As you may have already heard, the Fluid Project is a new collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of open source software. One of the communities we're working with is Moodle. To find out more about the project, check out http://fluidproject.org.
We're currently working to assess the usability and accessibility of several open source applications by performing heuristic evaluations and cognitive walk-throughs. Heuristic evaluations are an easy and low-cost way to identify problems and to start thinking about design solutions. We've got a great team of designers and accessibility experts who will be leading this effort, but we're still looking for volunteers from the Moodle community who are interested in helping with the evaluations.
"Heuristic evaluation is a discount usability engineering method for quick, cheap, and easy evaluation of a user interface design" (Jacob Nielson, http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/). Design, usability, and accessibility experts will engage in systematic inspections of the user interface with the goal of identifying usability and accessibility problems based on recognized principles ("heuristics"). Our particular technique will combine heuristic evaluations with cognitive walk-throughs of the user interface so that we also look at expected user flows through the system and identify potential work flow problems. Heuristic evaluation isn't, however, meant to be a replacement for watching real users' activity on a system, so we intend to use heuristics in conjunction with user testing.
These evaluations will help us identify areas of Moodle's user interface that are difficult for users to work with, both in terms of usability and accessibility. Fluid's user experience team will share our findings with the community and work together to identify potential solutions. Heuristic evaluations and walk-throughs will identify areas of focus; we will engage in solid user-centered design practices and user testing to create the right solution.
The working list of heuristics and cognitive walk-through questions for the Fluid Project is being compiled on our wiki at:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Experience+Inspection
We would very much appreciate additional volunteers from the Moodle community to help with the evaluation process. Please feel free to get in touch with me or join the fluid-work mailing list and introduce yourself. You can subscribe to our mailing lists at:
http://fluidproject.org/index.php/mailing-lists
In case you were wondering, Fluid has a number of other things planned with Moodle over the next two years. We are going to:
- Perform a comprehensive usability study of Moodle, lead by York University who has adopted Moodle as their primary LMS
- Work with designers in the community to prioritize and suggest design solutions based on the results of our research
- Create user interface design patterns that can be used by the Moodle community (see Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces for more information. http://designinginterfaces.com/)
- Continue to compile the results of our design process into a Designer's Toolkit for Moodle, Sakai, and uPortal
As always, I'd be happy to hear your comments and feedback as we get more closely involved with the community!
Colin