User experience (UX): Reduced information density in 4.0

Reduced information density in 4.0

by Nils Kattenbeck - Thursday, February 10, 2022, 1:46 AM

I recently checked out the sketches and QA site for 4.0 and noticed that the information density on the course page has suffered drastically. It already got lowered with the introduction of the completion status badge but now it feels even worse.

Previously it was no problem and very legible to have a section with a dozen submissions, file downloads etc. or a mix of them in a fraction of the available screen estate.

With the design in 4.0 much of the vertical screen space is now wasted. I am not talking about the width which is fine in most circumstances but why are video activities so large that only 5 of them fit on a single page? Other activities are similar especially if they have open or due dates.

It is common to have sections/topics with more than 10 activities and with the new layout these do not fit on one screen anymore. Having to scroll drastically hinders readability and makes scanning the content very hard. One does not need the type of the activity spelled out next to the overly large icon in the same size as the activities title. Also putting every activity inside a box with 1.5em seems very excessive.

Information density should not be reduced this much. Whitespace might be used to separate different topics/sections which these are clearly not. Furthermore these are only screenshots from my desktop—on mobile the experience is even worse.

Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Bob Gilmore - Thursday, February 10, 2022, 8:25 AM

This is Moodle 4.0 out of the box. It's never going to work for every single use case.

In my organisation (and a previous one) ,overly dense course layouts were a huge pressure point for us. My teachers/course creators were trying to get more and more on a course page, to the point where they were asking for global font reductions and steadily reduced space between elements. My learners complained of getting lost in the resources, never being able to find where they were up to and what they needed to do next. I also had frequent requests to change the icons from both groups because they "didn't mean anything".

We adapted by using the grid format layout plugin (https://moodle.org/plugins/format_grid - tiles also works https://moodle.org/plugins/format_tiles) and keeping the number of activities down per topic. I also tweaked the theme we use (Fordson, not boost) to display the name of the activity under the icon. For your specific example of 5 videos we have switched to using an activity, such as a lesson with 5 content pages containing 1 video each, then questions relating to the video either on the same page or on subsequent pages. My teachers are on board now and course engagement (as measured by activity completion) is significantly higher.

Basically, for us, works better by default and would take less work to tweak to our requirements.

I think the out of the box Moodle experience has to look and be as engaging and easy to use to as many people as it can. With some general quibbles I have you'll find scattered around this forum, I think they've done a good job overall. Once people are on-board, then questions about styling and themes can be addressed and Moodle has a wealth of options in this area.

Therefore, we as admins need to adapt our layouts to our specific requirements rather than expect one default theme from Moodle to cover all our needs. It's trivial to adjust the themes Custom CSS to change whitespace and even some elements or element placement. With some scripting knowledge, its possible to selectively move or remove elements from pages (see, for example Dominique Bauers post in this forum about chaning the icons for specific activities with a script you can add to your existing courses https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=424856#p1728325). Finally, of course there are themes which can completely change the layout, either finding one that's close and tweaking it as desired or creating / commissioning one of your own.

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Jon Witts - Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 5:44 PM

I would respectfully disagree Bob...

These changes to Moodle 4.0's default layout are going to drastically affect many courses... The increased amount of white space is going to make practically every single course on our Moodle almost unnavigable. We are doing our best to split a 2 or 3 course into as many discreet sections as we can and using collapsed sections so that students only need to view the resources for the section / unit they are currently studying; but some of these units can have many resources within them. For example one unit in my GCSE Computer Science course contains 15 labels, 39 URLs, 8 quizzes and 13 glossaries.

Course with this amount of resources within them are going to become so long that users will not be able to find the resources without scrolling for hours!

This new design for Moodle 4.0 is going to contribute hugely to the scroll of death for students!

Jon

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Bob Gilmore - Thursday, March 10, 2022, 3:13 AM

The course you describe isn't especially large, the courses I specifically develop have similar numbers of quizzes and an equal number of lessons without including assignments and database activities. I've already tested them on 4.0 and had both educators and learners do some testing for us. So far the issues have all be around primary navigation, specifically the breadcrumb and course index navigation. The two course formats we used (grid and tiles) both seem to work fine on 4.0. I just wish there was a course level toggle for the sections to be collapsed by default if you use the standard course formats provided with 4.0 and when collapsed, you could see a compilation status summary.

