developers/designers. I believe this would enable them to create and contribute great ideas instead of being locked into a fixed administration menu.

As for the point of praise for other LMS', the only reason there is room for praise is because they are innovating their UI/UX. Although they could take lessons from Moodle when it comes to functionality, Moodle could take a few lessons from them and build on elements that work. We have all seen what happens to businesses, open source or not, who don't adapt and innovate UX in a timely manor, no matter how good the technology might be. Just think about RIM, Palm, Sony, and a whole host of other players who used to be leaders of their domain).

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Best regards,

Michael

So, just for shits n giggles like - i thought i'd add this to the moodle jira ;)

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-41952

i guess i need someone needs to sit down with hq and explain something like  this http://alistapart.com/article/can-you-say-that-in-english-explaining-ux-research-to-clients

to moodle hq, but until then it looks like we are pretty much f**ked and left with :

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-32544 - closed

"Martin Dougiamas added a comment - 20/Apr/12 5:16 PM

Hi Vladimir,

Yes the default 'white' interface leaves something to be desired...

...but anyone how does, can put in the work and make it a lot better.

For example; https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=233520

or a system I work on from time to time; http://goo.gl/sYvjoD

Anne.