Thomas Hanley

While I can understand Joseph's point that not all educational establishments have access to the resources that a distance learning institution such as Athabasca has I still think Moodle should be flexible enough to allow those institutions who do have staff members with these skills to be able to use them.

I agree with Ian that as far as possible (I know the Moodle development team also has limited resources!) it would be nice for front-end designers (XHTML, CSS) to be able to improve the visual appearance and the usability of content and interactions within Moodle.

For me the reason I think it is important to make the front-end code as accessible as possible is primarily for reasons of usability, the secondary reason is aesthetics (although sometimes of course the two can be linked). Sometimes Moodle creates a confusing user-experience (for example when the pseudo breacrumb navigation had a link to a resources page that the user had never been to). I know this issue has now been resolved. I guess the point I am making is that as far as possible control over content and navigation mechanisms should be achievable by altering the XHTML and CSS rather than trying to hack PHP. With the more functional modules within Moodle I think that the interactions need to be designed and user-tested and then developed. People who have been doing rapid prototyping recently using Balsamiq are I believe onto a good thing as it makes sense to design the interactions and think them through before implementing.

Hi Tim,

Simplicity and consistency are important qualities in making a system usable so having one state that applies everywhere consistently seems like a good approach.

As you say if people cannot articulate why a different mechanism would be preferable then implementing the system you outlined would be best.

~thomas

Hi Joseph,

Many thanks also for this useful post. I feel that having clear navigation is fundamentally important in order to make your learning content as easy as possible to move through and find. The greater the number of navigation mechanisms and the greater the varying types of navigation mechanism the more likely you are to confuse users. So I too have chosen to disable this jump menu.

Just a quick clarification about where to disable within header.html. I am using

Moodle 1.94+ (Build20090225)
Standard Theme

The line Joseph highlights in red which needs changing:

<div class="headermenu"><?php echo $menu ?></div>

...occurs in two places.

The first time it occurs it places a jump menu on the home page which controls language choice:



The second time it places a jump menu to resources / courses on all other pages:



So change the two lines (highlighted yellow below) within header.html

<div id="page">

<?php //Accessibility: 'headermain' is now H1, see theme/standard/styles_layout.css: .headermain
if ($home) { // This is what gets printed on the home page only
?>
<?php print_container_start(true, '', 'header-home'); ?>
<h1 class="headermain"><?php echo $heading ?></h1>
<div class="headermenu"><?php echo $menu ?></div>
<?php print_container_end(); ?>
<?php } else if ($heading) { // This is what gets printed on any other page with a heading
?>
<?php print_container_start(true, '', 'header'); ?>
<h1 class="headermain"><?php echo $heading ?></h1>
<div class="headermenu"><?php echo $menu ?></div>
<?php print_container_end(); ?>
<?php } ?>

~thomas

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your thoughts. My reason for questioning who leads with regard to developing user interface guidelines is that in my experience the majority of commercial web and software application development projects (particularly those which are large scale and complex projects) do have separate roles for those that do the technical implementation and those whose primary expertise is in the field of user interface design and usability. Both of these fields are complex and involving and require different skillsets in my opinion. Of course there is communication between these two groups of people, particularly with regard to technical feasiblity, but user-centred design is about focussing on the user and the design of the system first and technical implementation second.

In your post you didn't say why you though this was a bad model, you simply made a statement that this was 'old-fashioned'. Sorry but I don't understand what you mean by this statement. Could you give reasons *why* this model is a bad model?

Your suggested alternative where we are all Moodle developers with all due respect sounds vague and unstructured. I agree that Moodle developers should be involved but my question was: who is leading the development of the usability guidelines? Personally I believe that with such a complex large scale application such as Moodle you need people with specialist user-centred design and usability experience and skills to do this successfully.

I do agree with you that the Moodle community should have a significant role and input in improving Moodle's usability. However, it doesn't seem clear to me who exactly is guiding and leading the process. Who is taking the useful feedback from users and then ensuring that information is feeding into general usability guidelines or into the specifications for the interactions involved in different Moodle modules?

~thomas

Hi Olli,

Thanks for your work on this. I think consistent UI guidelines as you suggest are essential to support the developers implementing Moodle modules. I can understand that given the modular nature of Moodle that inevitably there are many interface inconsistencies. Also totally agree with the point Martin Dougiamas made that usability has to be seen as an equal priority to technical code development.

Not sure what you meant by involving developers in creating UI guidelines. I can understand that developers will need guidelines that support their work and which are technically realistic. I am not sure though that they are the right people to focus on in terms of creating the UI guidelines themselves. As I understand it developers main focus is technical implementation; the intrticacies of coding in PHP and working with MySQL etc. Usability seems like a different field to me and a time-consuming one also. So I guess I am questioning how developers would find the time to delve into usability. Also I feel that best-practice user interface guidlelines should be independent to some extent from how interfaces are implemented. User-centred design should be the focus and I think in some ways developers are too close to the implementation to fully see things from the point of view of the user.

As far as making all this work I notice in the Drupal link you sent that different people are assigned to different aspects of the work. Is it possible to do this for the UI work  you are undertaking?

One of the strengths of Moodle is open feedback  and collaboration but I feel that sometimes this leads to information scattered across different discussion threads, the tracker, developer areas etc. I am not sure what the standard practice is for working through these issues. I feel that it would help if a core group of people were assigned to working on this and then sub-groups maybe to focus on different aspects of the work.

~thomas