Latest Updates: User eXperience RSS

  • 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: , , ,
    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: , , , ,
    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: ,
    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: , , , ,
    Posted in design | 1 Comment »

     

  • Usability and Users' experiences in Moodleland @ iMoot 2010

    February 7th, 2010

    Preparing for presenting in iMoot, an online conference about online learning and Moodle, was an intensive process for me, but it paid off –  both in terms of learning while designing it, and because many of the presentations were really inspiring.

    Martin’s keynote also inspired me to create a small bug report in the tracker, my first one in months.

    #imoot2010 Twitter channel

    If you are interested, you can still register now for access to ALL the conference presentations, and today you can still join the discussions for a couple of hours.

    Usability and Users’ Experiences in Moodleland

    Quotations in the presentation:

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in Communication | No Comments »

     

  • Modelling concepts

    September 8th, 2009

    I am currently starting out on a course of conceptual modelling. One interesting phrase from the lecturer’s mouth caught my attention, while he was presenting an old diagram of  the concepts of a particular target domain to us. The idea was roughly this:

    Once the concepts have been defined like this, the rest is implementation.

    Software engineers are indeed aware of the fact that we must understand what are the concepts of the target domain, and their relationships. (They may express this understanding in different terms, though.) When we do, we can turn them into programming constructs, be they classes and objects, or procedural code (in Moodle, PHP pages and functions).

    What is missing from this image? The people using the system: the actual dynamics of what happens, the characteristics and the goals of the users (?), and the circumstances of the users. All of these are more abstract than implementation details and can not be described using programming code, yet taking or not taking them into account can dramatically affect whether software meets the actual needs of the people it is supposed to serve.

    Tags: ,
    Posted in design | No Comments »

     

  • The power of simply having data

    July 6th, 2009

    From Contextual Design by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt:

    [...] Any change is a struggle. Engineers used to making what they are interested in feel constrained by having to think about what is useful and can sell. We all have to hold back the voice that tells us that producing code is progress – even if we cancel the project, even if it is the wrong code, even if we don’t know what would be useful to code. How does understanding work produce code? It is a struggle of personalities as we try to work in cross-functional teams to produce a shared direction. It is hard to remember that one smart guy working alone probably doesn’t have the whole answer. We simply have to realize that design is about people working together, and that’s what makes it hard.

    I remember the first design team I worked with. I barely knew what a computer was, but I jumped in to help a team designing a very large and expensive computer. They were stuck, not on the guts of the engine, but on the control panel! So I listened to six engineers arguing about how to lay out the switches: “Won’t we crash the system by accident if the remote selection is on the same switch as off?” “Oh, they’ll only do that once.” And whether or not there should be a key on the switch: “Security is important.” “No, it isn’t.” “Yes, it is.”

    As I listened, I realized that the team simply had no ground for their decisions. There was no way that reasoning and argument would get them to an answer. So I collected some data on how the panel was used: “Are you kidding? We won’t touch the remote. Someone might crash it.” “We turn the knob very, very slowly.” “Someone crashed it once, and the whole business stopped. No one touches that knob now.” And on security: “The computer is in a locked room; we don’t need it locked.” “Locking is a pain. We keep losing the key.” “We keep the key taped to the computer so we can find it.” “I catch my clothes on that lock; it sticks out.” The design was done in a day. We had a new switch for on and of and stopped agonizing about the key. I recently ran into a member of that team. He said he still talks about what happened 10 years later. The power of simply having data.

    Emphases and paragraph division (partially) mine.

    Tags:
    Posted in design | No Comments »

     

c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
esc
cancel