I do query the use of 15 labels in a course. Without seeing exactly what you're doing to be sure, this sounds like what many of my teachers were trying to do previously; i.e. put all of the learning materials on the course page instead of in discreet sections and course materials. This is where we found our learners struggling because they could never find what they needed to do and did contribute to overly long courses as well as learners unsure of what they've already done and where they are up to.

As an unrelated aside rant, the scroll of death is really only relevant when you need instant engagement to get people hooked to your content so they buy your product or don't skip over your important advertising links. Yet, every social media site has infinite scrolling and trust me, people are engaged with that stuff. If learners are on your LMS, they should already be engaged. The issue for an LMS is the ability to find materials you need quickly and see what hasn't been completed yet. The real solution to that is good course structure with help from a search feature (and, again, the grid / tiles plugins really help here). I'd really like to see Moodle beef up the search feature, let me search and sort on due dates, uncompleted, etc.

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Jon Witts - Friday, March 18, 2022, 12:51 AM

The course I mentioned is a GCSE Computer Science course. Each unit studied is a topic in its own right in the Moodle course. Each topic / unit then uses the labels to separate the resources and activities for each lesson within that topic / unit.

There would be far too many topics if we were to try and use one topic per lesson... Ideally we would have a far better way of sub-dividing topics / units in Moodle than just using labels on the topic page...

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Nathan Lind - Thursday, March 10, 2022, 3:58 AM

Jon, I agree with you 100%. Moodle 4.0, as currently designed, will make our courses 300% longer vertically. The standard response that the left-side "Course Index" will address this vertical navigation problem does not suffice. What is missing is the ability to group items (assignments, readings) together, indented, under a label, where the label provides context (learning objectives, headings, etc). This attached screenshots shows what was possible in Moodle 3.9 but does not work in 3.11 and 4.0. Despite many years of supporting faculty using Moodle, it is not a simple matter for me to "fix" the CSS to return Moodle 4.0 to the 3.9 compact layout. Hundreds of millions of courses have been built with Moodle using the layout used for the last 20 years. Those courses will now be 300% longer, and lack the ability to easily group and contextualize activities and resources using labels and indentation.

Left side shows Moodle 3.9 with label, followed by three indented forums, the right side, the same layout, in Moodle 4.0

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Bob Gilmore - Thursday, March 10, 2022, 1:58 PM

Really quick reply, I've only had a chance today to spend 5 minutes with 4.0, but with the following CSS:

.activity-item:not(.activityinline) { border: none; padding: 0.5rem; }
.activityiconcontainer { width: 30px; height: 30px; }
.activitytitle .text-uppercase { display: none; }
.description .course-description-item:first-child { margin-top: 0.25rem; padding-top: 0.25rem; }
.description .course-description-item:last-child { padding-bottom: 0.25rem; }

I get the following:

Obviously, I have the descriptions showing, and I'm sure I could tighten the margins between activities.

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Nathan Lind - Thursday, March 10, 2022, 11:51 PM

Thank you Bob.

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Jean-Philippe Pellet - Wednesday, May 4, 2022, 4:03 PM

Thanks, Bob, this is very helpful.

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Re: Reduced information density in 4.0

by Chris Kenniburg - Thursday, March 17, 2022, 4:34 AM

I don't know that I've used Moodle 4 enough to have a solid opinion on the new layout. Here is what I appreciate:

Better information upfront without having to open the activity
Seems to be more ADA compliant than just a checkbox
The color change for completed items has a similar effect for young learners as a checkbox

Here is where I think the new layout REALLY shines with long courses:

Switching to one topic per page is really intuitive now
Highlighting a topic displays that topic's items on the main course page which is really nice

I agree each item now consumes a lot of real estate on the page but I think the space is needed for the learner. I am also a fan of open space on a page. It helps the person focus on a task. So I am holding out concerns or forming an opinion until we get time on it and use it for a couple of months.

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Reduced information density in 4.0