Moodle Quiz UI for creating quizzes

As a result of a change of plans, I started to implement the reordering tab last week. That is: I decided to implement all the functionality before doing usability testing with the actual application. This was due to the fact that it was not easy enough to get teachers as usability test subjects during July. Instead of hunting, I decided to put my energy into implementation.

Thus, the question ordering/paging tab is well underway and will, if all goes well, be finished by next week.

The feedback from the Moodle community about the demo published last week has been very positive, though I have gotten some very interesting development ideas, too. So that is something to be glad about! :)

This week:

• Question bank layout (major CSS rework) finished
• Status bar of quiz etc added
• Setting grades for questions finished
• Fixed several small bugs

Published the demo version of the new UI yesterday (link: no user id? login as guest). Today I tested it with IE and the issues seemed less catastrofic than I expected. YUI javascript stuff does not work in IE yet, though.

Completed:

• Adding single questions directly to quiz
• Adding random questions directly to quiz (both AJAX-style/lightbox, and without javascript)
• Single questions CSS layout in quiz
• Properly resizing the quiz contents (column width) when showing/hiding question bank
• Taking javascript out of the PHP file in a separate javascript file
• Separate ‘add description’ button

Started:

• CSS layout for random questions

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.)

Published this on Saturday in the Quiz forum.

• Youtube: Moodle Quiz UI: Call for help: In pursuit of scenarios
• The forum thread for discussion
• The scenarios

For each task identified (or major tasks, or particularly special tasks if many tasks are defined), write a description of how that user would accomplish the task independent of how they would complete it within the application.

Still working on the scenarios. I would not have thought it can be such a handful.

However: slowly, but surely, I am starting to get them pretty simple and easy-to-read. Maybe someone else will bother to read them and perhaps, just perhaps even understand them enough to discuss them in the Moodle forums!

From the interviews, I have at least some data about the entire quiz creating process. However, I am going to try to just concentrate on the parts of Quiz that are relevant to creating quizzes, and then move on. That is the focus of this project, after all, plus extracting data into scenarios is a lot of work, and time is sparse.