User experience (UX)

Hi Candince, thank you so much for all the hard work and this enlightening presentation. 

I can't wait to try Moodle 4.0!

To Candice and everybody else who is involved in design:

First of all thanks for your great work, and I'm also quite pleased that the new design is trying to declutter the sometimes less than obvious navigation in the current Moodle version. That's why in our new course design we were also thinking about a cleaner layout:



The elements I like are the clear navigation at the top the course index and the fact that you can always hide the blocks on the right side so easily.

I have concerns with the course index: How will it look when you have a lot of resources in a course: Our courses typically have around fifty resources per topic. So from what I guess is the current state of design, this will lead to an endless long course index. Or will there be an option to collapse the part you don't need?

The priorities of the navigation links under the main title at the top of the page where also a bit surprising to me, as I definitely have other priorities there, but hopefully this will be customizable through theme plugins.

Another concern is the huge amount of white space on the left and right of the main course. On some devices this means that you could lose some screen estate especially when you move to activities like quizzes who probably still have to present more information at one glance.

Another thing I like and dislike at the same time is how the main content behaves when you blend in the navigation bar or the course index. From a users perspective it is very good that the main content doesn't change its width which at the moment can lead to content to move outside of the viewport of the user. What I like less, is the fact that the content moves to the side, but I guess that's still a preferable solution to the current state in Moodle 3.10.

To summarize, the will to make Moodle literally more visually accessible is clearly visible, and I hope that the new design will consider the needs of institutions who build big courses with many resources. I suppose, indendation of activities and resources will still be an option as it reflects the hierarchy of materials presented. And I certainly hope that the new design won't break all the great plugins available for the core system.

After your presentation I'm curious what other design improvements will come along the way in the next months.

Thanks, Candice & The UX Team!

I love it and can't wait ... exactly 17 years ago today I started with Moodle, and now I am looking forward to the new design.

One approach that came to me while watching the great video: I get the impression that the dashboard is now more of an actionboard. In other words, a place where I am informed about my upcoming activities.

If you want me to leave the approach in another place, please give me an information.

Keep up the good work

Dag from Berlin

Note: For faster translation I have used deepl.com

Hi Candice,

Thank you for doing this work publicly and soliciting feedback throughout.

The new "course index"

I love this concept, that there is a quick guide that a study can look at to see the course organization and quickly navigate throughout the course. I think it is wonderful. The one question I have about it is the decision to only include some course elements and not all course elements. In the prototype, it looks like you are only including "activities" and not "resources." 

It was a few seconds of confusion for me, because I was trying to navigate to something in the course, but didn't see why what I needed wasn't included in the list. I wonder if you could share your thought process in not including all course content? 

My opinion: If the dashboard is the place to figure out what's due next, then the course index would be better if it includes all content.

The next/previous navigation buttons

One thing that really jumped out at me is that there were no next/previous buttons for navigation anymore. Was that an oversight because it wasn't really the focus of the demo, or are those being removed again?

We use some LTI integrations that really benefit from next/previous buttons, so we would really miss them if they were gone. In the past we had added them back in through plugins, and were really happy when they were reintroduced as a core feature.

Great work, Candice and UX team. Looking forward to seeing the next steps.

This already looks unclunky. I think that the key information around each course item (completion, dates, etc.) give the page a much more structured feel.

A concern could be the amount of white space in the desktop version. Might there be a setting for this? i.e. more or less condensed, together with other options such as width, line spacing, font size, font family, etc. Or is this too messy?

Thanks Candice, this looks great. really cleans up the clutter.

One area I'm interested to better understand is the course page menu that shows Course|Settings|Participants..etc across the top.
I see all those items, other than "Course", as "admin items", where I would like the focus to be on "Learning items" (if that makes sense).Is that menu customisable to allow that?

We have used tabbed browsing at Solent for a number of years (using an adapted OneTopic course format) and have tabs in that position to move through the learning items. We have the first fixed standardised to our "SOL Standard"  - Overview; Assessment; Readings and Resources; Learning Community; Managing Learning; then further tabs as decided by the tutor. Each tab (ie Moodle Topic) can then have sub-tabs or the normal Moodle scroll down of activity and resource items. Works really well and provides a very consistent approach as students move between modules (moodle courses). So "Learning Items" are front and centre, while the "Admin items" are on the side menu.

Happy to discuss in a call if it helps.

That IS GREAT news Candice. Cannot wait to see the outcome of your hard work you have put. Tank you all!

Just a quick advice/request on a issue... It would be GREAT to have a feature to fetch an activity grade from another course! I hope you consider this as there are other users/admins who would like to have this feature.

Ciao!

Great work, Moodle Team, and thanks for the presentation, Candice!

Since you asked, one UX note to make: when an activity has been completed, the oval turns to green (nice!), but the label still reads "To do: View". Could this be re-worded to avoid confusion to something like: "Viewed" or some such. The lasting "To do" moniker may trip some users up.

Best on your continued work!

Our faculty have requested that the eye icon be added next to each activity in a course (when editing is turned on, next to the pen icon) for faster access to hide/show activities and resources.

Upon submitting the request to Moodle Tracker, it was suggested I post the feature request here, to see if others in the Moodle community would find this change useful.

Thanks for any feedback!

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