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.

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. :)

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! :)

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

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.

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.