General help

• Research in the usability world to see which methods are most used and which are most reliable: The usability guides that for me are most significant are the ones defined by MIT. There are, however, other recommendations perhaps more official such as the ones by usability.gov. There we can be how several guides that a first glance may be helpful (however a further study is needed to be done because the time is limited and perhaps some of them are more suitable for Moodle than others):
  • Navigation
  • Functionality
  • User control
  • Language and Content
  • Scrolling and paging
  • Links
  • Text appearance
  • Homepage
    
  • Online Help and User Guides
  • System and User Feedback
  • Web Accessibility (another proposal of GSoC is related to this item, because is required a deployment of a W3C's Tools)
  • Consistency
  • Error Prevention and Correction
  • Architectural and Visual Clarity: this has to do with Architecture information. It would be necessary that some kind of method (for example card sorting open and closed) verifies that the architecture information is valid. For that it would be strongly advisable to implement open and closed card sorting with an open source tool such as cardsword
    
• Select the ones that are more appropriate for Moodle:
  • I think that navigation is crucial for Moodle. Sometimes is a little bit messy, or too many clicks are needed.
  • System and user feedback is a think that is also very important, and perhaps is not as studied as other points.
  • Consistency is also very important because can cause much travel to the user
  • Finally, personally i have had many problems while using Moodle with the scrolling, that sometimes is not as usable as it should be.
    
• Create a usability guideline with the way to apply these methods for Moodle
  • This guideline should be done following the standards of the pages define above
    
• Try them with real world people (optional, although it would be very interesting)
  • I think this phase is really important in order to verify that the requirements are done properly. However, a considerable amount of time should be reserve to this phase. This phase would have the following points:
    • Goals definition
    • Tasks definition
    • Variables that should be measured
    • To which profile of users will make the test
    • Preparation of the test
    • Preparation of the set - up of the test
    • Analysis of the usability test
    • Conclusions of the usability test
      
• Analyse the results in order to extract conclusions of the current Moodle Usage
  • This should be done with the conclusions obtained with the usability test.
    
• Report the ways we could improve current Moodle Usability
  • This will be the last part.

Other things that can be used to develop this project is the reuse of some studies that have already been made for example the one developed by JAY MELTON of the Prefectural University of Kumamoto. The article was published in the internationally refereed journal, Language Issues. There, it is defined:

• the methodology (planning and design)
• the usability evaluation
• the evaluation
• the conclusions
• the references

With this study, this conclusion can be advanced: "Based on observations, comments from the participants, and information provided through the questionnaires, these results can be attributed partially to the level of computer skills of the participants, partially to the Moodle system, and partially to the choice of English as the Moodle system language." So we can expect to obtain this results from our study.

It is important also the availability that Moodle has. Moodle is one of the most adaptable and one of the software that allows more personalization. For that is really important not only to know the tool but also have read the previous studies done or the required references. In this study called "An Evaluation of Open Source E-Learning Platforms Stressing Adaptation Issues by Sabine Graf and Beate List Women’s Postgraduate College of Internet Technologies Vienna University of Technology". A grading of the adaptation capabilities of several open source software is done (we can see that Moodle is the one that has the highest mark) and also the evaluation details and the features that Moodle has to improve or that are most important to be tested. Perhaps see how other open source software are made can help to improve the usability of Moodle.

It is also important to define several type of user profiles in order to test the usability: administrators, users, deaf people (Moodle has developed an audio and other special features to allow handicapped people to use it), perhaps blind people (I don't know if there is any mechanism or compatibility with Braille, I don't think so...),etc.

Moreover, there are several prompts defined in this article which can be valuable:

• Enable quality streaming video of the sign-language interpreter, which can be viewed promptly and without unnecessary waiting time.
• Make the user interface simple and clear, without a multitude of additional options.
• Make the user interface as visual as possible without graphically exaggerating it.
• Keep navigation tools in a particular and clearly-defined position.
• Avoid unnecessary pop-up windows, since they can confuse users that have just started to work with computers.
• Simplify the language and explanations used - we advise the use of uncomplicated technical expressions.

I consider that it is also invaluable for the study to apply theoretical concepts of usability such as the famous ones of Nielsen:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

• Morae which is available only in Windows
• ErgoLight: Comprehensive GUI quality solutions for the professional Windows application developer. ErgoLight offers solutions for developers of Windows applications for testing and evaluating their usability.
• Bobby: Bobby is a web-based public service offered by CAST that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities as well as their compatibility with various browsers.
• Another list of usability software can be seen here

• check the usability guidelines described in the first analysis
• analyze that the web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities as well as their compatibility with various browsers as Bobby does
• give a list of statistics where we can see the result of the usability of the page.