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! :)

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.

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.)

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.

This week, I have been working on the scenarios. Today, added a new project page to Docs and created new pages there for each of the major scenarios, filling in details of the scenarios according to the different personas. The pages are still far from complete but can soon serve as basis for hopefully rich community discussion.

Last Thursday and Friday, I have been to Helsinki University of Technology and University of Turku and done five wireframe/prototype tests. The results were, as always when it comes to usability tests, at the same time surprising and not at all surprising. I am indeed grateful for finding teachers and support staff from these schools to take part in interviews and testing.

The biggest surprise was that actually, adding random questions is not such a hard task - at least not if users first read a bit of introductory text (3 paragraphs) explaining the three core concepts (quiz/exam, question bank, random question). That is, in the test the setting was somewhat artificial since users were told to first familiarize themselves with the conceptual model of the application (actual usage of the application was not explained though). Clarification: Novice users did without  trouble create single questions to the quiz before having read the text, though.

So, the tests gave a preliminary promise that if users understand the underlying concepts, with a reasonable UI no further documentation is needed for a simple task such as creating an exam. This was the real challenge I thought we were facing with the UI, but it seems we are getting there, though slowly. As usual, we discovered several issues, too, but more about them as soon as I get the results into a reasonable format.

It is June 2nd, the first official day of Summer Code. As I have already done a great part of the actual usability work and there still is a substantial amount of usability research to do before implementing the UI as PHP, I will publish a new project plan today. (Update: I did.) I am also planning to do my masters thesis about this project, but I have not gotten very far with that, yet.

• Currently, I am still processing the interview data I gathered in the six interviews we did in May.
• Based on that work, I will publish an as-easy-to-read-as-possible usability document in Docs, based on which discussion about the actual usage scenarios can continue in the Moodle community.
• After that, I will put the current prototype and the findings of the actual usability tests online, too.

Got Wordpress installed in order to get Kesäkoodi started. Though actual work will only start in June, I will prepare by catching up on HCI literature and by thinking about how to make the entire process as transparent as possible. This is in order to learn with and hopefully to help the Moodle community get more ideas of what usability and working on user interfaces is about, in practice, in everyday software design.

Also the original application for Kesäkoodi is available for now, until I move its contents to Moodle Docs and other appropriate places. This site now contains the gist of it so I removed the original site; see the links under “Pages”, on the right-hand sidebar ->.