In older versions of Moodle, there was a very recognizable dropdown box for toggling visibility of Restrict access rules, that immediately drew your attention when setting these rules up. From 3.1 onwards, this was changed to the 'eye' icon with just an Alt message describing the function of the button.
This is not really intuitive and it may take a course creator or teacher some time to find it altogether. Is there any way to improve usability of this feature?
What did the old UI look like? As far as I know the display of adding conditional restrictions has not changed since they have been introduced.
We do have a patch that is changing the way the conditional restrictions are displayed to end-users: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-59653
For much older versions of Moodle (around 2.5 - 2.6) I found there used to be a very clear dropdown menu for every condition added, prompting the teacher or course creator what to do (display the conditions and the activity greyed out; or hide the activity and the availability conditions altogether). In current versions of Moodle, 2.7 onwards, this very visible option has been replaced with the 'eye' icon.
Before 2.7:
and
I get that this is not the best UI, but I also think the current approach needs a bit more information for the teacher / course creator, so he/she can use this very useful tool adequately.
We are working on a patch that adds a help icon to try to explain the eye icon. What do you think?
Still requires an extra click, and users don't regularly click those help buttons. I would rather go for a view like this:
| Rule | Hide/show rule to students | Delete |
|---|---|---|
| [description of rule1] | eye icon to toggle visibility | cross icon to delete rule |
| [description of rule 2] | eye icon to toggle visibility | cross icon to delete rule |