Thomas Hanley

Hi Joseph,

The reason I suggested that would be happy to get involved with an aspect or specific area on Olli's list is that I am a relatively new Moodler (6 months!). To be honest I have barely scratched the surface and have not used most of the items on Olli's list.

I take your point though that Moodle is so wide-ranging that it is hard to have such a high-level, holistic, systematic overview. I was speculating (hoping!) that there are other people out there who have used Moodle for several years and are familiar with many different modules and interfaces. Or it maybe that Moodle is like any other software programme in that people generally use only 10-15% of the functionality. Everyone has different requirements and emphases and people may work alot with a subset of the available modules.

On reflection maybe some visual process would help? With complex tasks or information structures a card-sort methodology is often recommended by HCI experts. So you use post-it notes or cards and you lay them all out in front of you to sort and categorise the information or sub-divide the task. Maybe this could be applied to Moodle's interface(s)? You could take screenshots of all the different interface widgets / buttons / navigation mechanisms / interface mechanisms and then list all of the tasks being achieved and the interface mechanisms being used. The aim obviously to arrive at a consistent use of mechanisms for identical tasks. As a visual thinker myself this is the sort of approach I might take to try and tackle such a problem.

To (sort of!) answer your question the aim of the UI guidelines Olli is developing is to provide the holistic / systematic blueprint which is then used as a guide by Moodle developers who are coding specific modules. A developer wishing to include a specific task or interaction would refer to the guidelines to see what mechanism / widget should be used. The ultimate aim of course being a consistent user experience.

~thomas

Olli,

Sorry for my delay in responding. I got side-tracked on different posts. Thanks for all your work on making Moodle more usable and in particular on developing User Interface guidelines. I really believe that developing Moodle's user experience and interface design aspects is vitally important in enabling teachers and other Moodlers to make best use of this fantastic software (I can't imagine how many tens of thousands of development hours have gone into the programming!). There just needs now to be a push on the user-centred design / usability side of things.

I do agree that developers should be involved in this process. The extent and scope of this involvement is what I was questioning. I definitely think it is good that developers become more aware of the interaction design process and that they are provided with guidelines. I guess the main point of focus for me is on the experience users have and any issues they encounter which makes it hard for them to use Moodle. This is particularly significant as so many Moodlers are teachers, not interactive designers, usability experts or PHP coders! Their main concern is how to achieve a given task. They don't need to worry about XHTML, CSS, PHP etc ; ) So the more feedback from teachers who are non-technical the better. 

Thanks for the Guerilla HCI link, seems like an approach that is very relevant to Moodle. I totally agree of aiming for usability engineering to be systematically used rather than sporadically. Of course this is a big task as alot of work will have to be done retrospectively.

Looking in your development area here:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Usability/Improve_Moodle_User_Experience_Consistency

I think it is a good idea to develop some lightweight Human Interface Guidelines as an intermediate step. I guess then there will need to be some prioritisation of the items which you have listed in

UIs to examine
Interaction styles/elements to examine

Clearly there are so many areas to look at it seems like a big ask for one person to look at everything (ie you!). Once areas to address first have been prioritised would it be possible then to assign one or more people to a specific area (in the same way that Moodle Tracker works?). These usability issues are not of course bugs, they are perhaps better termed 'improvements'. These individuals or smaller teams could carry out some analysis feeding back to someone overseeing this (you!), maybe at the start of the process they could be tasked to carry out the analysis in a structured way so that there is some consistency in the analysis. Not sure what your plans are as far as working through the list of items is. The reason I raise this suggestion is that although these issues can be addressed (to some extent) in the forums, it sometimes feels a bit ad hoc, random, fragmented. Also in terms of work load it would obviously be best to spread the work across a number of people (with a person or group overseeing). Not sure exactly how this would work.

User experience lead person / group
Role: to define the priorities, to provide a framework for analysing current interface mechanisms, interaction types etc
Possible participants: User experience / HCI types, developers, Moodle administrators, experienced Moodle teachers

Course Management (or any other priority area) lead person / group
Role: to use the framework provided by user experience lead in order to systematically analyse a specific areas of Moodle
Possible participants: User experience / HCI types, developers, Moodle administrators experienced Moodle teachers

Moodle Community (Developers, teachers, administrators etc)
Possible participants: User experience / HCI types, developers, Moodle administrators, experienced Moodle teachers, all other Moodle teachers

These ideas about participants are just loose thoughts. For me the main point here is that I think it would help to have some way of structuring how we engage the Moodle community. Yes we need as many Moodlers from all levels of experience involved as possible, but beyond this I think the critical point is how we make use of their skills, experience and time. How we can best make use of this valuable input in a way which is structured and can lead to the creation of user experience and interface design guidelines which are based on a systematic, holistic view of Moodle. I would be happy to offer to get involved in one aspect (maybe it is just how my mind works, but sometimes I find it helps to focus on one task and get this clear). Of course as stated earlier there would need also to be someone or ideally a group of people guiding this from a level where they can see / understand / have experience of many different areas of Moodle.

Hope this helps

~thomas

Thanks to Frank Ralf for pointing me in the direction of this useful plugin which works with Firefox's Firebug extension:

CodeBurner is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10273

It is a nice quick way of checking browser compatibility. You can then follow up at the sitepoint website to read more specific info about any issue raised and see if there are any workarounds.

Looks like this:

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the CodeBurner link and for adding this info to Moodle's CSS help. Looks very useful as a quick way of checking browser compatibility. I have highlighted this in the Themes forum with a new thread as I think others might find this useful.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=122825

~thomas

Joseph,

This is a useful selector, a couple of minor things to bear in mind:

1) Not supported in IE6. Although perhaps for most people now this is not an issue.

2) Small bug in IE7 that can cause adjacent sibling selectors to fail:

http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/adjacentsiblingselector

~thomas