Moodle: The user's experience

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• Simplifying Moodle forms and adding activities to courses

  December 20th, 2011

  At LUNS Limited they’ve collapsed the Moodle form fieldsets that only contain optional items, in Moodle forms. Without having seen any usability test results or knowing whether they exist, it does seem like an elegant solution at first glance! (Discussion)

  They’ve also used the example of the Quiz Add question dialog (tracker item) we did with Tim for allowing people to add activity modules on the course front page. Originally I actually found this UI pattern in QuestionMark during the user research sessions done for the Quiz UI redesign project – great to see it being put to good use.

  

  This should make adding activities more straightforward. Yay!

  (Thanks to Helen Foster for the screenshot and to Mary Cooch for the screencast)

  Tags: pattern, UIpattern
  Posted in Communication, design | No Comments »

   

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• Dangers of moded user interfaces

  August 27th, 2011

  Modes can be dangerous in a user interface, especially if the UI does not make the modes and their states clearly visible. This is often heard advice about UI design. I collected snippets of this advice/heuristics here.

  If you have a different point of view or know scientific articles or textbooks that further discuss this, I would love to hear about it!

  (More …)

  Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

   

• What is a course & the tools for having a great one (Part 2)

  November 25th, 2010

  Moodle 2.0 was released yesterday (Yay! Super-Yay!) so a small discussion starter into what I think Moodle might look like in the future is appropriate. Actually, the discussion continues from a couple of months ago, when discussed quite a bit in MoodleNews and on Twitter. (See also previous course editing prototype.)

  I interviewed a Finnish polytechnic teacher back in July, and presented discoveries from that interview/brainstorming session in part 1. She uses Blackboard for her courses but is considering moving to Moodle. She is a bit confused when people around her are thinking of Moodle as more of a document repository than a learning platform. She acknowledges that there is probably more to it. Still, she thinks Blackboard better guides teachers who do not have a strong idea of their pedagogical approach, than Moodle.

  (More …)

  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

   

• The temptation to avoid usability work

  November 19th, 2010

  I am currently working on a private software project in a startup. I am involved not only in the design of the overall user experience, but also in implementation, since we are not many. The temptation to skip usability work is great for our team of two, and I too have to keep convincing myself why usability work is absolutely crucial to product success. Trying to find a succint enough way to express the basic needs for the work…

  Software engineers often question the value of usability work. It may be that a good designer could design a UI that does not create major confusion for most – if those designers already have lots of experience from usability testing in other projects. However, in any application that is done without explicit user research and usability testing targeted for the specific UI, you tend to have dozens of small confusing moments that make up the overall user experience and lead to a general ‘yuk’ reaction. Not to mention that if you don’t intimately know your users’ goals, you are likely to be designing the wrong overall application.

  Tags: Human-Computer Interaction, Strategy, usability test, User eXperience
  Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

   

• Master's thesis about Moodle and open source usability work

  September 30th, 2010

  A couple of weeks ago, my master’s thesis was approved, titled User experience design in open source development: Approaches to usability work in the Moodle community. The work documents usability work that happened for Moodle 2.0, so it was published just in time before that will finally get out. :)

  I owe a big thanks to many, many members of the Moodle community. I am truly grateful to the two professors, Eleni Berki (home) and Saila Ovaska (home), under whose very generous guidance the work took place. Especially Saila seemed to invest a near-infinite number of hours in my work, for which I am still amazed. Their final statement for the work is presented below.

  The grade Eximia Cum Laude Approbatur equals 6 on a scale (in Finnish) of 1-7, where 1 is weak and 7 is the highest grade. I have been asked to write an article based on the work, but that will probably have to wait for now.

  Update: I have sent a copy of the thesis also to Moodle HQ, as well as to Tim Hunt and to Silvia Calvet, who have supported Moodle usability efforts and my work. Further printed copies are available, tell me if you’re interested.

