Moodle Quiz UI for creating quizzes

See also: Presentation about the core ideas (ODT Impress 202kb)

Intro | Basic issues | Solutions

This is the official project blog for the Moodle Quiz usability process for the UI for creating quizzes. It is meant for personal documentation of the process, as well as for progress reporting to the Kesäkoodi administration.

It is an often stated issue with open source projects that they do not draw enough human-computer interaction professionals. As a result, many projects suffer from poor usability. I am an HCI student and a part-time Moodle developer, and a passion of mine is to promote usability in open source applications.

There is a critical need in the popular Quiz module for user interface development work. Novice users’ learning curve for making quizzes on their own is currently unreasonably high and is in many cases causing them refuse using the user interface altogether. Even experienced users have difficulty understanding some aspects of Quiz’s behaviour. In addition to having application specific terminology (which cannot be totally avoided in this case), the UI breaks many existing guidelines.

On March 28th, 2008 I was granted funding to work in the Kesäkoodi project during summer 2008 to program a new user interface for parts of the Quiz module of Moodle, based on the research, testing & planning work started during the Tenttis project - this UI prototype is ready for the implementation phase.

Tim Hunt <T (dot) J (dot) Hunt (at) open.ac.uk> of the Open University (UK) is the maintainer of the Quiz module, and has also actively taken part in the development discussion of the new UI. He has agreed to be my contact person in Kesäkoodi, on behalf of the Moodle community. However, as I already have the necessary support on the Moodle forums and plenty of experience of the tools I use (Subversion, Eclipse), mentorship is less crucial in this project.

Actual usability documentation will be kept in Moodle Docs.

So, what is so wrong with the current UI? See Quiz and its basic issues, which the project addresses