I'm Olli Savolainen (sometimes known as pilpi). I strive to make the Moodle user experience better.
Past projects:
The page layout and the single questions look like they are supposed to now. CSS took more time that I expected it to. Random question layout (+listing of the questions of the category in the random question box) and question bank layout are still unimplemented, which translates to being just about one week behind schedule.
Turns out that in Finland everybody (teachers) is still on holiday next week anyway so arranging usability testing would probably not have been easy, anyway.
Completed:
Started:
In short, the quiz display is very near complete. Next up: question bank window display. Also considering some negative margins to make the document flow order more sensible. I have not tested anythin in Ye Mighty Internet Exploder yet. I think of that moment in slight feelings of angst. Something amusing about browsers and users
Contacted some usability test persons I recruited earlier. No reply yet.
Released version 0.21 to tracker. I am planning to put a demo moodle here, once most other features will have been completed. For now, you can look at the static HTML demo and if you wish, download the version in the tracker for testing.
There were a couple of issues with the current quiz/questions. The most pressing one is that the Edit/Add Questions page seems to absolutely require a question category as a parameter. It would fit the workflow much better if a category could be unspecified once entering the question editing page with a new question. Then, the user would have to think about categories at least as much as to select the default category from the list. The changes required to do this seemed too dramatic so they should probably be discussed with Tim Hunt/the community. For now, we are preselecting the default category for the user.
Some highlights: To get quiz work as designed, I added a new GET parameter to the question editing page, which allows specifying the name of a GET parameter to return a newly created question’s id to the page in returnurl. Also, the quiz editing page got a new get parameter, addonpage, for specifying the page on which to add a new question.
It is somehow frustrating to use precious coding time in project management, but today I did and I am glad. Found many gems from my notes that I would have been sorry if I had found out them too late when actual development would have been done too far.
Last Saturday, I published the final spec with screenshots of the tested UI. Though everybody seems to be on holiday, I got some comments about it, too. Implementation is going on in the tracker, which is the main means of following development at this point, as well as the development section of the project portal for the bleeding edge developments.
Also the prototype testing report and details have been online for about a week now.
Created an 0.(0)1 version of the functional UI; added it to the new issue in the tracker.
Just finished the last OOo Impress prototype test, I have now done eight of them in total with different subjects from four different educational institutions. I will publish the results on Friday (and boy, is there a lot to talk about or what).
Tomorrow I will try to code together the first bits of actual code, in order to put them into the tracker, in order to gain Moodle CVS access, in order to start seriously developing :).
The discussion about scenarios has gotten into a nice-ish start. I also published some details about how the scenarios interviews were done. Although I will try to take into account all the feedback from that background data, it does seem quite far from concrete use cases or the UI. The work I am doing just on two – although quite complex – screens, still mostly seems too simple to be affected much by the high-level differences between the personas, though some changes have been made based on them, too.
Nevertheless, I have been working on the prototype again, for the most part making fixes based on the usability tests done on May 28th and 29th. I will probably do some rather quick&spontaneous prototype testing with basically anybody I can get my hands on, not to prove anymore the UI suits the tasks of teachers, but more trying to make sure the functionality is understandable, in accordance with the ideas presented about discount usability testing in Don’t make me think by Steve Krug. After that I will publish the final OOo Impress prototype.
The different areas of focus in the actual implementation and coding work are envisioned to be as follows. Note that most functionality is already present in the current Quiz – this is UI work, after all.
(What was here was moved to the Implementation plan page.)