  Update 2: I have been glad to see this has raised plenty interest in Twitter. Thanks everybody for the retweets and the congratulations! You rock! Feedback is very welcome.

  Update 3, Nov. 18 2011: This thesis won an honorary mention in the thesis competition (link in Finnish) of the Finnish chapter of SIGCHI ! Yay! Their statement of the thesis: “The jury thought this as a new type of thesis work, which successfully captures the phases and challenges in a multi-phased process of redesigning a Moodle community application. Open source communities have been little investigated from the HCI point of view, and the author successfully opens interesting new viewpoints with the thesis. The constructive Pro Gradu thesis has also resulted a tangible contribution.”

  (More …)

  Tags: academic, Background ideas, Human-Computer Interaction, modelling, User eXperience
  Posted in Communication | 20 Comments »

   

• Springtime activities

  May 20th, 2010

  During this spring I have taken part in the following:

  Grieved over what Navigation 2.0 does to the Quiz editing UI I designed and usability tested in summer 2008 (discussion, tracker item), throwing away much of the tested design without testing the changes (update, later the same day: this is still being discussed; see the tracker item). How I wish I could be there when core moodlers design and decide about big UI-related changes like this Navigation 2.0! (spec for the Quiz change)

  • Worked with Eloy, Sam and others to get Moodle’s first proper Wizard in. Yay!  Sam did a great job of reacting to my feedback quite late in the process, though apparently he did not know of the specifications I had made for the wizard last autumn.
  • Discussed Database module exporting UI
  • Discussed Forum search UI with Anthony
  • Commented on The database module’s UI on Anthony’s request – hope to have a chance to do some research and help in redesigning the Database module UI at some point
  • Added MediaWiki categories to Moodle UI guidelines for faster browsing, cleaned up the guidelines so unfinished things are less in the way of usage
  • In the Moodle sprint, took a look at the toolbar of the rich text editor; reviewed all the comments the question had received since last summer, and created a new patch. Petr told me it is okay to assign the bug to him, as he will be working on the editor before Moodle 2.0 release.
  • Commented on issues, such as MDL-6820 MDL-20461,  found on the CANnect Accessibility report by Randall Hansen (MDL-20409)
  • Commented on the new Moodle 2.0 Dock navigation’s interactive behaviours: MDL-21529

  Also, jotted some usability related bugs down:

  • MDL-22393: password recoverz functionality tweak
  • MDL-22249: wrong mime type for an image file

  Part II to What is a course & the tools for having a great one, with exciting new UI design for an old challenge is coming out at the beginning of June as soon as I can find any free time. Stay tuned!

  Tags: Strategy, User eXperience
  Posted in Communication, design | 7 Comments »

   

• What is a course & the tools for having a great one (Part 1)

  May 11th, 2010

  See also: Part 2 – a design proposition for Moodle course front page

  (Update July 5th: Working on the follow-up article is taking longer than I expected. Bear with me, it is on its way! :)

  Inspired by Tomaz’ blog post, I did an informal interview with a business and marketing teacher I know. There are two separate points I want to make about the interview, so this article starts a series of two articles.

  I wanted to go thinking on a very general level of what are the tools that can be used for helping individuals learn on a given theme. I will here call the place to do such learning, a course.

  The questions I presented:

  What constitutes a course?
  What are the defining factors; what do you do on a course, how, and why? In other words, we playfully tried to generate a definition of a course.

  What kinds of tools can be used in order to facilitate learning of individuals on a course?
  Then I asked the interviewee to list the tools that can be used for learning in each aspect of the course’s definition. “Tools” are defined very widely here, as anything that can facilitate learning on the theme. They may sometimes have natural hierarchy, but here I want to perceive them such that each we can each still see the relations differently.

  The definition here is of necessity more narrow than that discussed by Tomaz – I believe that restriction helps when thinking about the design of a platform for courses.

  (More …)

  Tags: Background ideas, modelling, pedagogy, Strategy, User eXperience
  Posted in design | 1 Comment »