Moodle Quiz UI for creating quizzes

I went to Kuopio on Tuesday, and during Wednesday and Thursday ran usability tests with 7 participants in total. I am in the process of making conclusions from the results, and will publish the results and an executive summary in the Docs as soon as possible.

After making the changes to the UI suggested by the testing, the official Kesäkoodi portion of the project is starting to be done and successful.

Then, there are still some finishing touches the application needs (CSS for IE and other browsers, further tooltips, question bank integration controls, further feedback for different editing operations), but those will be completed during and after September. Also, much integration work - moving CSS to Moodle 2.0 themes, discussion about the general library changes I have made - will need to take place as soon as Tim Hunt, the Quiz coordinator gets settled in to Moodle HQ (Perth, Australia) where he has recently moved.

The community feedback has been good, and Moodle 2.0 launch is planned for the end of the year (last time I heard). I will probably be participating in Openmind 2008 to present the results of this project via video conferencing from France.

From the forums:

The reorder tab is now functionally complete: Even though the repaginating is hidden, it also works ok server-side, but as I am making it an YUI dialog, that dialog is still missing.

There is a lot to discuss still, especially code-wise but also in terms of the UI, but it works now pretty well. Please test it out, and try to break it so we can iron bugs out at this point.

A particular question is whether sending questions to a specific pages should be a separate input field/submit button pair, at this point it is combined with “reorder questions” submit button, which also reorders the questions according to the numbering the user has given.

Also, 6 test subjects have been confirmed from the University of Kuopio to participate in tests next week, on Wednesday and Thursday. :)

Just published the current version with a reordering tab pretty finished HTML/CSS-wise (which, again, was surprisingly lot of work) but not much functionality there yet.

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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.

The discussion about the upcoming second prototype is heating up in the forums (alright alright, not that much yet :D). Otherwise, I have been contacting teachers, currently mostly from Haaga-Helia since they have been the most active, and trying to determine what to ask them once we get there next week.

Yes, the first interviews have been scheduled plus a usability teacher from my university, Saila Ovaska, agreed to review my plans before that. Last week’s chat with Ivar Ekman, a fellow CS student at the uni, has proved fruitful, opening my eyes to a set of issues I will still need to address.

I will probably post a new project plan at some point soon, too, taking into account that I have begun working on this already, contrary to the original plans.

Somehow I wish the process was even more transparent than it is now. I am not sure how to do that. I was inspired by Nielsen’s Guerilla HCI. How low could we take the barrier to usability work?

I feel that for me, learning about what to do in a project like this has been hard enough and I am still trying to learn more: having a concrete example about how a project like this should proceed, I dream, might help others to get a grip of practical open source usability. I would like to publish the interview material here, but the problem is that if my interviewees see the material beforehand, will it affect the actual interviews?

UPDATE: I am excited about the other discussion I found just now that is gaining momentum in the forums! This will be good :).